Over the past decade, we have mispredicted earthquakes, flu rates and even terrorist attacks. Yet we seem to have access to more data and computing power than ever.
"Why isn't big data producing big progress?" asked statistician, author and NY Times blogger Nate Silver during an April 5, 2013 talk at Cornell.
Known for his innovative analyses of political polling, Silver is author of "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't" and author of the New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight. Silver first gained national attention during the 2008 presidential election, when he correctly predicted the results of the primaries and the presidential winner in 49 states.
The talk was part of the Survey Research Institute Speaker Series.