538

In the United States and Canada, a 538 is a type of headlight on a car or truck that has a straight and simple beam. It is characterized by a single row of high-intensity "dual-filament" light units like filament bulbs, which spread the light in a single beam.

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The Reserve Officer Training Corps program consists of two main phases that span a cadet's academic career. These phases are separated by Field Training, which occurs during the summer following a cadet's sophomore year. Each phase is also broken down by year level with specific required classes designed to teach and prepare cadets to become an Air Force or Space Force Officer. Cadets will receive a Minor in Military Studies and Leadership upon graduation.

The main aim of the course is to provide basic knowledge to instructors from agencies involved in the emergency response to chemical agents in order to create a pool of trainers in African countries capable of disseminating knowledge on topics related to the response to a chemical incident. (Source: eur-lex.europa.eu)

Use

However, while adopting such an approach in his own analysis, Silver reasoned that there was additional information available in polls from "similar" states that might help to fill the gaps in information about the trends in a given state. Accordingly, he adapted an approach that he had previously used in his baseball forecasting: using nearest neighbor analysis he first identified "most similar states" and then factored into his electoral projections for a given state the polling information from "similar states". He carried this approach one step further by also factoring national polling trends into the estimates for a given state. Thus, his projections were not simply based on the polling trends in a given state.

Using such information allowed Silver to come up with estimates of the vote preferences even in states for which there were few if any polls. For his general election projections for each state, in addition to relying on the available polls in a given state and "similar states," Silver estimated a "538 regression" using historical voting information along with demographic characteristics of the states to create an estimate that he treated as a separate poll (equivalent to the actually available polls from that state). This approach helped to stabilize his projections, because if there were few if any polls in a given state, the state forecast was largely determined by the 538 regression estimate. (Source: en.wikipedia.org)