Stats Chat

Team Ratings for Round 14

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 80 matches played, 56 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 70%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 14

Here are the predictions for Round 14. 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 11

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 80 matches played, 43 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 53.8%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 11

Here are the predictions for Round 11. 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.

There’s a story in Stuff about a potential new cure for baldness

A cure for baldness could be on the horizon after British scientists discovered that an osteoporosis drug stimulates hair growth three times quicker than other drugs.

The first thing to notice about the story is the name of the new drug, WAY-316606. That’s not a drug name. That’s a drug-company internal name of a research compound. This isn’t a story about repurposing an already-approved drug. The name of the cancer drug “CsA” they supposedly started with also looks a bit weird.

The next thing to note is that we aren’t given much source information, apart from the Daily Telegraph. The story there has the headline Baldness cure could come from side-effect of cancer drug. You’d need to sign up there to actually read it; I wouldn’t bother if I were you.  Searching for keywords like “baldness” and “Manchester” finds the press release.

The press release tells us some interesting new facts. First, “CsA” isn’t a cancer drug at all. It’s cyclosporine A, the immune-suppressant drug that made organ transplants really feasible in the 1980s.  It looks as thought the Telegraph invented the connection with cancer — maybe by misunderstanding the fact cyclosporine increases cancer risk. Second, the research paper is in the journal PLoS Biology — unlike the Daily Telegraph story, it’s open-access.   The press release is also more measured about the medical potential, saying “Clearly though, a clinical trial is required next to tell us whether this drug or similar compounds are both effective and safe in hair loss patients.” As far as I can tell, WAY-316606 hasn’t ever been tested even for safety in humans.

The research paper is harder going. It does have this graph (Figure 3A) comparing hair growth in hair follicles treated with WAY-316606 and untreated controls. It’s true that the treated hair grew faster, and it’s true it was 2mm after 6 days, but the difference from untreated hair was a lot smaller than that.

The research paper links to another paper about WAY-316606, which is not open-access.  That paper gives a hint as to why WAY-316606 isn’t a drug already: it doesn’t last long enough in the body (at least, the bodies of rats). It might work better applied to the scalp. Or not.

So, this is interesting biochemical research that might turn out to have practical applications for hair growth, but it’s not really a way to use an existing drug to cure baldness.

Team Ratings for Round 13

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 73 matches played, 51 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 69.9%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 13

Here are the predictions for Round 13. 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 10

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 72 matches played, 39 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 54.2%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 10

Here are the predictions for Round 10. 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 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 132 matches played, 93 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 70.5%.
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.

• Creative arithmetic in some official statistics “an incident in the Rio Grande Valley Sector on February 14, 2017, involved seven U.S. Border Patrol Agents assaulted by six subjects utilizing three different types of projectiles (rocks, bottles, and tree branches), totaling 126 assaults.” 
• Interesting, slightly-nerdy post on fake news, network structure, and Cambridge Analytica
• Also on Cambridge Analytica: “The psychology ethics committee refused permission, and when he appealed to the [Cambridge] University Ethics Committee  this refusal was upheld”
• “Seven Visualization Talks That Terrified Me At CHI”: Michael Correll on this year’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Abstract art to a human; representational art to a neural network
• The success of statistical models in horse-racing (Bloomberg: limited free articles)
• The UK’s opt-out internet porn filter has lots of completely stupid false positives because of course it does (BoingBoing). There’s a site where you can search or browse them.  I think my favourite so far is Utopia Palms and Cycads, a nice ecologically-responsible tropical-plant supplier in Queensland, Australia.
• And in other UK computerised false-positives news “However, when ETS’s automated voice analysis was checked against human analysis, its computer programme was found to be wrong in 20 per cent of cases, meaning that more than 7,000 students were likely to have been wrongly accused of cheating.”  Sometimes 80% is a fail, not  an A-

Q: How many spaces do you use after a full stop?

A: Whatever LaTeX thinks is appropriate. We have computers so that people don’t have to worry about that sort of thing.

Q: How many spaces do you actually type?

A: Two. I was brainwashed by the program that taught me touch-typing.

Q: Me too! Science has just proved us right!

A: <eyeroll emoji>

Q: It’s in the Herald! And in the Washington Post!: One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.

A: I see what they did there. <unimpressed emoji>

Q: But Science?

A: The researchers took a group of people who used two spaces after full stops and another group who used one, and got them to read text with different spacing conventions.  They measured reading speed and comprehension

Q: And the one-space texts were read faster and comprehended better?

A: “In the analysis of reading speed, although there was not an overall significant effect of period spacing or typing condition, there was a significant effect of comma spacing such that readers read paragraphs faster when they were written with only one space after the commas, as is the common convention.”

Q: That’s… not really what the story says.

A: No. No, it isn’t. There was a slight tendency for people to read faster when the spacing in the text matched the spacing they personally tended to use.

Q: And what do they mean about “only one space after the comma”?

A: They looked at one or two spaces after the comma as well as after the full stop.

Q: <anguished face emoji>

A:  Indeed.

Q: But at least it shows two spaces at the end of the sentence is ok?

A: Under the conditions of the experiment, yes, there’s weak support for that point of view.

Q: I’m sensing an implied asterisk here

A: The Herald story says, near the start “Some said this was blasphemy. The designers of modern fonts had built the perfect amount of spacing, they said. Anything more than a single space between sentences was too much.”

Q: Yes?

A: The experiment was done in the monospaced font Courier New.

Q: How is that relevant to, like, anything in the modern world? I mean, even if you want a monospaced font for coding or something you can use Monaco or Hack or Consolas

A: Well, you might think that if two spaces was bad in real-world use it would be even worse in Courier New, but it’s not how I would have done the experiment.

h/t David Hogg

There’s a shocked story on the internet about a New York restaurant serving chicken wings coated in gold for US$1000.

It’s a great example of not doing the maths. Gold currently costs $42/gram, and culinary gold leaf is easily available for not much more than twice that.  A gram of gold leaf is a lot: nearly a square metre.

In fact, if you track down a more detailed source — and in this case I’m sorry to say the Daily Mail qualifies — you find that 10 gold-covered wings sets you back $30, at a restaurant whose regular “small plates” wings are $15.

The $1000 price tag is for 50 wings plus a bottle of Champagne Armand de Brignac.  It’s the posh bubbly that explains the stratospheric price, not the gold.

Kirsty Johnson and Chris Knox have a report  in the Herald today on why the number of unresolved reports of sexual assault has gone up.

On the face of it, one could assume the driver behind the spike in unresolved cases was the overall increase in reporting rates. Data shows reporting has also climbed steadily since last decade.

That’s what I would have assumed. It’s true in a sense. But the change wasn’t more reporting to police; it was more reporting by police. Many cases where the police felt they could not get a conviction were classified for reporting purposes as not being reports of a crime and so were lumped together with false accusations and cases where the reported behaviour wasn’t criminal.

It’s good news that the police don’t do this any more, but it’s also important that the past minimisation of reports is now more widely known.

[I should also note that reporters show their working: there’s a page on the data and calculations, and plenty of links to police documents and other sources. ]