Hi All, It’s Robert (rcs1000) here, and I’m using the Politicalbetting soapbox to promote a venture that OGH and I are involved in: Crowdscores. The goal of Crowdscores is to crowdsource sports data. So, instead of buying offical data from Opta, we get fans at the game (or watching TV) to tell us what the score is, who scored etc. We’re getting a lot of traction with this model: more than 10,000 people use our app each week, and it…
Regular PBer’s will know that five years ago I built VIPA, a model that attempted to look at proportionate swings on a party-by-party basis to model results. This model was – to be quite frank – stolen by Nate Silver, and he used it with much bally-ho. While VIPA did a better job of predicting the 2010 election than UNS (it was noticeably more pessimistic on the LibDems than UNS, for example), it was not perfect. And so, 11 months…
Hello PB’ers, This is Robert, Mike’s son and the technical administrator for the site. I’d just like to use the site as an advertisement for a business I’m involved in, Crowdscores. The idea is simple: crowdsourced football scores. Fans watching games record goals, and the like, and this means that we have the fastest football scores around. (We also have a nice line in fan generated commentary.) Currently, we do Premiership, SPL, and European games. But this idea is perfectly…
It’s highly likely there will be problems with the new system. Please feel free to vent your frustrations in the thread below. Also: I will only be migrating the old comments over later. So, for now we’re likely to have an empty / shiny / new comment system. Thanks, Robert
A guest slot by Robert Smithson If you read The Telegraph, or the pb.com commenters, you could hardly fail to come to the conclusion that the Euro has been a disaster for all involved. Riots in the streets of Athens, austerity in Ireland, and the bumblings of Euro-summits serve only to reinforce the view. Yet, as always, the truth is rather more nuanced. Since January the first 1999, when the Euro was introduced, GDP per head in the Eurozone has…
Political Betting will be off-line tonight between about 1am and 4am. Hopefully, come tomorrow morning it will all be working perfectly. Thanks, Robert
Hi all, Over the next three or four days I will be susbstantially upgrading the Political Betting technical infrastructure. For those who care, the big changes are: A new faster, shinier main server An upgrade to the latest version of WordPress A huge upgrade to the Disqus commenting system (you’ll be able to ‘like’ particularly insightful comments, or those from tim or seanT) While I will try and minimise downtime, it’s quite likely that there will be substantial periods when…
Our database server will be switched this evening. Hopefully no-one will notice anything at all… but if we’re down, you know to blame me! Thanks Robert