Alibi

As I walked into the studio, the Technology Director gave me a concerned look, and mused:

"People haven't been checking into the studio."

This wasn't anything new. WIRE members had always been notoriously bad about indicting when they entered and exited the studio. But perhaps the problem had gotten worse? To be sure, I asked: "How bad is it, do you think?"

"Well, I'd be surprised if more than half of all DJs were signing in and out, to be honest" he responded.

No good. People were indeed even less vigilant than usual. "Yikes! What should we do about it?" I retorted.

"Beyond telling them that they have to sign in? No clue."

---

As the Station Director of WIRE (Wentworth Internet Radio + Entertainment), I spend a lot of my time resolving issues and maintaining operations. And as a Computer Information Systems major, I am taught and trained to look for ways to implement technology in order to provide clever and powerful solutions to often-times complex problems.

Speaking of which, this was one of them. Having all members of WIRE sign in and out is a critical component to our operations, since it means we can audit DJs, and since it allows for the directors of WIRE to understand and control who is in our studio (which is very important when the value of our equipment is considered). Yet, even with constant reminders, frequent pestering, and the possibility of disciplinary action, DJs were simply not taking the time to record their presence, whether due to negligence or forgetfulness.

I spent a fair amount of time considering my options, and trying to think of a way to solve this problem once and for all. I pondered: If people will not check in themselves, I need something to check them in for them. But what? And how?

...Meanwhile, a company by the name of AXIS had just given WIT a whole box of various network cameras, all of which had on-board silicon -- running a Linux variant -- that allowed for applications to be developed for the cameras themselves. Furthermore, AXIS was looking to test an idea they had: What if cameras were given to students for them to create applications for? What if we told them to just develop whatever they wanted? What would come about that?

Anyhow, as I continued about my duties as Station Director and CIS student, I eventually heard about the cameras provided by AXIS, and about the opportunity to write some software for them. And, over time, an idea occurred: Could I possibly have a camera and some software recognize and remember people? What if the software could check people in and out as they were seen? And what if this data could be thrown into a readable text file?

You know, that could actually work!

So I decided to see if I could get my hands on a camera. And, after a few conversations with a past professor and the provost, I had a camera to use the very next day!

Of course, I knew that I had a major handicap: Namely, I had never worked with network cameras before, let alone written software for them. I knew of things such as OpenCV, but I certainly hadn't worked with it in the past. How could I possibly create software so complex with such limited knowledge? And how much could I really do with the already-limited time I had free?

I decided to stand on the shoulders of giants. I knew of some incredibly useful, open-source code for object recognition and tracking called OpenTLD. Although quite barebones, and not specifically made for faces and people, I realized that I could treat individuals and their heads as unique "objects" that could then be identified and tracked.

I also knew of the aforementioned OpenCV libraries, which I figured would become vary useful, particularly for a GUI. I could even implement generic facial recognition if I wanted to, in order to increase tracking accuracy and perhaps even allow for strangers to be learnt and tracked by my program.

And so, I began work on what I eventually called "Project Alibi": A solution that would be the 'alibi' for WIRE members when asked about when they had been in the studio. I started putting together these unrelated projects and snippets and libraries, whilst developing my own code to get everything to work well together. Simultaneously, I developed and programmed the logical component of Alibi - that is, the sort of reaction and decision-making that the program would have to do once someone was (or wasn't) recognized.

All the while, time simply flew by, while finals for WIT quickly approached. As my work progressed, I had the opportunity to attend several meetings with representatives of AXIS, alongside professors and others within the school, where I was able to provide progress updates on my project, and reach out for additional help and advice where needed.

Before I knew it, Project Alibi was no longer a set of disjoint libraries, but one cohesive (and functional!) program. Although certainly not where it needed to be to be called final, I had overcome the largest challenges that were blocking me from completing the project - namely, the persistence and recognition of multiple objects simultaneously. Plus, Alibi was even demoable, with most of the graphic elements working for illustrative purposes.

Needless to say, I was quite happy with the project after only about six weeks of development, even if there were many weeks ahead of further work.

---

I have to admit that, although a chance to demo my work at ISC West was a wonderful incentive to work on Project Alibi, I never expected to be one of the two students chosen to go, and I still consider it quite the honor and recognition.

