The task was to predict how the popular vote in the 2008 Presidential Election would break down, expressed as Obama's fraction of the total votes that will go to Obama+McCain, and also to give a standard deviation. The winner will be the prediction whose Gaussian distribution function has the largest value at the real fraction, whatever it turns out to be. Entries are now complete, and here they are, in handy graphical format:
Pretty, isn't it? But a tad cluttered. Zooming in a bit:
And, in case you are one of those jumbled in the middle there, zooming in a bit more:
The mean (unweighted -- sorry) prediction was that Obama would win 53.6 percent of the McCain/Obama popular vote, while the median was 53.2. The average standard deviation was 1.2%. Clearly, for predictions anywhere near the popular values, a fairly small standard deviation was required for one's curve to poke up past the crowd; indeed, some predictions with large errors are already mathematically eliminated. Like -- me. That's what you get for going first. Here is an even closer zoom, vertically as well as horizontally, centered on my 55.5 +- 1.5 prediction:
See that aqua-colored bell curve, reaching a peak of about .27 at 55.5? That's me, swamped by narrower neighbors. Confidence pays! I think there are about 20 entries out of 61 that have a nontrivial chance of winning. (If we were serious and respectable, we would have kept the predictions [and, crucially, the total number of entries] secret until they were all announced. We are neither serious nor respectable.) See you in November.
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