Posts filed under General (3156)

Team Ratings for Round 18

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

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 106 matches played, 67 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 63.2%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 18

Here are the predictions for Round 18. 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.

From Deadspin. No further comment needed.

• Motivated reasoning: In a survey of doctors “68% of the 125 circumcised males supported circumcision, and 69% of the 106 uncircumcised males opposed circumcision“
• “And although many would consider this creepy stalking, that’s not actually my problem with it.” Cathy O’Neill on medical data mining
• From Pacific Standard magazine: How to get people to donate. “One [study] finds that requests featuring a single child are more effective than those with multiple faces. A second suggests that child had better not be too attractive.”
• A lighter side: colour dictionaries — what scientists did before Pantone

Interested in learning to do data analysis but don’t know where to start? Try out the Department of Statistics’ new MOOC (massive online open course) called From Data to Insight: An Introduction to Data Analysis. It’s free – yep, it won’t cost you a bean – starts on October 6, takes just three hours a week, and will be led by our resident world-renowned statistics educator Prof Chris Wild (right).

The blurb says, in part:

“The course focuses on data exploration and discovery, showing you what to look for in statistical data, however large it may be. We’ll also teach you some of the limitations of data and what you can do to avoid being misled. We use data visualisations designed to teach you these skills quickly, and introduce you to the basic concepts you need to start understanding our world through data.

“This course assumes very little experience with statistical ideas and concepts. You will need to be comfortable thinking in terms of percentages, have basic Microsoft Excel skills, and a Windows or Macintosh computer to download and install our iNZight software.”

And that’s all you need. Spread the word.

The Séralini et al paper on Roundup and Roundup-resistant GM corn is back. The NZ Science Media Centre has comments.  As does Retraction Watch

Team Ratings for Round 16

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

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 110 matches played, 63 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 57.3%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 16

Here are the predictions for Round 16. 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 17

The basic method is described on my Department home page. I have made some changes to the methodology this year, including shrinking the ratings between seasons.

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 101 matches played, 65 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 64.4%.

Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 17

Here are the predictions for Round 17. 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.

Two people we have linked to a lot, Felix Salmon and Cathy O’Neill, now have a podcast on money and finance, at Slate

From Stuff, the headline “Cheating on the rise at Massey.” The basis for the story is that there were 56 incidents from 56 separate students reported in 2012, and 72 incidents from 51 separate students reported last year.

We aren’t told if that’s out of the 35000 total students, the 18000 on-campus students, or the 9000 at the Manawatu campus. Even with the smallest denominator, the cheating rate is only about half a percent. Taking this at face value requires a touching faith in the honest of Massey students, since the rate is a couple of orders of magnitude lower than self-report surveys often find for ever having plagiarised in college, and five times lower than a careful experiment found for a single assignment in US colleges (PDF)

Since reported incidents of cheating are a small minority of actual incidents, it’s hard to say anything sensible about trends from two years at a single university, especially as the story says Massey is taking new steps to combat cheating. There’s no way to disentangle changes in reporting from changes in cheating.

• From The Functional Art, ethics in infographics
• From Scott Aaronson, is it possible to define morality or trust the way Google defines reliability
• “Ethics in Graphic Design” is a forum for the exploration of ethical issues in graphic design. It is intended to be used as a resource and to create an open dialogue among graphic designers about these critical issues.