Probability Versus Prediction in Volcanic Hazards (and Elections)

How is Vesuvius like predicting the U.S. presidential election? Image: Antonsusi / Wikimedia Commons Unless you've been living on the far side of the moon for the past two years, you'll know that the U.S. presidential election is next week. Now, I'm by no means going to get into politics here, but I am going to talk a little bit about the controversy regarding the analysis of polls/data to project who might win the election. I have been a fan of Nate Silver, the head of 538, for many years now, starting back when he was working for Baseball Prospectus creating the PECOTA projection system for baseball statistics. Now he's headlong into examining how polling and previous electoral, demographic and economic data can be used to model the outcome of an election - and this has rubbed pundits who use, well, beats me, to try to "predict" the outcome of ...