Nate Silver, NYTimes Blogger, Forecasting the 2012 Elections

Nate Silver, blogger for The New York Times' FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus, will speak at UMBC about his forecasts for the 2012 presidential election.

Silver is a statistician, elections expert and writer who became well-known in the early 2000s for developing the PECOTA system, which forecasts the performance of Major League Baseball Players. Silver's election analysis website FiveThirtyEight became popular during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, when he correctly predicted the winner of all 35 Senate races and the presidential race in 49 of 50 states. Silver's blog is now published by The New York Times.

TIME Magazine named Nate Silver one of the World's 100 Most Influential People in 2009. In late 2010, Politico's Editor-in-Chief John F. Harries listed Silver as one of "The Most Powerful People on Earth" in Forbes Magazine.