Gay marriage trends in the US

Nate Silver says that "voter initiatives to ban gay marriage are becoming harder and harder to pass every year" and uses a regression model to produce a listing of when the voters of each US state would vote against a marriage ban if given the chance. Some notables:

New York - 2009
Iowa - 2013
Utah - 2013
Kansas - 2015
Texas - 2018
Mississippi - 2024

Nate Silver's Oscars

So how'd Nate Silver do with his predictions on Oscar night? He got four out of six, missing Penelope Cruz for best supporting and Sean Penn for best actor. I, however, am one for one with my Nate Silver predictions.

Update: Silver's postmortem.

Nate Silver predicts the Oscars

Nate Silver, who used polling statistics to predict a clear Obama win in the Presidential election in November, turns his analytical tools loose on the Oscars.

For example, is someone more likely to win Best Actress if her film has also been nominated for Best Picture? (Yes!) But the greatest predictor (80 percent of what you need to know) is other awards earned that year, particularly from peers (the Directors Guild Awards, for instance, reliably foretells Best Picture). Genre matters a lot (the Academy has an aversion to comedy); MPAA and release date don't at all. A film's average user rating on IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) is sometimes a predictor of success; box grosses rarely are.

Silver's "Gamble-Tron 2000 Lock of the Oscars" is that Danny Boyle wins Best Director for Slumdog Millionaire with a whopping 99.7% certainty. I suspect that the Oscars will prove more difficult to predict than the election and that Silver will be wrong in at least two categories. I will report back on Oscar night. (via fimoculous)