See, AXIS had let students in on the fact that they wanted to give two projects a chance to be demonstrated at their booth in Las Vegas, during perhaps the largest security conference of the year. And so, being flown in to Sin City to present Project Alibi was an immensely fun experience, let alone an opportunity to connect and network with many professionals in the security field, both inside and outside of AXIS.

I was joined by Nick Gelfman and his project (which detected velocity of a person towards a camera), and together we had a table within the AXIS booth, at ISC West, demonstrating our projects and advocating the ACAP program that AXIS had been trying out with WIT. The three-day conference was a fantastic event, and our table offered demos for hours to countless vendors and visitors, with very few hiccups. After communicating with AXIS shortly after the event, it was clear that, for all parties, the entire initiative was quite successful, and I eagerly await to see where and how ACAP and the student projects continue to develop.

---

It is crazy for me to think that I could have very easily let this opportunity pass by me, in the general craziness and busyness of my life, and I am so glad that I took the time to seize it. I really think that AXIS has figured out a brilliant way to introduce a plethora of new applications and use cases for their network cameras, through providing the hardware and support needed for students to have fun and learn a lot through real-world, applied development.

I am excited to see where Project Alibi goes as I look to further work on it later this summer, and I am equally interested to see what will come of ACAP and of the many brilliant projects that other WIT students have been working on. This sort of program (and the results of it therein) would have been really difficult to provide (let alone succeed with) just a few short years ago, and yet with the continuous exponential growth of computational power that we can harness from silicon, alongside the flow of ever-improving and savvy programmers from higher education, the potential is huge for groundbreaking and fundamental disruptions to the current state of security, among many other industries.

And it sure is great to be amongst the trailblazers of that frontier.

Indeed, the future is now.

New gallery: las vegas, nv

When I wasn't at ISC West...

AXIS + WIT

...and when I was:

At ISC West 2013, Booth #14057, Wentworth students Nicholas Gelfman and Joshua Ramirez, with the help of Associate Provost and Professor Chuck Hotchkiss, [presented] "Smarter Surveillance" innovations they have created over the past semester using Axis' embedded Linux environment:

-- Gelfman, a computer science major, with the guidance of Professor David Rilett, aimed to create an evolved motion detection application for Axis cameras that can improve a number of tasks, including enabling the camera to detect when an object is moving toward it in order to protect itself from vandalism and damage.

-- Ramirez, a computer information systems major who also manages Wentworth's Internet radio station, WIRE, created a dynamic object and facial tracking application used for time logging of recognized objects. Referred to as Project Alibi, this application was inspired by the need to efficiently and securely track who enters and exits the expensive studio 24-hours a day.

"Normalization:
Poetry, logic - higher
form nirvana mine"
- Lisa MacLean

Spring cleaning

Hello all!

As you can probably tell, my website has undergone some drastic changes, as I modernize it and update/upload to a significant degree. I am excited to have a brand new journal, gallery and professional platform, and I hope that you all like the new look! Expect more pages (such as a long-awaited digital portfolio) to be online soon!

Low-poly, non-isometric worlds

Gorgeous renderings by Tim Reynolds.

"The wise ones fashion speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve." - Rg Veda (10:71)

A shameless plug

I should apologize upfront for the lack of updates to my journal, but I realized (after answering inquiries as to why I haven't been writing) that many are not aware of the podcasts that I am a part of, and that air on a weekly basis. If you were wondering where my efforts and exposure were all going to, wonder no more!

In fact, let me take the opportunity to announce that, for the remainder of the spring, I will be co-starring on Wiretap on the WIRE network!

Wiretap is an hour-long program that distills the week's technology news down to what really matters, alongside insightful and entertaining commentary. With occasional guests and enough insider sources to embarrass the CIA, Wiretap is probably the best technology podcast out there that you have yet to listen to, and features myself alongside my good friend (and once-roommate!) Mike Layton.

Wiretap airs every Tuesday at 1 PM.

You can also catch my all-variety and delightful-commentary show, Pour Hour, every Wednesday at 11 AM. Occasionally, you can tune in to impromptu versions of The Show, a talk show starring myself and Jackson Richardson, on Fridays at 1 PM.

And, of course, you can tune in to all of WIRE's top-notch programming 24/7, including all of the aforementioned shows, at wire.wit.edu.

The debt limit explained

Everyone ought to watch this.

