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: