This exec, who was stopped coming into the country at Boston’s Logan Airport because of an inconsistency of his title on a document,  was able to get one message out to a colleague before the chains went on. The tech community network was tapped, a “war room” was assembled where 5 people called lawyers and politicians, said Reed Sturtevant, an entrepreneur and investor recounted the tale at TechStars Boston Demo Day on Wednesday.  ”After a lot of work from these people, after two nights in jail, this founder was released and is back at work,” said Sturtevant, obviously emotional about the experience.

Sturtevant then introduced Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum who spoke of the need for real immigration reform, not just for the foreign-born PhDs, engineers, and blue-collar workers affected but also for the sake of law enforcement officials and for the business community that needs fresh ideas and talent at all levels.

Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum speaking at TechStars Boston Demo Day.

Noorani’s organization is trying to build consensus with constituencies that might surprise onlookers — law enforcement agencies and religious organizations. “Our theory is if you hold a Bible, wear a badge or own a business, you want a common-sense solution,” he said.

His organization has won support among southern Baptist churches in Missouri, from anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who wants police to “chase murderers, not landscapers and nannies,”  Noorani said.

This is a timely topic. Earlier in the day, at his first press conference since re-election,  President Barack Obama stressed the need for reform and said the public will is there for it now. The strong turnout of Latino voters has already encouraged some Republicans to reconsider their hardline stance about immigration, he said. (As a refresher,  Republican nominee Mitt Romney had been a pragmatist on immigration before taking a hard right., Romney suggested that illegal residents  ”self-deport” as part of the process of gaining legal status.)

In the past, Senator John McCain and former President George W. Bush, also supported immigration reform, evidence that this was not always a partisan issue. Now with so many votes at stake, the president thinks Republicans will be motivated to support change. “We need to seize the moment,” Obama said.

In addition, the president said:

“I am a believer that if you’ve got a PhD in physics, or computer science who wants to stay here, and start a business here, we shouldn’t make it harder for them to stay here, we should try to encourage him to contribute to this society. I think that the agricultural sector, obviously has very specific concerns about making sure that they’ve got a workforce that helps deliver food to our table. So there’re gonna be a bunch of components to it, but I think whatever process we have needs to make sure border security’s strong, needs to deal with employers effectively, needs to provide a pathway for the undocumented here, needs to deal with the DREAM Act kids.”

The Washington Post has the full transcript of the presidential press conference.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user DIAC Images

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A presidential campaign is not a tech startup; it has to innovate on tight deadlines and in an environment where failure really is not an option. So although it had to move fast, for example, Reed’s team couldn’t afford to re-invent the wheel because it could maybe shave 5 milliseconds off of page-load time for a web page.

Or, as Reed put it a phone call with me on Monday morning: “Our goal [was] to be the force multiplier, not to be a technology experiment.”

It was there to make sure the president’s foot soldiers — the folks who really do affect the results — could execute their ground-game without having to worry about technology failing them. Reed’s team just had to take the tools at its disposal and use them to their fullest extent so that old-world and potentially time-consuming techniques such as calling phones and knocking on doors were done as efficiently as possible.

For example, Reed explained, his team didn’t invent the tool for making and handling phone calls, but it gave that tool legs. “We made it so it could stand up and take all the calls,” he said. “Innovation was scale. Innovation was not falling down.”

Here’s how Reed and company fulfilled their duty.

Reed (center rear) and team on election day.

It made the cloud work for it …

Reed said the the vast majority of the campaign’s infrastructure was hosted on Amazon Web Services, with only the analytics platform and some “nominal” other pieces residing on physical gear. This was a fairly big change from 2008, when Obama for America was running only a few minor tasks in the cloud. A reliable cloud service is a game-changer, he said, because smart campaigns no longer have to worry about buying servers, engaging contractors or negotiating software licenses.

AWS, he said, was particularly helpful because of all the services it offers. In order to ensure visitors to President Obama’s website had the same experience wherever they were located, the team decided to “light up boxes all over [the country]” and use the CloudFront content-delivery network feature to route data from the closest virtual server. When it wanted a key-value store, it went to DynamoDB.

