O'reilly Radar Podcast - O'reilly Media Podcast

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Prediction algorithms, cognitive biases, and how our brains come online.On this week's episode, I chat with Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton. Wang is also a co-founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, a site focused on analyzing and predicting U.S. national elections. We talk about the site's prediction algorithm and this crazy election cycle, and the role neuroscience may have played. We also talk about the current research Wang and his team are working on, the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, and the powerful role governments play in academic research.Here are some highlights: Predicting elections What we do at the [Princeton Election Consortium] site is we collect publicly available polls. This is a website that's at election.princeton.edu. We take those polls and then feed them into a script that I've written and scripts that my students have written, and on an automated basis, we take those polling data and we turn the pol