After their first 30 games, the Chicago Cubs were 24-6 with a winning percentage 0f 0.800.  How have they fared since?  Well, the Cubs are now through 51 games and are at 36-15 with a winning percentage of 0.706.  They’ve cooled off a bit since their blazing start (which isn’t surprising), but they still hold…

In this clip with Gwen Ifill, Obama claimed that the federal government has fewer employees now than under Reagan.  That seems hard to believe given the narrative that Reagan was all about small government and Obama is all about big government and ruining the economy (Thanks Obama).  Turns out it’s actually true though.  You can…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: No one wants to read about Patriots fumble rates, and I don’t want to write about Patriots fumble rates. But I can’t not write about this. The football person behind the initial commotion regarding low fumble rates was interviewed recently for a podcast. In response to a question about the 2015 season, in which…

Over at Gawker, they are running a series on Adjunct professor’s, whom they refer to as “academia’s hidden underclass”.  I figured I would comment because I have a blog and you can’t stop me.  Let’s stop talking about the academic job market as if it’s one homogenous entity.  Applying for academic jobs with a philosophy…

So since January of this year I’ve been taking improv classes at Second City Training Center and last Thursday (May 12) I participated in my first “show”.  It’s called Jam Sandwich, which consists of faculty and students doing improvised scenes based on several monologues.  During the show I was wearing my FitBit and here is…

Cheers.

This is the blog post that I would have written after the Cubs 30th game when they were 24-6 if I wasn’t in bed 20 hours a day for the last week with “the sickness”.  Anyway, I scraped baseball reference to get the game results of all teams going back as far as they go.  First I…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: As part of their final assignment in my statistics and sports class, students were tasked with looking at the home advantage in the English Premier League (EPL). In some recent and related work, James Curley and Oliver Roeder found that, by 2014, an EPL home advantage had reached an all time low. Interestingly, that low reached new depths…

Originally posted on StatsbyLopez: Another NFL draft has come and gone, and with it has come the predictable displays of unyielding optimism, stale and arguably race-based generalizations of player skill, and, as a relative newcomer in 2016, lazy misuse of the term analytics. In following along this spring, it became clear that what is mainstream knowledge among researchers is far from it in…

Respondent Driven Sampling is awesome.