links for 2008-10-16

"Silver’s site now gets about 600,000 visits daily. And as more and more people started wondering who he was, in May, Silver decided to unmask himself. To most people, the fact that Poblano turned out to be a guy named Nate Silver meant nothing. But to anyone who follows baseball seriously, this was like finding out that a guy anonymously running a high-fashion Website turned out to be Howard Cosell. At his day job, Silver works for Baseball Prospectus, a loosely organized think tank that, in the last ten years, has revolutionized the interpretation of baseball stats. Furthermore, Silver himself invented a system called PECOTA, an algorithm for predicting future performance by baseball players and teams. (It stands for “player empirical comparison and optimization test algorithm,” but is named, with a wink, after the mediocre Kansas City Royals infielder Bill Pecota.)" When I found out Nate Silver was forecasting politics, I subscribed … IMMEDIATELY.

Oooheeeee, standards wars.

This is the best and hardest thing I read all day. You should read it. I'm giving you no intro to it—just read it.

"These endorsements won't swing the election, but McCain's on track to keep losing them. Newspapers don't like Palin and they don't like negative attacks, and McCain is offering up plenty of both. It's been 10 days since Palin opened up the front on Bill Ayers. How have the polls moved since then?" The print media, who McCain called "my base" back in his maverick days, are leaving him in droves, as well they should.

"I also just think that Obama is a pragmatic liberal. His judgments in the past have been largely practical and reasonable. He is not an ideologue. Nor is he an excessive partisan. Those qualities are admirable from a conservative point of view. As for Burkeanism, I agree it can be an amorphous concept. Because it allows for a great deal of lee-way for prudence to determine particular judgments in history, it allows for minimal change and maximal change within its boundaries. I don't think this makes it meaningless as a concept. It is the way a society changes that Burke was interested in. He backed the huge change of the American revolution, for example. And all we're talking about with Obama is a prudent response to an ill-begotten war, some measures to tackle a failing healthcare system and an attempt to tackle the emergent problem of climate change. And all in a spirit of national reconciliation. This is no Robespierre, Ross." And Sullivan will oppose him come 21 Jan 2009.

"I think Obama's relatively weak but nonetheless real interactions with William Ayers are a legitimate campaign issue. But Obama's best response, after telling the facts of the relationship, is to point out who else supported him. Republican machers Walter and Leonora Annenberg gave the former terrorist $50 million. They also gave money to Rick Santorum, Strom Thurmond and Mitt Romney. Annenberg was Nixon's ambassador to Britain. If Obama is 'palling around with terrorists,' the Republican Annenbergs are funding them.

"Yesterday, the McCain campain put out a press release boasting that Leonore Annenberg had just endorsed him for president. Why is McCain happy to accept the endorsement of a funder of terrorism?" GOOD question.

"Spin and hype were apparent, once again, at the third and final debate between McCain and Obama:" HOW did we rightly dissect debates before sites like FactCheck.org?

Now I know why Chris REALLY is voting for Obama.

I mean, *I* respect Boyd, and I'm an Open Theist, but …

Their Web offerings just keep getting better. They're coming out of the traditional-media's typical ghettoizing of their Web offerings and truly interacting with their fans. I'm glad to see it. It takes work, but it really is worth doing.

"If politics is about defining somebody before they define you, McCain's clumsy attacks on ACORN and Ayers just gave Obama the opportunity to address them in his most favorable light. Voters think those subjects are distractions from the economic mess. The days the McCain campaign spent on them have left him with a double-digit deficit in most polls and a 1-in-20 chance to win, according to the poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight.Com." Yep—McCain's attacks were inside baseball, understood only to anyone who'd been following the campaign closely—and those folks have largely made up their mind at this point.

I've only gotten through the first page, but Sullivan has nailed it.

"Data is almost as good as money, but I don’t know of a single consumer Web application where access to data is guaranteed by a third-party private entity, much less by the government. By no means am I begging for government regulation; doing so has the potential to undo the innovation equation that defines the digital age. Personally it’s my view that that way lies madness. But so too does the path of inevitable failure that we’re on. Essentially, as consumers of cloud computing, we have virtually zero recourse, to say nothing of insurance. It’s something we should be thinking about and talking about more explicitly as we continue to move more and more of our lives online."