As for that phone-call tool and the millions of calls it has to support, Auto-Scaling, a method for adding additional resources in mere minutes, saved the day. “We used the hell out of it,” Reed said. When volume was higher than expected, he added, “we could just turn that to 11.”

… even when the cloud crashed

But relying so heavily on the cloud wasn’t always easy, because the cloud isn’t always reliable. Amazon’s cloud went down a few times between June 2012 and election day — including as late as Oct. 22 — and brought a lot of web properties down with it. “Both times we survived,” Reed said, “but it was hard.”

Obama for America stayed online because it embraced devops (the tight alignment between application development, engineering and operations that cloud computing enables) and the smart architectural strategies employed by cloud computing pioneers such as Netflix. (Paraphrasing a discussion thread from popular programming site Hacker News, Reed joked that if a developer can still use Netflix while AWS is down, then the developer screwed up. If Netflix is down, then AWS is really down.) That means spending a little more money to replicate databases and applications across geographic regions and generally being smarter about where the various application components run and how they’re connected to each other.

AWS gives you tools to do amazing things, he explained, “but you’re responsible for screwing it up.” At the beginning, he added, everything might be chill and people are working on how to creatively architect a reliable cloud application, but eventually “you start valuing uptime over experimentation.” At that point, you just have to accept the gravity of your mission and say “we’re going all in.”

Reed thinks keeping applications up in the cloud will get easier thanks to some of the innovative companies and technologies working in that space. He pointed to cloud-management company RightScale, the Tungsten Replicator engine for MySQL and the general platform-as-a-service space as things he thinks are really cool but weren’t quite ready for primetime in 2012 — at least for something as deadline- and mission-critical as a presidential campaign.

It understood how the web works

Aside the from finer points of cloud computing infrastructure, Reed said Obama’s tech team also really understood how the web has evolved since 2008. Take, for example, the advent of Twitter and Facebook as forces to be reckoned with in terms of voter engagement. Then-candidate Obama got a lot of attention for his 5 millionish social media connections, but President Obama now has roughly 10 times that many across Facebook and Twitter. That’s a lot of people from which to spark a network effect, and a lot of data to analyze.

“Being able to work at that scale is amazing,” Reed said.

And it’s not the just the president’s follower counts that have grown — social media platforms have evolved significantly and people are far more familiar with how they work. Facebook Pages, for example, were created after 2008 in part because having profile pages for candidates and companies didn’t work out too well, and Facebook Connect didn’t exist either. Twitter has also grown into a widely popular platform, while MySpace is all but gone. Reed said it was critical that team Obama take the platforms built in the four years between elections and use them the way they are being used today.

Or take the details of how people access those sites to begin with. The president’s technology team knew (no doubt thanks in part to its analytics team that has received so much attention post-election for its data mining efforts) that voters in urban areas where Obama was counting on high voter turnout were more likely to use a mobile phone rather than a laptop as their primary means of internet access. They’re also more likely to use Android devices than iOS devices, as are many potential swing voters who generally don’t care too much about technology. So, Reed said, the team designed apps to run on multiple operating systems and used responsive design to ensure apps ran well on whatever devices voters were using.

It disrupted with data

Reed’s team worked closely with that vaunted analytics team, he said, and what the Obama for America team really did better than Mitt Romney’s team was disrupt the status quo with regard to how it used data. He’s not too keen on jumping on the bandwagon calling out the failings of Romney’s Project Orca (“I never would wish technology failing on any sort of opponent or enemy,” Reed said) but he will acknowledge that the analytics team Obama had been putting together for more than a year leading into the election was a major differnentiator.

He compares the advanced modeling and analytic techniques of his comrades and guys like Nate Silver to MP3s, thus making traditional pollsters and political “experts” akin to the music industry. They both had been going about their business for decades without competition, and they both reacted violently when their worlds were disrupted. However, these are smart people, and Reed expects they’ll come around in the next election cycles.

But for now, he said, “That’s a hard position to be in when you’re no longer relevant.”

