February 2013
1 post
Talk on Ranking NFL Teams
I gave a talk last month at the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup on ranking systems, specifically applied to the NFL. You can find slides, code, and an IPython notebook which contains most of the information. I encourage you to look at the slides, which I spent a lot of time on. They contain two embedded interactive visualizations. I did get my Super Bowl prediction wrong, though.
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January 2013
4 posts
NFL Fans on Facebook →
I made a promise to myself when I interned at Facebook that I would write at least one blog post on the NFL. Today I got to publish it! Technically this was all quite trivial, mostly just aggregating users by teams and geography, then producing the maps using D3 (I had to rasterize them to post them on Facebook).
The NFL friendships thing involved a join on the social graph with the Like graph....
Real scientists make their own data
Around budding social- and data scientists, a question you often hear is “where can I get data?” It happens so often that people like Hilary Mason, who I’m sure gets this question all the time, have posted pages with resources. Getting new data can be just what you need to practice a technique you are learning or complete a project that you can publish or add to your portfolio.
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Creds Blog: The Simon-Ehrlich Wager and Another... →
Creds is a side-project I’ve been working on for awhile now. I encourage you to 1) check it out and 2) read this post to see my inspiration.
credsblog:
In 1980, an economist named Julian Simon and a biologist named Paul Ehrlich had a disagreement about the future scarcity of natural resources on Earth. Being gentlemen, they decided to stake some token money-as well as their reputations-on...
The Statistics Software Signal
Last night on Twitter, I went on a bit of a rant about statistics packages (namely Stata and SPSS). My point was not that these software packages are bad per se, but that I have found them to be correlated with bad quality science. Here is my theory why.
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When you don’t have to code your own estimators, you probably won’t understand what you’re doing. I’m not...
December 2012
1 post
1 tag
Trouble in the Sandia Mountains
Last night I made a series of decisions that seriously jeopardized my life.
The Sandia mountains rise up to the East of Albuquerque and provide views of a beautiful Southwest sunset. You can take a cable car up to a lodge at the crest of the mountains. When we arrived at the departure point, I decided I would go for a quick trail run when we got to the top. Having been trapped in the car all...
November 2012
1 post
Optimal Descriptive NFL Rankings
Most NFL fans, like myself, obsess over who’s going to win games or which players to start in our fantasy football leagues. One of the fundamental tools we use to look at this are rankings. Rankings are the simplest possible model that can represent a total order, which you can think of as a function that allows you to compare all possible pairs in your set.
Describing the NFL season
In...
