Results tagged “statistics”
At first I assumed this article about England's chances in the World Cup was going to be the regular apply statistical analysis to sport story. (Not that that isn't a good story, it's still amazing that so much money is spent without anyone paying attention to the numbers.) While it does hit on that, it also gets into the effect of Europe's geography on team styles, which I found incredibly interesting.
From 1970 to 2000, a few continental European countries - Italy, Germany, France and Holland - worked out the best collective style of football. Each of these countries has its own preferences, but all share certain elements: fast, physical, collectivist, one-touch football. Their advantage was sitting in the most interconnected region in history. Football thinkers such as Arsene Wenger and Arrigo Sacchi could travel across porous borders, gathering and spreading knowledge.
From 1970 to 2000, the national teams of these countries piled up trophies. In the same period, the countries on Europe's margins - the Brits, Iberians, former Soviet republics and Balkans - won none. They were isolated, excluded from the best knowledge networks and, therefore, stuck with their dysfunctional indigenous football styles. The Brits played kick-and-rush. The Greeks dribbled too much. However, from about 2000, the marginal countries came in from the cold. They became more integrated with core Europe, through travel, trade and football's growing Champions League. Many countries - such as England and Greece - hired continental European football managers. Quickly, they absorbed continental know-how. Of all the formerly marginal countries, none did better out of this trend than Spain.
Tags: culture, history, soccer, sports, statistics, worldcup
There is a certain beauty to the contradictory nature of sports analysis. Everyone is sure they're right all the time. And thank goodness they are, if not what would they put on the radio during the day?
Anyhow, there's a nice analysis of the analysis from last night's game over at rc3.org. In case you missed it (like me), Bill Belichick decided to go for it on a fourth-and-two from the Patriots 28-yard-line with just over two minutes left in the game. They failed and the Colts scored and won the game 35 to 34. Belichick has been roundly criticized for the decision, which was clearly a gamble. However, as Advanced NFL Stats points out, the numbers work in favor of the decision:
Statistically, the better decision would be to go for it, and by a good amount. However, these numbers are baselines for the league as a whole. You'd have to expect the Colts had a better than a 30% chance of scoring from their 34, and an accordingly higher chance to score from the Pats' 28. But any adjustment in their likelihood of scoring from either field position increases the advantage of going for it. You can play with the numbers any way you like, but it's pretty hard to come up with a realistic combination of numbers that make punting the better option. At best, you could make it a wash.
Tags: football, sports, statistics
How do you tell if Iran's election results are fraudulent? Well, if you're a statistician you look at the last two digits of the vote counts from the precincts that report and look for anomalies.
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.
To put it in perspective, in last year's US presidential election "returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections." So there's that.
Tags: iran, politics, statistics
This was a Holy Crap Fact yesterday, but check out these stats from The New York Times: "The U.S. now has more choreographers (16,340) than metal-casters (14,880), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More people make their livings shuffling and dealing cards in casinos (82,960) than running lathes (65,840), and there are almost three times as many security guards (1,004,130) as machinists (385,690)."
Tags: economics, statistics
If everyone else has seen this, sorry, but The Gapminder World is an amazing visualization of international statistics. The program lets you program the x and y axes (as well as color and size) to correlate to different statistics (like per capita income, birth rate, life expectancy or percentage of women in the work force). What you get is an amazing look at how the world has changed and a really cool way to surface historical insights. Apparently Google bought it last year and you can watch Hans Rosling, the director, talk about it at TED.
Tags: statistics, visualization
This script by Damon Cortesi makes me wish I used Twitter more. Here are my charts.
Tags: charts, statistics, twitter
According to a recent Harris Poll, "more people [in America] believe in the Devil [62%], Hell [62%] and angels [74%] than believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution [42%]." In fact, evolution only barely beats out ghosts [41%], creationism [39%] and UFOs [35%]. That's amazing.
Tags: america, statistics
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