With the election in the United States now decided, the dissection of the result is well underway. And, perhaps the biggest winner of all is the science of big data. Yes, mathematical analysis of vast quantities of demographic and polling data won over the voodoo proclamations and gut felt predictions of the punditocracy. Now, that’s a result truly worth celebrating. From ReadWriteWeb: Political pundits, mostly Republican, went into a frenzy when Nate Silver, a New York Times pollster and stats blogger, predicted that Barack Obama would win reelection. But Silver was right and the pundits were wrong – and the impact of this goes way beyond politics. Silver won because, um, science. As ReadWrite’s own Dan Rowinski noted, Silver’s methodology is all based on data. He “takes deep data sets and applies logical analytical methods” to them. It’s all just numbers. Silver runs a blog called FiveThirtyEight, which is licensed by the Times. In 2008 he called the presidential election… Read more