First to the latter.

According to Silver and computer programmer Matthew Conlen, only 14 teams have any appreciable statistical (better than 1 percent) chance to prevail to the very end of March Madness. (Stanford, it should be noted, is not among them.) The chance of success is expressed as a percentage and listed next to each team:

Louisville (15)
Florida (14)
Arizona (13)
Michigan State, Virginia, Kansas (6)
Wichita State, Duke (5)
Villanova (4)
Michigan, Creighton, Wisconsin (3)
Kentucky, Ohio State (2)

Silver's model for predicting the brackets, which is in its fourth year, is principally based on a composite of five computer power ratings:

Ken Pomeroy’s ratings
Jeff Sagarin’s “predictor” ratings
Sonny Moore’s ratings
Joel Sokol’s LRMC ratings
ESPN’s Basketball Power Index, which is a new addition this year.

Good luck with that.

Finding a Lost Airplane

As for the mystery surrounding Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared just off the Malaysian coast on March 8, Silver's associate Carl Bialik writes:

"Bayesian statisticians are particularly helpful in a search operation. Their methods allow hunters to update their estimates of the probability of finding their target in any latitude-longitude combination — or even in three dimensions, accounting for depth in the water. Bayesians helped hunt U-boats in World War II, a U.S. submarine in the 1960s and an Air France jet in 2011."

The problem in this case may be the vast distances that need to be searched since the plane disappeared. The Malaysian government seems to have no idea to which end of the earth the Boeing 777 proceeded before sending its last-known signal to a satellite.

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say someone, someday will locate that airplane. But as for the odds of winning Buffett's challenge, with or without Silver's analysis at your side, forget it.

missing jetmissing jet

March Madness Odds: Nate Silver Assesses All 68 Teams