With the election season heating up, there's no better time to
explore the role of statistics in our nation's politics. Join the
Chicago chapter of the American Statistical Association on Friday, May
4th at Loyola University's Downtown Water Tower Campus for America the
Predictable? and learn more about the factors that play into
presidential campaigns and the ways that social media and political
attack ads affect the results of our political elections.
Featured speakers include: Forrest Nelson, one of the founders of the
Iowa Electronic Market; and Allan Lichtman, professor at American
University and author of the "13 keys" that have successfully predicted
every presidential election winner since 1984.
America the Predictable?
Different approaches to understanding and forecasting political election results.
Conference presented by the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association
Date: Friday, May 4, 2012
Time: 9:00am - 5:00pm
Location: Loyola University, Downtown Water Tower Campus (Kasbeer Hall)
25 East Pearson, Chicago, IL
Conference Program
9:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. Registration and continental breakfast
9:30 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. Conference Welcome by John VanderPloeg, Conference VP
9:45 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. Session One Speaker: David W. Moore
(Senior Fellow, The Carsey Institute, University of New Hampshire)
Topic: Issues With Polling Entities
10:45 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. Morning break
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Session Two Speaker: John G. Geer
(Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University)
Topic: Political Attack Advertising
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Session Three Speaker: Allan Lichtman
(Distinguished Professor of History, American University)
Title: The Keys to the White House: Forecast for 2012
2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Session Four Speaker: Forrest Nelson
(Professor, University of Iowa)
Title: Iowa Electronic Markets - 2012 Presidential Elections
3:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. Afternoon break
3:15 p.m. - 4:15 p.m. Session Five Speaker : Filippo Menczer
(Professor of Informatics and Computer Science, Indiana University)
Title: Tracking the Diffusion of Political Ideas in Social Media
Speaker Detail:
Speaker: John G. Geer (Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University)
Topic: Political Attack Advertising
Learn More:
John G. Geer (PhD, Princeton University) is the Gertrude Conaway
Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. He
has been a
visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic
Politics at Princeton University and a research fellow at the
Shorenstein Center at Harvard
University. Geer is the former editor of The Journal of
Politics. He has published numerous articles and several books,
including In Defense of
Negativity (2006), which won the Goldsmith Book prize from
Harvard University in 2008. He has provided extensive commentary in the
news media on
politics, including live nation-wide interviews for FOX, CNN,
NBC, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, and NPR. Geer has also written op-ed pieces for
Politico, The
Washington Post, LA Times, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. His
lecturing has earned him a number of awards at Vanderbilt, including the
"Squirrel
Award." In 2005, he won The College of Arts and Sciences'
Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In
2009, he won Vanderbilt
University's Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award for Excellence in
Classroom Teaching.
Speaker: Allan Lichtman (Distinguished Professor of History, American University)
Title: The Keys to the White House: Forecast for 2012
Learn more:
Allan J. Lichtman received his PhD from Harvard University
in 1973 with a specialty in modern American history and quantitative
methods. He became
an Assistant Professor of History at American University in
1973 and a Full Professor in 1980. He was the recipient of the
Scholar/Teacher of the
year award for 1992-93. He has published seven books and
several hundred popular and scholarly articles. He has lectured in the
US and
internationally and provided commentary for major US and
foreign networks and leading newspapers and magazines across the world.
He has been an
expert witness in more than 75 civil and voting rights
cases. His book, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American
Conservative Movement was
a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in
nonfiction. His prediction system, the Keys to the White House, has
correctly predicted
the outcomes of all US presidential elections since 1984.
Speaker: Forrest Nelson (Professor, University of Iowa)
Title: Iowa Electronic Markets - 2012 Presidential Election
Learn more:
Forrest Nelson is a Professor of Economics and Tippie Research
Fellow at the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business. His
fields of interest
include Econometrics and Prediction Markets. He was one of
three founders in 1988 of the Iowa Electronic Market, the pioneer of all
prediction
markets, and has been involved with the extension of these
markets to health issues since 2003. Previous positions include
Assistant Professor at
California Institute of Technology and visiting Professor,
Aarhus University, Denmark.
Speaker: Filippo Menczer (Professor of Informatics and Computer Science, Indiana University)
Title: Tracking the Diffusion of Political Ideas in Social Media
Learn more:
Filippo Menczer is a professor of informatics and computer
science, adjunct professor of physics, and a member of the cognitive
science program at
Indiana University, Bloomington. He holds a Laurea in Physics
from the University of Rome and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and
Cognitive Science from
the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Menczer has been
the recipient of Fulbright, Rotary Foundation, and NATO fellowships, and
a Career Award
from the National Science Foundation. He currently serves as
director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research. He
previously served as
division chair in the IUB School of Informatics and Computing,
as Fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute, and as Lagrange Senior
Fellow at the
Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Torino,
Italy. His research is supported by the NSF and McDonnell Foundation,
and focuses on Web
science, social networks, social media, social computation, Web
mining, distributed and intelligent Web applications, and modeling of
complex
information networks.
Fee and Registration
Member $175
Non-Member $225
Student $95
Register: