Christie Aschwanden writes: Not sure you will remember, but last fall at our panel at the World Conference of Science Journalists I talked with you and Kristin Sainani about some unconventional statistical methods being used in sports science. I’d been collecting material for a story, and after the meeting I sent the papers to Kristin. […]
Archive of posts filed under the Sports category.
“Ivy League Football Saw Large Reduction in Concussions After New Kickoff Rules”
I noticed this article in the newspaper today: A simple rule change in Ivy League football games has led to a significant drop in concussions, a study released this week found. After the Ivy League changed its kickoff rules in 2016, adjusting the kickoff and touchback lines by just five yards, the rate of concussions […]
The hot hand—in darts!
Roland Langrock writes: Since on your blog you’ve regularly been discussing hot hand literature – which we closely followed – I’m writing to share with you a new working paper we wrote on a potential hot hand pattern in professional darts. We use state-space models in which a continuous-valued latent “hotness” variable, modeled as an […]
Isaac Newton : Alchemy :: Michael Jordan : Golf
Not realizing the domain-specificity of their successes.
How to set up a voting system for a Hall of Fame?
Micah Cohen writes: Our company is establishing a Hall of Fame and I am on a committee to help set it up which involved figuring out the voting system to induct a candidate. We have modeled it somewhat off of the voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame. The details in short: · Up to […]
Cool tennis-tracking app
Swupnil Sahai writes that he’s developed Swing, “the best app for tracking all of your tennis stats, and maybe we’ll expand to other sports in the future.” According to Swupnil, the app runs on Apple Watch making predictions in real time. I hope in the future they’ll incorporate some hierarchical modeling to deal with sparse-data […]
Of statistics class and judo class: Beyond the paradigm of sequential education
In judo class they kinda do the same thing every time: you warm up and then work on different moves. Different moves in different classes, and there are different levels, but within any level the classes don’t really have a sequence. You just start where you start, practice over and over, and gradually improve. Different […]
“For professional baseball players, faster hand-eye coordination linked to batting performance”
Kevin Lewis sends along this press release reporting what may be the least surprising laboratory finding since the classic “Participants reported being hungrier when they walked into the café (mean = 7.38, SD = 2.20) than when they walked out [mean = 1.53, SD = 2.70, F(1, 75) = 107.68, P < 0.001]."
Stan goes to the World Cup
Leo Egidi shares his 2018 World Cup model, which he’s fitting in Stan. But I don’t like this: First, something’s missing. Where’s the U.S.?? More seriously, what’s with that “16.74%” thing? So bogus. You might as well say you’re 66.31 inches tall. Anyway, as is often the case with Bayesian models, the point here is […]
Josh “hot hand” Miller speaks at Yale tomorrow (Wed) noon
Should be fun.
Garden of forking paths – poker analogy
[image of cats playing poker] Someone who wishes to remain anonymous writes: Just wanted to point out an analogy I noticed between the “garden of forking paths” concept as it relates to statistical significance testing and poker strategy (a game I’ve played as a hobby). A big part of constructing a winning poker strategy nowadays […]
Boston Stan meetup 12 June!
Shane Bussmann writes to announce the next Boston/Camberville Stan users meetup, Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM, at Insight Data Science Office, 280 Summer St., Boston: To kick things off for our first meetup in 2018, I [Bussman] will give a talk on rating teams in recreational ultimate frisbee leagues. In this […]
How jet lag impairs major league statistical performance
Kyle Meyer writes: Last August you wrote about [1] a PNAS paper that looked at “jet lag” and a bunch of metrics across twenty MLB seasons. I’ve played around with incorporating their measure of jet lag into a model of run differentials [2], working from your posts about estimating team abilities in soccer [3-5]. I […]
“If I wanted to graduate in three years, I’d just get a sociology degree.”
From an interview with a UCLA QB who’s majoring in economics: Look, football and school don’t go together. They just don’t. Trying to do both is like trying to do two full-time jobs. . . . No one in their right mind should have a football player’s schedule, and go to school. It’s not that […]
“Deeper into democracy: the legitimacy of challenging Brexit’s majoritarian mandate”
There’s no reason that we should trust someone’s thoughts on politics just because he’s a good chess player, or even a good writer. That said, I found this opinion piece by Jonathan Rowson on Britain and the EU to be worth reading. Also I came across this short post by Rowson on “virtue signaling” which […]
“Heating Up in NBA Free Throw Shooting”
Paul Pudaite writes: I demonstrate that repetition heats players up, while interruption cools players down in NBA free throw shooting. My analysis also suggests that fatigue and stress come into play. If, as seems likely, all four of these effects have comparable impact on field goal shooting, they would justify strategic choices throughout a basketball […]
Here’s a post with a Super Bowl theme.
Kevin Lewis pointed me to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, using the email subject line, “Not statistically significant, but close.” The article in question, by Atheendar Venkataramani, Maheer Gandhavadi, and Anupam Jena, is called, “Association Between Playing American Football in the National Football League and Long-term Mortality,” and it reports: […]
Popular expert explains why communists can’t win chess championships!
[cat picture] We haven’t run any Ray Keene material for awhile but this is just too good to pass up: Yup, those communists have real trouble pushing to the top when it comes to chess, huh? P.S. to Chrissy: If you happen to be reading this, my advice to you is to not take stuff […]
A new definition of the nerd?
Jonathan Falk points to this book excerpt by Michael Lewis, who writes: A lot of what people did and said when they “predicted” things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, […]
High five: “Now if it is from 2010, I think we can make all sorts of assumptions about the statistical methods without even looking.”
Eric Tassone writes: Have you seen this? “Suns Tracking High Fives to Measure Team Camaraderie.” Key passage: