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Friday, February 10, 2012
Hero of the month: Brittney Baxter
See video:
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Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Batman, the webslinger?
It sure seems early to do a reboot, considering that SpiderMan 2 is one of the best comic-book movies ever, and SpiderMan 1 was pretty good as well. Tobey McGuire was also a great choice as actor.
And by the looks of the trailer, it seems to follow the Batman model: focus on the dead parents (which were barely mentioned in the movies or comics when I was growing up), focus on the science, and get grittier.
But, I’ll get past it, because once I set all that aside, this movie looks promising!
Is Nate Silver alot more certain than he lets on?
I’ve been following Nate’s mean forecasts for the five primaries so far. So far, he’s made 25 predictions over those 5 primaries (and obviously, they are interdependent). His worst forecast result was Santorum in Iowa, where he gave him a mean forecast of 19.1, and he ended up at 24.6, for a difference of 5.5 points. His average error over those 25 forecasts is 2.34 points, with one standard deviation being 2.71 points.
However, his posted uncertainty level is much higher than that. Let’s take Mitt in Iowa as an example. He gave him a mean forecast of 24.5, with a range of 13 to 32 (a range of 19 points). In another article, he notes that his range is the 5th and 95th percentiles. Those levels are reached at the +/-1.645 standard deviations (or a range of 3.29 standard deviations). This means that one standard deviation for Romney is 5.8 points.
So, I calculated it for all 25 forecasts, and one standard deviation averaged 4.6 points as Nate’s uncertainty level. However, as I noted earlier, the actual observed standard deviation was 2.71 points. This means that Nate’s uncertainty level is 4.6/2.71 too wide, or 1.7 times too wide.
Now, either he made a calculation error of his historical data (making the width of his uncertainty level almost twice what it should have been), or this year, things simply worked out alot closer to the mean than expected, just by luck (after all, we only have 25 data points).
Here’s the data for those who want to take a crack at it:
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Turbo Tax: the Netflix of tax software?
Non-sports post.
Reading the reviews of the customers, and the interaction of the VP of Turbo Tax on Amazon, is quite the eye opener.
I’m going to surf a bit, to see if someone has documented the Turbo Tax issues. I’ve never seen such outright dissatisfaction from long-time customers… well, not since the Netflix fiasco.
Friday, February 03, 2012
Aasif Mavi and The Daily Show
Non-sports post.
Wait until you see the show posted online.
Basically, the brain-dead legislators of Florida want Floridians on welfare to pee in a cup to prove they are not on drugs before getting the welfare money. One of the legislators said something like “The taxpayers deserve to know if that money is going to go to drugs or not.”
Manvi asked: “Who pays your salary?”
“The taxpayers.”
Manvi: “So, can you pee in this cup? Don’t the taxpayers deserve to know you are not on drugs?”
The politician knew he got nailed, and then danced around the issue.
It was beautiful.
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Tango, Jr.
My boy got all excited as he noted a mathematical pattern. If you square a number (say 4), then you square the next (5), the difference is two less than the square of the next after (6). So, 25-16 = 9. 36-25=11.
Here’s some explanations.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Same media that “suspects” Bagwell + PED is same media that “suspects” Brady guaranteed a Super Bowl
Marcellus Wallace throwing someone out of a window for massaging his girlfriend’s feet is more reasonable than what the media creates/reports.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Spongebob: breaking the Fibonacci rule of pineapples
She makes a pretty good case:
Friday, January 27, 2012
Calvin & Hobbes
Bill Watterson made the comics Hall of Fame on peak value.
It’s clear when you look at things outside of baseball that there are different standards, no? Had The Beatles only done Sgt Pepper, don’t you put them in the Hall of Fame? Dr Richard Daystrom or Zefram Cochrane make it on one invention, no? Da Vinci makes it for Mona Lisa? After the 4th Wimbledon, don’t you immortalize Bjorn Borg?
So, apply the same thing to baseball. Have different standards for best-3 years, best-5 years, best-7 years, best-10 years, best-15 years, best-career. Obviously, you’ll have very few qualified for the best-3 years, and the more years, the more players qualify. Bonds 1999-2003 guarantees enshrinement, regardless of what else he did.
I read the entire Calvin & Hobbes collection to my boy last year. Some really great stuff.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Academic ivory towers and gated databases
Peer-reviewed journals: it’s been nice knowing you.
Step back and think about this picture. Universities that created this academic content for free must pay to read it. Step back even further. The public—which has indirectly funded this research with federal and state taxes that support our higher education system—has virtually no access to this material, since neighborhood libraries cannot afford to pay those subscription costs. Newspapers and think tanks, which could help extend research into the public sphere, are denied free access to the material. Faculty members are rightly bitter that their years of work reaches an audience of a handful, while every year, 150 million attempts to read JSTOR content are denied every year.
And, perhaps, the future has arrived.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
PSA: Mariska Hartigay
Non-sports post.
She writes:
An estimated one in six men, or nearly 19 million adult males in the United States, have had an unwanted or abusive sexual experience in childhood. The median age for reported sexual abuse, male and female, is 9 years old.
...
I invite you to watch the re-airing of “Personal Fouls” tonight on NBC, guest starring the NBA’s Carmelo Anthony and Chris Bosh. I hope it will inspire you to think and talk about the issue of sexual abuse of boys and men. And I hope it will inspire you to take action—on behalf of your child, your spouse, your friend, your co-worker, yourself—and join me in the effort to engage men in the movement to end sexual abuse and violence. To learn more about this important issue, please visit men.joyfulheartfoundation.org
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Justified: the bad-a$$ show that all the others aspire to
Wasn’t that great?!?
Sunday, January 15, 2012
The Garfoose: mouthpiece for Tebow?
Love those three tweets from Hayhurst (bottom of the page). He gives a level of introspection that’s lacking from Bill Maher’s biting and mocking commentary.
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
Why I’d Bet on My Model (and Against My Instincts)
Nate Silver had a headline that read:
Why I’d Bet on Santorum (and Against My Model)
I thought: NO!!!! Nate, why? Why?
The reason should be clear: why HAVE a model that includes all the parameters you deem relevant, if you then throw away the model if you don’t like the results? Nate’s model showed Romney with getting 22% of the votes, Ron Paul with 21% and Santorum with 19%. After them were Gingrich 15, Perry 10, Bachman 8, Huntsman 4. (Without rounding, that adds up to 99.3%).
The actual results shows: Romney 25, Santorum 25, Paul 21. Gingrich 13, Perry 10, Bachman 5, Huntsman 1. Presumably, when it comes to actual voting, no one wants to vote for the eventual losers, so Bachman/Huntsman lose 6 points, and that moves over to the expected winners (with Santorum absorbing most of the extras, it seems).
Nate however was not talking about this “abandon the loser effect”. Instead, he was talking about momentum, and using a model with more parameters (but also more uncertainty), he said:
23.5 Santorum
21.4 Paul
19.1 Romney
15.4 Gingrich
8.7 Perry
6.7 Bachman
4.3 Huntsman
So, in this case, we see he nails everyone except the bottom two losers and Romney, and most of their lost votes went to Romney, who Nate missed in this revised model.
Follow me here. Under the revised momentum-based model, the one that showed that Santorum getting all the extra votes, it was actually Romney that surged ahead far above the revised model.
But, under the official momentum-free model, it’s Santorum that surged ahead beyond the model.
Basically, he over compensated Santorum with the momentum-based model, and under compensated him with the momentum-free model.
The end result? Well, half-and-half (meaning using both of Nate’s models) would have given us this:
21.3 Santorum
21.2 Paul
20.5 Romney
And all the abandon-the-losers vote then were split more evenly between Santorum and Romney.
So, I really wish that those people who have forecasting models to NOT hedge their bets here. Either you have a model or you don’t. And if you think momentum should be included, then include it. If that means you don’t know enough then underweight it. If you want to include a “gut” parameter, then include that too if you have to. (But do that BEFORE seeing the results.)
And if you want to have a abandon-the-loser adjustment (is there such a thing? did I just make that up?), then model that as well. That is, Ron Paul is not going to get those votes.
The key point is this: the personal opinion of any single person is useless. Completely useless. How am I supposed to distinguish one person’s guts from the other? How am I supposed to distinguish between someone’s lock-of-the-week ("that’s a pretty big lock") to someone else’s opposite shoe-in-of-the-week ("that’s a pretty big shoe")?
So, keep your opinion consistent, or learn and improve it. But, don’t show two models, and then tell me why you would bet on your shoe-in model, but not your lock-model.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Ricky Gervais infiltrates the one percenters by remaining a 99er
I love this guy. He’s Larry David without the neurosis. Anyway, that’s a great post. You should read the whole thing.
***
He had a good dig on Jerry Seinfeld once: “And finally, the funniest man in the world, Jerry Seinfeld!… I know that because he told me.”
A dig on Jimmy Fallon, as Fallon is delivering a monologue, Gervais comes up to him: “You know, Jimmy, you’ve got to sell that joke… as if you were smart enough to write it.”
Another dig, as he’s drinking a beer at the Globes: “I love a drink as much as the next man… unless that man is Mel Gibson!"… And then Gibson walks on.... and to Mel’s credit, he played along by pretending to stumble like a drunk. He turned a great one-liner by Gervais into a great comedic experience.
I can’t think of anyone who can give zingers like that to the biggest celebrities around, and to their faces, and have everyone laugh, including the targets.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Thank you for 2011
I just want to say thanks to everyone who has contributed to this blog. I am very appreciative of not only your contributions, but also of how you comport yourselves. It’s a pleasure to be here, and read all your comments, knowing that I rarely have to wade through any sludge, even though there’s no user registration. Below you will find the list of every contributor (and the number of posts made in 2011… when in doubt, I always add numbers). Again, I really appreciate how thoughtful you guys have been, and I will strive to continue to make this place a worthwhile destination.
And if anyone thinks they post too much (I know I think I post way too much), stop that crazy talk.
This blog is a shadow of what it would otherwise be without you guys.
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