Since this is my first post, I want to thank Charli, Dan, and everyone else for giving me this opportunity to, well, spout off about whatever I want. They may regret it. To start, as someone of you might remember from a guest post that I did over the summer, one of the projects I am currently working on involves looking at the best ways to accurately forecast international political events such as whether Iran will test a nuclear weapon before 1 January 2014 or who will win the upcoming election in Sierra Leone.

In the wake of the stunningly accurate election models designed by many over the last several months (for a roundup on those that nailed it – and those that didn’t – go here), Jay Ulfelder just wrote a fascinating piece for ForeignPolicy.com titled “Why The World Can’t Have A Nate Silver.” I want to highlight it first and foremost because it is a good piece of work. In it, Jay outlines why it is so difficult to forecast international political events: we often lack excellent, or even above average, or even minimally acceptable data on the necessary “plausible predictors” (Jay’s phrase) to accurately forecast important events such as revolutions or wars. For those interested in Jay’s writing in general, he runs a great blog called Dart-Throwing Chimp.

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