It had a great leader

In the end, though, Reed thinks the success of Obama’s campaign all boiled down to having a good leader. It wasn’t just Obama’s good fortune of running in during the era of Twitter and Amazon Web Services that let him forever change the way campaigns are run. The president is the one who set the tone about how the campaign would function and what it would focus on, Reed said, and the president put in place the campaign leaders who followed through on his vision by hiring the right people down the chain.

If Reed does come back to politics, it will take another candidate with Obama’s vision and ability to generate excitement among the populace to get him back in the saddle. But for now, Reed said, “I’m definitely ready for a little break.”

Feature and Obama for America photo courtesy of Harper Reed.

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Project Orca, the Romney campaign’s mobile strategy to equip an army of loyal volunteers with tools to help measure voter turnout, generated more stress than it did votes for the Republican candidate. As detailed by Romney volunteer and web developer John Ekdahl on his blog and further explained by other reports, Project Orca was untested technology foisted upon volunteers at the last minute with very little practical training.

The idea was a good one: campaigns have for years monitored voting in cities and towns across the country to see whether or not people expected to turn out for an election actually vote. Campaign volunteers watch polling places to see which registered voters show up, with the intention of encouraging the ones who had yet to vote to get down to the polls through a phone call. It’s usually a pen-and-paper affair, but Romney’s campaign wanted to automatically collect that data from its volunteers to get a better sense of where to direct its get-out-the-vote team.

It didn’t work. Some of the problems:

• Many volunteers didn’t realize that they were being asked to use a mobile website, not an app.
• Those who did realize it was a website didn’t necessarily understand that they needed to use “https:” for secure browsing on the site, and got a blank webpage because the campaign didn’t forward the regular unsecure URL “http:” to the secure site.
• PINs issued to volunteers simply didn’t work in Colorado.
• The campaign’s data center was poorly designed and collapsed under the weight of all the attempts to connect to the Orca system.

There are plenty of lessons here for future campaigns. For starters, it’s still an app-focused world: one can understand the campaign’s desire to build a system that could work on any smartphone, but its volunteers still expected that they were going to be using a mobile app. If you’re not directing people to an app, you need to make it very clear, and you need to figure out a way to let your volunteers test it beforehand.

It’s also clear that Election Day is probably not the best day to roll something like this out at a grand scale. With dozens of primaries leading up to a typical election, there was plenty of time for the Romney campaign to test this out on a smaller scale before the big day.

Still, mobile strategies such as Project Orca are definitely the future of campaigning. Had this system worked, the Romney campaign could have had a real-time picture of how and where its supporters were voting. That could produce some fascinating data for the next wave of political data scientists to crunch.

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At the Visualized Conference in New York City Friday, Carter explained how he and the NYT’s graphics team came up with their “Paths to the White House” tool. Carter began by looking at past tools the paper had used — all the way back to the 1896 election, in which William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryant. The morning after the election, the NYT ran a color-coded electoral map on its front page: white states for McKinley, black for Bryant. “They got some states wrong,” Carter said, but “everyone knows how to read this.”

There are several problems with color-coded electoral maps, though, Carter said. First, there’s the “area problem” (many states that are large in geographic size have a small number of electoral votes). The maps may also look very similar across elections even when the results are different. Carter showed red and blue electoral maps from the past four elections and at a glance they all look the same. If you make a color-coded map more interactive — allowing a user to click a state and fill it with a new color, for example — that overrides any information the New York Times has added: “The more you use it, the less useful it is.” Finally, Carter said, these maps are just “boring” and “not very fun.” (Which isn’t to say that the NYT abandoned them completely — the “President Map” illustrating this post is another tool the paper offered this year.)

Carter and the graphics team ultimately came up with “512 Paths to the White House” (when he showed it on the projector, the audience cheered). Users could create their own paths. “We struggle a lot with stepping people through things or letting them explore themselves,” Carter said. The NYT decided that users could test their own paths, but there were annotations for highlighted paths at the bottom of the page to help them get context.

Disclosure: GigaOM is a media partner for the Visualized Conference.