"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness." - Dalai Lama

Recovery

Benedict Carey, The New York Times:

Doctors have long believed that disabling autistic disorders last a lifetime, but a new study has found that some children who exhibit signature symptoms of the disorder recover completely... In the study, a team led by Deborah Fein of the University of Connecticut at Storrs recruited 34 people who had been diagnosed before the age of 5 and no longer had any symptoms. They ranged in age from 8 to 21 years old and early in their development were in the higher-than-average range of the autism spectrum. The team conducted extensive testing of its own, including interviews with parents in some cases, to gauge current social and communication skills... Dr. Fein and her team used standardized, widely used measures and found no differences between the group of 34 formerly diagnosed people and a group of 34 matched control subjects who had never had a diagnosis.

---

When I was only a few years old, my parents noticed that I was acting strange. I was reserved, I had extreme attachment to certain things, I was absolutely fascinated with texture (to the point where I would chew emery boards and lick the carpet), and I was not developing language and communication nearly as fast as had my older sister.

I was taken to our family physician at age three, who, after learning of my behaviors, felt that I met the criteria to be diagnosed as mentally retarded.

But, of course, my mother knew better. She had seen how I would crawl to her computer, open an application on the desktop for keeping track of finances, and play around with it, entering numbers and clicking buttons. And she noticed how I had managed to password-protect the fake account I had made, so that only I could play with it. She simply knew that I had a certain mental acuity that was not being impeded. I had some sort of problem, but mental retardation wasn't it.

A few tests later, I was diagnosed with autism.

My parents were told that I would never graduate high school, that I would never be fully independent, that I would likely be institutionalized, and that I would probably never tell them I loved them. And this was the outcome that most every individual diagnosed with autism faced at the time.

But, of course, my mother knew better. Or perhaps, she just wanted better. Than to have her son trapped, a mind and personality crushed, under the burden of social deficits.

So I was enrolled in ABA, or "Applied Behavior Analysis", which was a new means of treating autism at the time. It was extraordinarially intensive, adding tens of hours to my schedule alongside school. But it promised to, through a barrage of exercises and procedures and tests, modify my behavior in ways that encouraged me to act normally, and it tried to teach me the sorts of social interactions and intuitions that are obvious and natural for most people, but that are misunderstood or otherwise alien to autistics.

ABA, however, was very experimental. In fact, due to the sheer volume of time and effort it called for, it was considered so intensive and laborious that many professionals felt that, if anything, it would only worsen the outcome of autistics that were put through it.

But, of course, my mother knew better. Autism had dug a very big hole, and it would take a bigger ladder to climb out of it.

And so I went through ABA, for what seemed to be a very long time, and at considerable expense. My boundaries were constantly challenged and pushed, and, though I managed to persevere every time, I also managed to put up a hell of a fight along the way. Initially, though, there did seem to be some benefit: After years on applied behavior analysis, I was finally developing language within the normal bounds of my age range, and I was having fewer tantrums.

But I was still stubborn, and still reserved. I bit my nails and got into a nasty habit of fidgeting with my hands. There was a long way to go.

Soon enough, I was taken off of ABA as I grew, and my family moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, where I entered a brand new elementary school in the third grade. Throughout elementary school, much of my disruptive and antisocial behavior persisted, I had an aide that was present very frequently, and the school had me on a sophisticated learning plan in an effort to accommodate my disability.

But tests showed a child with above-average intellect, particularly in mathematics. Writing and geography were difficult, but I was otherwise performing well in school.

In fact, upon entering middle school, my behavior had improved significantly, to the point where the school decided to migrate me from a lesson plan to a 504 plan, which is comparatively much less structured and complex - I just had time dedicated in my schedule to be in a study area known as the "Learning Center", as well as accessibility to aides for advice and help if I needed it. It was still a significant challenge to get along with my peers, but it was no longer all but impossible. And I started to fidget less.

My intelligence further expanded. I did well in all my classes. I joined the school math team and won several awards. I was placed in the 98th percentile in state testing, and was invited to Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth after taking the SATs in seventh grade, only to score higher than the average senior in high school.

By the time I finished the eight grade and entered Hanover High School, my 504 plan was dropped. The school felt that, since I was no longer exhibiting the traits of a student with autism, that I was (in effect) no longer autistic, since a doctor would not diagnose me as such at that point.

