A lot things went wrong in 2020. And presidential polls were no exception. Joe Biden was supposed to win the 2020 presidential by eight points, according to the polls, which were wrong. He won by five points. He was supposed to win Wisconsin by 10 points. Instead, Biden eked out a victory there with less than 1 percent of the vote between him and incumbent President Donald Trump. The polls were very wrong in Wisconsin. The polls also had Biden winning Florida. And North Carolina. Here’s why the polls ended up missing the mark in 2020, and what’s being done about it.
Tag Archives: 2020
Year In Review: ‘2020 In Twenty Minutes’ (Video)
The year you want to forget, retold in 20 minutes. Every news story you forgot or missed from 2020, as told by the TLDR News Team
Walks: New Year’s 2021 On The Champs-Élysées, Paris
PARIS NEW YEAR 2021, Champs-Élysées This video filmed before curfew.
Aerial Views: Western U.S. And Southeast Asia (Video)
Filmed and Edited by: Jason Hatfield
This is the time of year myself and other photographers share our favorite photos from the past year. 2020 was obviously a very challenging time and despite struggles of my own I was vastly more fortunate than many. As I started to think on what were my favorite photographs I decided this time to share a film that conveys some of the incredible experiences and views I had. There’s so much more that happened but just these few minutes is enough.
Locations featured include: Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia
World News Podcast: Brexit Deal, A Look Back At 2020 And Forward To 2021
Georgina Godwin and guests set the tone for the weekend. Top news and a look back at 2020 and forward at 2021.
Scandinavian Travel: ‘Helsinki & Southern Finland’ (Video)
Filmed and Edited by; Jan Fröjdman
Many of us hope for brighter times these days, on many levels…
Filmed in Helsinki and the southern part of Finland.
Helsinki, Finland’s southern capital, sits on a peninsula in the Gulf of Finland. Its central avenue, Mannerheimintie, is flanked by institutions including the National Museum, tracing Finnish history from the Stone Age to the present. Also on Mannerheimintie are the imposing Parliament House and Kiasma, a contemporary art museum. Ornate red-brick Uspenski Cathedral overlooks a harbor.
SCIENCE: ‘THE BIGGEST BREAKTHROUGHS IN Math & Computer Science’ In 2020
For mathematicians and computer scientists, 2020 was full of discipline-spanning discoveries and celebrations of creativity. We’d like to take a moment to recognize some of these achievements.
- 1. A landmark proof simply titled “MIP* = RE” establishes that quantum computers calculating with entangled qubits can theoretically verify the answers to an enormous set of problems. Along the way, the five computer scientists who authored the proof also answered two other major questions: Tsirelson’s problem in physics, about models of particle entanglement, and a problem in pure mathematics called the Connes embedding conjecture.
- 2. In February, graduate student Lisa Piccirillo dusted off some long-known but little-utilized mathematical tools to answer a decades-old question about knots. A particular knot named after the legendary mathematician John Conway had long evaded mathematical classification in terms of a higher-dimensional property known as “sliceness.” But by developing a version of the knot that yielded to traditional knot analysis, Piccirillo finally determined that the Conway knot is not “slice.”
- 3. For decades, mathematicians have used computer programs known as proof assistants to help them write proofs — but the humans have always guided the process, choosing the proof’s overall strategy and approach. That may soon change. Many mathematicians are excited about a proof assistant called Lean, an efficient and addictive proof assistant that could one day help tackle major problems. First, though, mathematicians must digitize thousands of years of mathematical knowledge, much of it unwritten, into a form Lean can process. Researchers have already encoded some of the most complicated mathematical ideas, proving in theory that the software can handle the hard stuff. Now it’s just a question of filling in the rest.
Science: ‘The Biggest Breakthroughs In Physics In 2020’ (Quanta Video)
This year, two teams of physicists made profound progress on ideas that could bring about the next revolution in physics. Another still has identified the source of a long-standing cosmic mystery.
- 1. Here’s an extremely brief version of the black hole information paradox: Stuff falls into a black hole. Over time — a long, long time — the black hole “evaporates.” What happened to the stuff? According to the rules of gravity, it’s gone, its information lost forever. But according to the rules of quantum mechanics, information can never be lost. Therefore, paradox. This year, a series of tour de force calculations has shown that information must somehow escape — even if how it does so remains a mystery.
- 2. Levitating trains, lossless power transmission, perfect energy storage: The promise of room-temperature superconductivity has fed many a utopian dream. A team based at the University of Rochester in New York reported that they had created a material based on a lattice of hydrogen atoms that showed evidence of superconductivity at up to about 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) — about the temperature of a chilly room. The only catch: Superconductivity at this temperature only works if the material is crushed inside a diamond anvil to pressures approaching those of Earth’s core. Utopia will have to wait.
- 3. A dazzling cosmic strobe has ended an enduring astronomical mystery. Fast radio bursts — blips of distant radio waves that last for mere milliseconds — have eluded explanation since they were first discovered in 2007. Or rather, astronomers had come up with far too many theories to explain what are, for the brief time they’re alight, the most powerful radio sources in the universe. But on a quiet morning in April, a burst “lit up our telescope like a Christmas tree,” said one astronomer. This allowed researchers to trace its source back to a part of the sky where an object had been shooting out X-rays. Astronomers concluded that a highly magnetized neutron star called a magnetar was behind the phenomenon.
Science: ‘The Biggest Breakthroughs In Biology In 2020’ (Video)
In 2020, the study of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was undoubtedly the most urgent priority. But there were also some major breakthroughs in other areas. We’d like to take a moment to recognize them.
- 1. This year, we learned that we had severely underestimated the human brain’s computing power. Researchers are coming to understand that even the dendritic arms of neurons seem capable of processing information, which means that every neuron might be more like a small computer by itself.
- 2. The new Information Theory of Individuality completely reimagines the way biologists have traditionally thought about individuality. Armed with information theory, the researchers found objective criteria for defining degrees of individuality in organisms.
- 3. Deprived of sleep, we and other animals die within weeks. More than a century of scrutiny failed to explain why lack of sleep is so deadly. This year, an answer was finally found — not inside the brain, as expected, but inside the gut.
Science: ‘Breakthrough Of The Year In 2020’ (Video)
Each year, editors and writers choose a top research achievement as Science’s Breakthrough of the Year. This year, that honor goes to the multiple COVID-19 vaccines that have succeeded in large human trials—and are now being deployed around the world. But there are a lot of other advances to talk about, from figuring out the origin of Fast Radio Bursts to the discovery of the earliest known figurative art. Check out a few of the runners-up candidates—and this year’s Breakthrough of the Year—in this video rundown. Read the stories here: https://scim.ag/37v20ds
Boomers Daily 