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It’s worth mentioning that Silver wasn’t the only statistician to perfectly predict the presidential race, either. In terms of Electoral College votes, Simon Jackman of Pollster did so, as did Josh Putnam of Davidson University. Save for Florida, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium fared very well, too, and actually nailed the popular vote split. Slate has a nice interactive chart showing how various statisticians and pundits fared in their predictions; there certainly are more predictions and models floating around that haven’t been included.

The important takeaway, however, is that the people who nailed the outcome didn’t achieve their results by cherry-picking data that served their political interests. They did it because they’re professional statisticians whose success depends on accurately predicting the outcomes of events, not on cheerleading for the outcome they might personally desire or that will drive the highest ratings. Even if the data they’re working with is somewhat biased — as some individuals and organizations suggested to me is the case — the science comes in being able to take the data sources for what they are and accurately weigh their relevancy.

Wrong. Data ALWAYS does, starting w/ collection | Data doesn’t play politics & says Obama win is.gd/piGdIb by @derrickharris

— Liberationtech (@Liberationtech) November 6, 2012

In business, this is the shift in thinking that’s driving the movement toward big data and advanced analytics. Forward-thinking companies want to use data to make the right decisions, not to back up their predetermined decisions based largely on gut instinct. But there’s an unprecedented amount of data at their disposal — some good, some bad — which is why data scientists who can figure out what sources to use and how to use them are in such high demand right now.

So in 2014 and and 2016, pollsters are going to keep polling, statisticians are going to keep analyzing those polls (and whatever other factors they choose to include) and, maybe, pundits and the media will pay some attention to what they’re saying. Probabilities aren’t promises etched in stone, and a vote either way can change the face of close elections like this one. But no one should be surprised when someone whose only job is to get it right does just that.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Carolyn Coles.

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That was the counterintuitive thing about last night: If you were watching a major news network or following Twitter, you were pretty sure that Barack Obama was your next president by 11:15. If you were instead relying on NYTimes.com and 538.com for the news, you might have gone to bed thinking the election was still up in the air.

The networks began projecting Obama had won a little before 11:15 p.m. as the votes from Ohio rolled in.

NBC News declares Barack Obama as the projected winner of the Presidency of United States. More at NBCNews.com #NBCPolitics

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2012

Fox News projects #Obama re-elected president fxn.ws/Svj9UI via @foxnewspolitics #election2012

— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 7, 2012

That was also Obama tweeted the following…

This happened because of you. Thank you.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

…and tweeted and Facebooked the photo that has now become the most-retweeted tweet ever.

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st… — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

Yet the New York Times — and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which accounted for a massive amount of traffic to the New York Times this week (with 71 percent of visits to NYTimes.com’s politics section also including a stop at Silver’s blog) — were silent, with the NYT’s homepage headline alternating between reporting Obama’s win in Pennsylvania and saying that the networks projected Obama had won the election. My husband was working late, and when I called him at 11:15 p.m. to discuss the Obama win, he said, “Are you sure? The Times doesn’t have anything.” At the same time, people outside on my street were cheering. The New York Times did not project that Obama had won the election until 12:03 a.m.

Breaking News: President Barack Obama Wins Re-election, The New York Times Projectsnyti.ms/TvricB — The New York Times (@nytimes) November 7, 2012

At that point, this was happening in Chicago, per the NYT’s own election blog:

Romney supporters were clearing out:

Nobody tell Rove, but the Ohio GOP has conceded and gone home. twitter.com/daveweigel/sta…

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) November 7, 2012

And the Empire State building had turned blue.

#BREAKING: The Empire State Building is BLUE. #ObamaWins

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) November 7, 2012

Nate Silver has built his reputation on accurately predicting elections, and it looks as if his model got all 50 states right last night, though votes in Florida and Virginia are still being counted. But if you were looking for commentary from him last night, particularly after the networks announced an Obama win and the Obama campaign started celebrating, he and the NYT were not the place to get it — even though readers were seeking him out.

Instead, a lot of discussion of the results was coming from Karl Rove, who was arguing on Fox News with the network’s own anchors that they’d called Ohio too early.

