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Just wanted to let everyone know that starting January 4th I will be writing a weekly baseball column (sometimes twice weekly if I am feeling especially opinionated) at Beyond the Box Score. Beyond the Box Score is a fantastic site, examining baseball from an analytical perspective. The authors definitely embrace sabermetrics, but they don’t beat [...]
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(This article originally appeared at Beyond the Box Score, where I am now a regular contributor) 2010 marks the end of the “ought” decade for Major League Baseball. I thought I would take the opportunity to analyze the last 10 years by visualizing team data. I used Tableau Public to create the visualization and pulled team [...]
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I am sure many people will be writing and speaking about Bob Feller this morning, as the baseball hall of famer passed away last night at the age of 92. (Here is some great old black and white footage of Feller). Feller was blessed with arguably the greatest fastball in major league history, breaking into [...]
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Lynn Stout, a law professor at UCLA, says yes: Why does a large slice of the hedge fund industry seem to have succumbed to illegal behavior? I would argue that it’s not so much about misaligned incentives, as we might guess from standard economic theory, but rather because, from a behavioral perspective, hedge funds are [...]
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A while back I stumbled on the video below about Thaumoctopus mimicus, or the Mimic Octopus. Discovered in 1998, the Mimic Octopus is unique in that it doesn’t simply manipulate its physical features to blend in to its surroundings in order to escape predators. Instead, the Mimic Octopus manipulates it’s physical appearance in order to [...]
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John Kotter over at HBR argues that we should use less data and evidence in our presentations and Q&A: [M]ost people respond to a critical question by arguing against the reasoning of whoever asked the question. They offer all of the evidence they can think of, hoping to make their case overwhelming. They shoot at [...]
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Here are the posts that garnered the most views during November. Remember, you can follow Signal/Noise by RSS feed, email, or by liking the the Facebook page. As always, thanks for reading! “Statistics is the New Grammar” Counter-signaling in the Luxury Brand Market: Snookie edition Book Review: The Bottom Billion Open-ended vs. Scale Questions: A note on survey methodology [...]
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Alan Schwarz’s The Numbers Game is an indispensable look at how the numbers that have come to define the game of baseball came to be. The book is less about the hallowed numbers that even casual fans can identify; Aaron’s 755 home runs, DiMaggio’s 56 game hit-streak, Nolan Ryan’s 5714 strikeouts, Cy Young’s 511 wins, Pete Rose’s [...]
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Jonathan Bernstein draws on Bill James to offer advice to both the Republican and Democratic parties following last week’s election: I can start not with wisdom from political science, but from the great baseball analyst Bill James, who had useful observations about both winners and losers that I think are worth learning from in the political [...]
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Fiction
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Non-fiction
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value
The Numbers Game
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception
The Rational Optimist
The Quiet American
How Doctors Think
The Wisdom of Whores
Switch
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
