Posts filed under General (3152)

Team Ratings for the Super Rugby Final

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 141 matches played, 106 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 75.2%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for the Super Rugby Final

Here are the predictions for the Super Rugby Final. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 22

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 152 matches played, 92 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 60.5%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 22

Here are the predictions for Round 22. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 3

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 6 matches played, 5 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 83.3%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 3

Here are the predictions for Round 3. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

In 2015, the Herald said

Drinking the caffeine equivalent of more than four espressos a day is harmful to health, especially for minors and pregnant women, the European Union food safety agency has said.

“It is the first time that the risks from caffeine from all dietary sources have been assessed at EU level,” the EFSA said, recommending that an adult’s daily caffeine intake remain below 400mg a day.

(I quoted it at the time: the link seems to be dead now).

Now we have, under the headline Good news for coffee lovers: Caffeine is harmless, says research

A review of 44 trials dispelled the widespread myth that caffeine, found in tea, coffee and fizzy drinks, is bad for the body.

It found that sticking to the recommended daily amount of 400mg – the equivalent four cups of coffee or eight cups of tea – has no lasting damage on the body.

The recommendation that 400mg/day is generally safe was described as ‘caffeine is dangerous’ in 2015 and ‘caffeine is harmless’ now.

Other not-news about this is the not-new research. Obviously the Daily Mail (the only link) isn’t a research source. The research was published in Complete Nutrition, a professional magazine for UK dieticians. As their website says

Each issue of CN is packed with articles which are practical, educational and topical, and all are written by independent, well-respected authors from across the profession.

That’s a valuable mission for a journal, but it would be surprising if an expert opinion article in a journal like that contained new research worth international headlines.

From deep in the archives at Language Log

The Pirahã language and culture seem to lack not only the words but also the concepts for numbers, using instead less precise terms like “small size”, “large size” and “collection”. And the Pirahã people themselves seem to be suprisingly uninterested in learning about numbers, and even actively resistant to doing so, despite the fact that in their frequent dealings with traders they have a practical need to evaluate and compare numerical expressions. A similar situation seems to obtain among some other groups in Amazonia, and a lack of indigenous words for numbers has been reported elsewhere in the world.

Many people find this hard to believe. These are simple and natural concepts, of great practical importance: how could rational people resist learning to understand and use them? I don’t know the answer. But I do know that we can investigate a strictly comparable case, equally puzzling to me, right here in the U.S. of A.

From context, you can probably guess where he’s heading

From the editing blog “Heads Up”

… you don’t need a course in statistics to ask what a writer means by “incident count,” “city” and “occurrence percentage,” not to mention why and how the means are weighted, or even why users of an insurance comparison website would be a good representation of a city where a huge proportion of drivers are uninsured. 

And

This isn’t “fake news” in the 2016 sense; it’s the old-school kind that has always gotten past enough gatekeepers to do its work. The traditional response is “tell them to buy an ad.”

• “Algorithms can dictate whether you get a mortgage or how much you pay for insurance. But sometimes they’re wrong – and sometimes they are designed to deceive” Cathy O’Neil, for Observer.

• What’s so hard about histograms? A beautiful, detailed exploration by Aran Lunzer and Amelia McNamara

• A talk about human factors research and what it says about data visualisation

• “Point your phone at any mushroom and take a pic, our tech will instantly identify any mushrooms while giving you an article you can read or listen to.” This app seems to be intended as educational ‘augmented reality’, but one reason people want to identify mushrooms is to decide whether it’s safe to eat them. That’s not possible from just a photo, and the costs of some of the possible classification errors are very, very high.

• A new trend in graphics: ‘joyplots’, named for the famous cover art of a Joy Division album. Here’s a history of the album cover, from Jen Christiansen. And now some examples:

Over the years, movies have converged to a length of ~100 min.

4 lines of code with ggjoy. #rstats pic.twitter.com/2xRoRPqVvg

— Claus Wilke (@ClausWilke) July 12, 2017

 

Peak time for sports and leisure #dataviz. About time for a joyplot; might do a write-up on them. #rstats code at https://t.co/Q2AgW068Wa pic.twitter.com/SVT6pkB2hB

— Henrik Lindberg (@hnrklndbrg) July 8, 2017

Team Ratings for the Semi-finals

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 139 matches played, 105 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 75.5%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for the Semi-finals

Here are the predictions for the Semi-finals. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 21

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 144 matches played, 88 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 61.1%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 21

Here are the predictions for Round 21. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 2

The basic method is described on my Department home page.

Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 3 matches played, 2 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 66.7%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 2

Here are the predictions for Round 2. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.