Nate Silver fivethirtyeights the Oscars. (Yes, that’s a verb.) That is, he predicts who’s going to win Academy Awards tonight by looking at who’s won (or been nominated for) awards previously in this awards season, weighting the results in proportion to how well those results have predicted Oscar results in the past. See also his 2009 and 2011 (behind NYT paywall) attempts at the same, which try to take some other variables into account; Silver seems to believe that he may have overfit, hence the simplification.
Meanwhile, John Lopez of Vanity Fair reports on a 2008 paper by Jonas Krauss, Stefan Nann, Daniel Simon, Kai Fischbach, and Peter Gloor, “Predicting Movie Success and Academy Awards Through Sentiment and Social Network Analysis”; at least at the time, the IMDB comments section gave lots of useful information. But there was no Twitter at the time of the paper (which was based on data from 2006); the folks at Topsy have an Oscars Index.
(I will refrain from predicting, because unlike Nate Silver I don’t have minions to clean the data for me.)
God plays dice 
Reblogged this on lava kafle kathmandu nepal.