I finally started to make good friends. I joined the soccer team as a freshman and was the most improved player of the year. I got a part-time job at the local hardware store, which I kept for almost four years, and, during my senior year, I held a seminar for fellow students where I taught them how to assemble a desktop computer, only to then let them each build one of their own to take home.

This time around, when I took the SAT, I scored 2260, having missed only one question in the math section and three in the reading, placing me in the 98th percentile for mathematics and the 97th percentile overall. And my top choice college - Wentworth Institute of Technology - offered a generous scholarship alongside admission, which I happily and graciously accepted.

At last, I was no longer "Joshua, that weird kid". I was just, Joshua. I was finally, simply, myself.

---

Benedict Carey:

“This is the first solid science to address this question of possible recovery, and I think it has big implications,” said Sally Ozonoff of the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research. “I know many of us as would rather have had our tooth pulled than use the word ‘recover,’ it was so unscientific. Now we can use it, though I think we need to stress that it’s rare.”

Dr. Fein emphasized the importance of behavioral therapy. “These people did not just grow out of their autism,” she said. “I have been treating children for 40 years and never seen improvements like this unless therapists and parents put in years of work.”

For me, autism hasn't gone away, and I don't think that it ever will. I still have great trouble noticing certain social cues, such as sarcasm or dual-meaning. I have to be extraordinarily deliberate with my eye contact, posture and hand placement when in normal conversation. I too easily fail to notice tone of voice, or the meaning of something based in the context in which it was said. I am extremely rational and logical in everything I do, often times at the cost of ignoring the frequently emotional and illogical aspects of the human condition. And, often, social interactions simply feel awkward and uncomfortable, even with people I care about or know well.

(I could also stand to be a little more empathetic, though that is arguably true for just about anyone.)

But I have something that most autistics don't have, and that is, for all intents and purposes, the opportunity to live a productive, independent life. So, in that since, I have "recovered" from autism.

---

I hope with all my heart that my story, and my path, can be replicated for more and more people diagnosed with autism, as we expand our understanding of this condition. It is disturbing to me that my outcome is as rare as it is.

I was fortunate enough to be considered as one of the subjects for this particular study, although dental work prevented me from qualifying at the time, since the metal in my mouth would have interfered with MRI scans they were completing. But perhaps I will get the opportunity in the future to contribute my experience to the medical literature.

Until then, I am left to live my life and to focus on my studies, to feel solace from a seasonal donation to Autism Speaks, and to wonder how I can take full advantage of my outcome to pay it forward.

Someday, I will. Someday.

The gallery

I am very pleased to be able to begin publishing my ever-growing album of street photography on my journal, beginning with a midnight walk I took a few days ago.

Please feel free to peruse my collection under the new Gallery section of my website at your leisure. I expect to add to it frequently.

...Admittedly, I am far from an expert photographer, and I am sure my pictures will reflect that. But hopefully they will improve with time, as I become more experienced.

Thus far, I have focused more on buildings and architectural details, of which there are fortunately countless examples of throughout Boston. Hopefully, though, I will be able to go beyond the short radius surrounding my school in which I usually travel.

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." - Confucius

The time is now

Aurora:

Columbine:

Virginia Tech:

And, now, Sandy Hook:

According to The Guardian, firearms were the weapon of choice for 68% of all murders in the United States in 2010. With 12,996 total murders for the year - 8,775 of them involving guns - this means that twenty-four people are killed every day in the US with a firearm.

In other words, Sandy Hook (where 28 were killed) occurs on a daily basis.

The consequence of this is a rate of 9 firearm-related deaths per 100,000 population in the United States every year, which places us at the top spot when compared to other first-world nations:

Even second-place Canada is only about half of the rate of the United States, and this is with wider proliferation of firearms in Canadian households than American ones.

Make no mistake: The time is now to talk about gun control, and has been for decades. The difference between the United States maintaining the current firearm death rate, and falling just to the level of Canada, is over 4,600 lives annually.

To put this in perspective, this is the equivalent of a September 11th attack every eight months.

The NRA, the gun rights lobby, and individuals wishing to maintain current laws, are all making the argument that the current freedom and ease in which we can acquire guns is worth the cost of loss of life we endure. But this argument has only held water because we have been unaware of how large that cost is. Sandy Hook serves as yet another reminder, but significantly more death is wrought on the United States around the clock, with little press coverage or fanfare. I would imagine that the majority of Americans would advocate for much stricter gun control laws currently.