The delay makes some sense: Silver has to be cautious, and the New York Times has to protect its own reputation. It can’t call the election too early and it doesn’t want to risk a Dewey defeats Truman moment. But Nate Silver is the man of the hour, the NYT’s top brand and probably traffic driver yesterday, and he could have brought even more traffic to the site between 11:15 p.m. and 12:03 a.m. if he’d been saying, well, anything.

@fivethirtyeight Little slow, eh?

— Tyler Hicks-Wright (@tghw) November 7, 2012

He, or another Times writer, could have written about why the Times hadn’t called the election yet and explained to readers what they were waiting for. But last night the paper was too slow to get in on the action, and readers who wanted a really good sense of how the election was unfolding had to turn to other sources.

Update, 4:19 p.m.: The NYT’s recently appointed public editor Margaret Sullivan commented on the NYT’s slowness on her blog. “Journalism history is full of cautionary tales about ill-fated instances of jumping the gun – whether the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in The Chicago Tribune or, much more recently, the many newspapers and cable networks who got the presidential results wrong in 2000,” she writes. And “unlike the television networks, which depend on their combined exit polls in calling elections, The Times prefers to look at real numbers in addition to exit polls, said Janet Elder, an associate managing editor who is part of The Times’s election ‘decision desk.’”

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99 bottles of beer on the wall 99 bottles of beer

— Drunk Diane Sawyer (@DrnkDianeSawyer) November 7, 2012

im not drunk u gusys r dunk — Drunk Diane Sawyer (@DrnkDianeSawyer) November 7, 2012

While tiredness rather than tippling likely caused Sawyer’s condition, the Twitter account provided a fun way to record a micro-meme that sprung up on election night. Sawyer wasn’t the only source of fun. Nate Silver, whose 538 blog overshadowed his employer The New York Times on election night, became a target too. Here’s how a satirist cleverly mocked the pollster’s portentousness and the public’s sudden fixation with data driven reporting:

Now is the nowcast of our forecasts, made glorious projection by this mean of polls.

— Nate Silver 2.0 (@fivethirtynate) November 6, 2012

I grasp from the beak of a silver dove a laurel wreath of finely-wrought permutations. The Signal has come at last.

— Nate Silver 2.0 (@fivethirtynate) November 7, 2012

Drunk Diane and fake Nate are fleeting by their nature — they cause a chuckle and then vanish in days or months. But one day they may also carry historical significance in the same way that newspaper cartoons serve as a vital tool for political scholars. Consider how well these spoof tweets sum up a central narrative of the 2012 election — the Republicans lost because they couldn’t broaden their demographic base:

We were going to retake the Senate, but Republicans have a way of shutting that whole process down. #Akin #Mourdock #election2012

— Willard Mitt Romney (@MlTTR0MNEY) November 7, 2012

Wait! Wait! Stop everything! We found the Whitey Tape!! #4moreyears

— Willard Mitt Romney (@MlTTR0MNEY) November 7, 2012

(Image by  jbor via Shutterstock)

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Check out our ultimate guide to watching the elections online below:

