NOVA Now
From the PBS science series NOVA, a biweekly podcast digging into the science behind the headlines. Alok Patel takes you behind the scenes with the people—scientists, engineers, technologists, mathematicians and more—working to understand our world. Now it's more critical than ever to distinguish fact from fiction and find science-based answers to the most pressing questions of our time.
(Special) NOVA Now — The Statistical Science Behind Polling
With so much uncertainty hanging over the US presidential election, one place we look for clarity is in the numbers. Pollsters learned valuable lessons from the 2016 election results that they’ve applied in the current election cycle to try to yield more accurate predictions. From our GBH and PRX partners, NOVA Now, and as a special in The World’s podcast feed, host Alok Patel interviews a pollster and a statistician. They delve into a brief history of political polling in the US, what went wrong in 2016, and how statistical concepts like data weighting and margin of error make all the difference in the accuracy of the polls.