Further, guns are precisely what enable these mass shootings to occur at all. The saying "guns don't kill people, people kill people" operates on the false assumption that a gun does not make it easier, or that a murder would take place with or without a gun, when there is no doubt far fewer murders would take place if individuals only had more primitive weaponry. The reason Japan enjoys an impressively low .07 on the previous graph is because guns are outlawed there for everyone but law enforcement. For the United Kingdom, the .22 rate comes only with marginally tighter regulation on gun licensing and ownership, and the inability to own guns beyond pistols, shotguns, and rifles.

And, of course, more guns mean more problems: Households with guns suffer more casualties due to accidents, additional suicides, murders and assaults than they earn prevented casualties and assaults due to the additional protection.

The fact that only pure luck ensured that this massacre did not happen at the school my nine-year-old sister attends, to me, is horrifying. I don't think anyone wants the death of their child, or sibling, or loved one, to be what indicates to them how absurdly dangerous the world we live in currently is, due to something that is trivially easy to resolve through common-sense legislation and regulation.

So while the White House Press Secretary may say that now is not the time to talk about gun control, I ask of you: When is the right time? How many more have to die? How many schools have to be massacred, how many kindergartners have to be slaughtered, before it is time?

My thoughts go out to everyone in Newtown, CT, and to all that have lost a friend or loved one in such a tragedy. I sincerely hope that we as a society can do better than this.

The signal and the noise

I couldn't help but to share this wonderful Q&A session of Nate Silver (of Five Thirty Eight fame), which I stumbled upon just before comparing the results of my own predictions:

"If you would like to establish a connection with people from another culture, it’s always good to offer a few gifts as a gesture of friendship. But, an even better way to forge a lasting bond is by creating something together. Whether it’s a meal, an art project or just a spontaneous dance party. When you create with others, you build a connection that lasts a lifetime." - The Social Synapse, Louis Cozolino

Who has the right to life?

Jill Filipovic, The Guardian:

"This is a Catholic country," was what Irish doctors told Savita Halappanavar after she learned she was miscarrying her pregnancy and asked for an abortion to avoid further complications. She spent three days in agonizing pain, eventually shaking, vomiting and passing out. She again asked for an abortion and was refused, because the fetus still had a heartbeat.

Then she died.

Pride

I couldn't have more of it for our president.

Damn lies and statistics

With only a couple days remaining until the 2012 Presidential Election, I am glad to announce that I am ready to publish my predictions regarding what will occur on November 6th! I have run a final series of 100,000 simulations, using state-level polling data, as well as some statistical wizardry and methodology, all of which I will explain in great detail.

If you just want to know what the most likely scenario is in terms of the winning candidate, electoral vote breakdown, and exact vote numbers, skip to the bottom. But if you would like my methodology and analysis alongside those figures, read on!

The Simulator

At the core of my prediction, as well as my math, are the outputs from a simulator I have built over the past four months. The simulator itself is relatively straightforward, written entirely in C++, and is very spartan by design. But it is also well-built to take in state-level polling, adjust polls for known bias, and then determine what would happen if an election were to run at that particular instance. Furthermore, it logs polls over time, as well as simulation results, giving me quite a bit of catalogued data.

In fact, I was able to take this data and plot the daily percentile results of each state election (when run through the simulator) on a time graph, which allowed me to track the volatility and direction of the data itself. This helped to establish a certain level of confidence in given average poll numbers on a state-by-state basis, and made for some interesting graphs to boot. Here is the one for Florida, over the past month, for instance:

In terms of what I accounted for directly in my calculations, I only used state-level polling that was from polling firms which ran more than three polls, and were found to have a bias of less than 4.5% in a given direction (I put these rules in place to root out the institutions that had garbage results).

As far as what my simulator does not account for:

• National polling. I do this purposefully, since national polling is uninformative and useless - EVs on a state-by-state basis elect the president, not the national vote. A good example of these two not correlating is the year 2000, where Gore received over half a million more votes (.5%) than Bush, but lost the Electoral College. So far, in fact, there have been four elections where the popular vote winner lost the election! Consequently, although national polling in aggregate can be a helpful indicator as to which candidate has momentum, the individual state polling is better in nearly every meaningful way.