• Polls are closing in Indiana and Kentucky at 3 p.m. PT / 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday. Check out this Politico map for poll closing times in every state, or check this site if you need to find your own polling place before it closes.
• ABC News will be streaming live election coverage on YouTube as well as through its iPad app starting at 4 p.m. PT.
• NBC will stream its election coverage on its Democracy Plaza site as well as through its NBC News Xbox app starting at 4 p.m. PT.
• CBS News will have seven hours of live coverage on Ustream.
• Fox News will have a live webcast of its election coverage starting at 5 p.m. PT. The network is also partnering once again for Twitter to surface trends and sentiments from millions of tweets.
• Univision’s Spanish-language election night coverage starts at 4 p.m. PT on YouTube.
• Fox News Latino will host Spanish-language live coverage on its site starting at 6 p.m. PT.
• CNN will stream its election night coverage on its website as well as to to its iOS apps.
• MSN News is streaming live on its website.
• Hulu is featuring live streams from ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Fox and the New York Times. The site will have additional coverage, including the winner’s acceptance speech, on its election hub.
• Comedy Central will stream live episodes of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report on its website as well as its iOS and Android apps staring at 8 p.m. PT.
• PBS NewsHour will have a total of six streams with live election coverage on Ustream.
• C-SPAN is live streaming its election coverage starting at 5 p.m. PT. C-SPAN’s live feed comes with closed captions, which can be turned on here.
• Al Jazeera English will have live coverage of the election results on its website, its mobile apps, Facebook and YouTube.
• Yahoo’s election control room features live video from ABC News, live updates from the Yahoo News staff and a tie-in with Yahoo’s IntoNow second-screen app.
• The Wall Street Journal will be on YouTube with a live stream as well, which will also be available through its WSJ live apps  on the iPad, on Android devices and various Smart TV platforms.
• The New York Times will host its own election results show straight out of its newsroom starting at 4 p.m. PT, and the site will take down its paywall to make its entire coverage available to everyone for 24 hours starting 3 p.m. PT. Also worth noting: The Times’ excellent interactive “Paths to the White House” data visualization.
• Politico’s live election coverage starts at 4 p.m. PT.
• The Washington Post will stream live coverage on its website and on YouTube. In addition, it will feature its The Fix columnist on a Ustream-hosted live stream.
• The Huffington Post will have live coverage of the election available on its website as well as through its HuffPost Live iPad app.
• Democracy Now is covering the results live on its site starting at 4pm PT.
• Larry King and ORA TV will be live on YouTube starting at 4 p.m. PT.
• Video The Vote, a group dedicated to documenting voting problems, will be live streaming throughout the day on Ustream.
• Aereo will make its broadcast streaming service freely available to anyone in New York from 6 p.m. ET to 6.a. ET the following day.
• Twitter is providing curated tweets on its #election2012 micro-site.
• Facebook is doing some neat live data visualization around their member’s voting.

We will update this list frequently until Tuesday night, so check back often – and feel free to leave any additional links in the comments!

For more on how to watch news and other TV programming without paying for cable, check out my ebook Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.

Image courtesy of Flickr user League of Women Voters of California.

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Statistical models have been hot topic of conversation (maybe even argument) over the past couple weeks thanks to New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog author and statistician Nate Silver. He has become a lightning rod for controversy because of his whirlwind media tour promoting his new book and his model predicting that Barack Obama has a greater than 80 percent chance of winning Tuesday’s election. However, as Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy Fellow Zeynep Tufekci astutely explained last week, Silver isn’t guaranteeing Obama will win on Nov. 6 — just that there’s a high probability he will — and whatever outcome his model comes to is very likely not influenced by partisan politics.

And believe it or not, Silver isn’t the only guy around who spends his time building statistical models to predict the outcomes of politcal contests — he’s just the most famous. There are plenty of academicians, predictive markets, hobbyists and others who also do this, all of whom use different data with different methods for assessing the importance of any given piece of it. With a few notable exceptions, most of them also foresee an Obama victory.

Here’s how they (as well as some less-scientific sources, such as Twitter) see the contest playing out.

Who has Obama winning

FiveThirtyEight: Silver’s final (I believe) model is in, giving President Obama an 86.3 percent chance of being reelected. A late-campaign-season bump came as national polls finally aligned with state polls in giving the edge to Obama.

The New York Times: Two of Silver’s colleagues and fellow data junkies at the New York Times, Mike Bostock and Shan Carter, published an interactive version of their own model on Friday. Based on analysis of the states still considered competitive, they see 431 paths to victory for Obama versus 76 for Mitt Romney.

InTrade: Arguably the world’s most popular prediction market, InTrade gives Obama a 67.2 percent chance of victory as of 10:54 a.m. Pacific Time on Monday. The percentages change in real time, but Obama hasn’t relinquished his role as favorite since the campaign season began early this year.

PredictWise: Prediction market PredictWise (headed by Yahoo’s The Signal blogger David Rotshchild and without a real-money investment model like InTrade) gives Obama a 72 percent chance of winning as of 9:48 a.m. Pacific Time on Monday. The president’s chances have risen steadily over the past week.

