I haven’t taken a look or done much of anything with the NFL play-level data in a while. Most of what I did involved getting it into MySQL. Since then, I’ve been terribly busy with work and personal life, and so analytics have gone to the wayside. But over the past week or so, I’ve […]
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Back in the analytic groove Leave a comment
Why Not Learn to Code? Leave a comment
I’m reading Jeff Atwood’s Please Don’t Learn to Code. He’s a software developer by trade, and I’m not. So take my comments with a grain of salt. Atwood writes, of NYC Mayor Bloomberg tweeting that he is learning to code using Codecademy: A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but […]
Hammer (yes, that Hammer) on Analytics Leave a comment
This morning, from the INFORMS Twitter feed, there was a link to a video from Hammer (formerly MC Hammer) about the importance of analytics in marketing rap music. It’s only a minute, and has clips from “U Can’t Touch This”, so you might as well watch it: As someone who loves rap, and loves working with […]
More Working with MySQL Leave a comment
In my previous post, I talked about setting up the SQL database based on Dennis Erny’s NFL play-by-play dataset. I spent some time generating a script that did the appropriate ALTER TABLE statements to ensure that the character encodings and collations are utf-8, not latin1_swedish_ci as in the last post. I started doing it manually […]
A Toe Dipped into Sports Analytics 1 comment
One of the things I’m trying to do is to write about my experiences learning about sports analytics. I am learning more about it because it’s at the intersection of sports, data analysis, and statistical methods, three things I’m interested in. Recently, I read Scorecasting by Moskowitz and Wertheim, a rather interesting book about the “conventional […]
On odds ratios Leave a comment
Even though I’ve had a fair amount of training in technical areas of statistics and probability, my work (primarily in the realm of “public policy”) does not generally lend itself to having to understand the intricacies of, say, GMM estimators. (Though sometimes I develop Monte Carlo simulations for sensitivity analysis.) The vast majority of what […]
just a test of Jetpack Leave a comment
I decided I would try out Jetpack and its great feature set. One of the reasons for installing the plugin is being able to insert code in documents. Even though this works now: rendering does not seem to consistently work. And I am not sure why it’s not working consistently, even when I follow the documentation […]
A Logorrheic First Post Leave a comment
It has been a long time since I have written in a blog. Other than Facebook and Twitter, most of my writing now is for work. To that extent, the vast majority of my writing focuses around policy briefs and proposals. This is not a bad thing, but I believe that I can write about things […]