• Economic factors or conditions. I may love statistics, but I am only confident in analyzing the polling data, and I frankly have no idea how to take in something like job report numbers, and use those to affect the expected turnout of voters. Furthermore, I figure that anything that could change the dynamic of the race would effect the polling I am measuring anyhow. To that end, I leave analysis that includes other factors to people who are a bit better with this sort of thing than I can ever hope to be.

• Voting restrictions, Voter ID laws, reduced early voting, etc. I don't disclude these factors from my analysis out of some expectation that these things won't have an effect on the voting outcome. I disculde them because there isn't much precedent to them, and so there really isn't any reliable way to account for them that I can discern.

The Math

Here is what my simulator does, expressed in a simplified step-by-step logical path:

1. Accepts all polls for a given day for all states as input.

2. Adjust polls for bias, which is tabulated by taking into account factors such as the known bias in the previous election, the difference from the mean of all polls in the previous month, and others.

3. Derive a mean data point for all states, from all polls for a given day, given as (Obama%, Romney%). This is then weighed against the data from the previous day to try to reduce rapid fluctuations and changes in the simulator results.

4. Run 100,000 simulations with the calculated vote share percentages, using the estimated votes to be cast (derived from 2010 Census data) to find actual vote numbers.

As you might expect, a lot of this math is rather tedious, and I won't bore with the specific formulas and such that I used, in part because I programmed them into my simulator and automated most of it anyway. But most everything I did follows SOP for any statistician: Collecting data points, establishing a mean and standard deviation and confidence interval, running repeatable trials against a normal model, and so forth.

The Results

In consideration of the fact that we are so close to the election cycle, and in particular due to the data points from pollsters moving in a uniformly inward direction (that is, polls are tracking towards the mean of all polls, for one reason or another), I decided to make today's simulation the last. Below is the chart expressing results of this simulation, excluding the vote percentages for states that are won by a gap of more than five points:

To help with interpreting the data: The darker-colored states on the chart are those that are, for all intents and purposes, already decided (In extremely infrequent instances, certain states that are categorized in this way could flip, but they would just add to a landslide, rather than act as the decisive state). With just these states, we see Obama start with a base of 253 electoral votes, and Romney with 191 out of the gate.

The lighter-colored states are contests that are within the margin of error for the aggregate of all polls, but are tinted blue or red to indicate the current leader. I have colored all the states so as to put them on one side or the other, but would point out that, although Romney is awarded Florida, he carries it by barely more than a tenth of one percent.

All 50 states (and D.C.) are listed in order from the biggest to smallest gap in votes between Obama and Romney, where an Obama surplus is expressed as positive and a Romney surplus is expressed as negative.

Taking these results at face value, we get the following map:

*After 100000 simulations: B.Obama 66,781,988 votes (50.4386%), M.Romney 65,620,776 votes (49.5614%)

...and, as it turns out, this map was the most frequent one to crop up during the 100,000 simulations! For reference, the second most frequent map was identical but gave Florida to Obama; the third most frequent was identical but gave Virginia to Romney.

Also on the chart are two dividing lines on either side of Ohio, and the respective Electoral Vote tally for Obama if he was to win every state up to those lines. I added these to make it very clear that, indeed, this entire contest will come down to Ohio, since for Romney to win Ohio, he would (for the most part) have to win every state below it, and would reach 270 EVs if he did manage such a result.

To put it another way: It is extraordinarily implausible for Romney to lose a state like Florida or North Carolina, but win Ohio or New Hampshire, given the linearity of the states (and polling data), relative to each other, as of late.

But the most important numbers on the chart are the two colored ones on either side of the dotted line, for they indicate what I have decided to declare as my prediction for the election: Obama will be awarded 303 Electoral Votes, to Romney's 235. The preceding election map is what I have determined will be the most likely to occur, though I do think that Florida, Colorado and Virginia could quite easily go the other way (although this would not change the overall winner).

In addition, I have found Obama to have a 89.846% chance of winning the election.

However - and this ought to be stressed - I am not saying that Obama is going to win, period. A 10% chance of a Romney victory is still quite a significant possibility, and to that end, complacency on the part of either political camp is quite unwarranted. A good ground game and GOTV effort could flip any of the battleground states, as well as torrents of money and advertising.

That being said, if I had to put a bet down on one candidate or the other, a second Obama term is looking like quite the favorite.

"Genius is eternal patience" - Michelangelo