Twitter: It’s not really a predictive model, but the Twitter Political Index does provide a point for gauging how the social media platform’s user view the candidates. As of Nov. 4, Obama has a positive sentiment rating of 59 versus Romney’s 53, although Romney has closed the gap by 9 points since the index launched in July.

Who has Romney winning

At least six political scientists and/or economists: An October symposium from the peer-reviewed journal PS: Political Science & Politics includes the results of 13 statistical models generated by noted political scientists, of which eight give Obama the edge and five give Romney the edge. One of the those favoring Romney, an historically accurate and economy-centric model from University of Colorado professors Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry, generated quite a bit of buzz when released in August and giving Romney a 67 77 percent chance of victory. Bickers and Berry have since ran the model again and it showed an even higher likelihood of a Romney victory.

Another model with a track record of success — that of Yale economics professor Ray Fair — also gave a slight edge to Romney (although well within the margin of error) as of Nov. 2.

Source:

PoliticIt (tied): The Provo, Utah-based startup that aims to measure politicians’ online footprint and popularity actually has the candidates tied with It scores of 50. The scores appear to be old (I’m checking with PoliticIt for an answer on how recent they are) and don’t claim to be a predictor of campaign success, but its founders did claim a high correlation between higher It scores and victories in primary campaigns last spring.

Updated: PoliticIt responded with more-recent It scores of 49 for Obama and 48 for Romney. They are now projecting a win for Obama, as they detail in this blog post released Monday.

The NFL: If mere correlations (and superstition) are any indicator, Romney’s chances of victory are high after this weekend’s slate of professional football games. The oft-cited Redskins Rule regards the Washington Redskins’ performance in their last home game before the election — they lost, an outcome that suggests a Romney victory — but Chris Wilson at The Signal has concocted a series of correlations for the other 31 NFL teams, as well. All told, this year’s 19 of this year’s results foretell a Romney victory, 12 foretell an Obama victory and 1 won’t be decided until Nov. 18.

Source: NFL.com

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The site has just launched and for now contains only a handful of photos, but this screenshot of photos submitted to Electiongrams by Georgia politicos gives you the basic idea:

The significance of Electionsgrams for NBC is that it gives the network another news tool for election night. But, on a broader level, the site also represents a new phase in citizen reporting.

It’s true that media outlets have long drawn on the voice of their viewers through Twitter or tools like CNN’s iReport. Electionsgrams, however, means that NBC and others can easily tap into photo-based reporting on an unprecedented scale. The flood of photos on the site provides a cheap and near-frictionless way for NBC to add color to its coverage and keep up with real time events.

According to Ryan Osborn, VP of Digital Innovation at NBC News, these new citizen submission tools are not a replacement for people on the ground but a “nice complement” to existing coverage.

Mass-scale photo reporting offers a new form of coverage but also creates new challenges for traditional news outlets: how to find the good stuff in the deluge of photos? And how to screen out the mischief-makers who will try to spam the system with ads, fake news or worse?

In the case of Electiongrams, NBC is relying on a start-up called Chute that provides back-end tools for large-scale photo management to brands and large media companies. Chute helps its clients pull in photos that people share through email or sites like Facebook, but also offers human and automated moderating tools.

According to CEO Ranvir Gujral, the Chute moderation tools are part of an enterprise solution for brands and big media companies that are trying to swim through the massive new stream of user photos flooding the internet.

A quick look at NBC’s Hurricane Sandy photo-sharing site, Stormgrams, shows the moderation is working – sort of. The state-by-state storm collages are largely free of ads but do contain a fair number of irrelevant pictures like this one:

This doesn’t mean NBC is on the wrong track, though. The company appears to recognize that sites Twitter and Instagram have come to influence major news events as much as any desk anchor or gumboot-wearing weatherman, and is responding appropriately.

NBC’s Ryan says sites like Electiongrams are part of a larger process in which news companies are using people-based platforms to news gather. “We use them as an early barometer,” he said, “and then the work for journalists begins.”

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