Tornado Tracks
One year ago today, a tornado hit Springfield, MA and, luckily, no one in Springfield was killed. It missed my house by about a quarter mile. Some of my friends weren’t so fortunate and their houses were damaged to varying degrees. My sister was leaving work right before it hit, and she had to run to her car to avoid being out in the open as it passed. The tornado smashed most of the windows in her parked car while she was in it. Pretty traumatic stuff.
In honor of the one year anniversary of the Springfield tornado, I present a fantastic visualization of tornados: Tornado Tracks: 56 years of tornado tracks, by F-scale.
Cheers.
Presidential Candidate Auto-Completes – 5/30/2012
I’ve been following search engine auto-completes for the presidential candidates for a few months now. Here are Romney and Obama’s results from 4/16/2012, and here are the republican primary candidates from 12/29/2011. Below you will find the auto-completes for the two presidential candidates from 5/30/2012.
YAHOO!
BING
Here’s something I started to write a few months ago, but never got around to finish it off.
Neil Charles over at Wallpapering Fog has just written an excellent post about the growing importance of R and Tableau to the modern day analyst. Although not as old in the tooth as Neil (sorry Neil), even in the last 5 years, there has been a definite movement towards a much wider skill set for everyday analysis, at least within marketing.
The days of only using the likes of SPSS, SAS and Excel are long gone as the need to make work more repeatable, scalable and downright flexible. Today’s analyst needs to be comfortable getting hold of new datasources that don’t necessarily sit in an excel file or in tabular form, manipulating it, using a statistical technique that they didn’t necessarily learn at university and then visualising the results (maybe on a…
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Paul Konerko
I jsut read this article (Paul Konerko Is An MVP Candidate, And Possibly Psychic) on Deadpsin. Paul Konerko is having a very good year so far. So good that he showed up at number 1 in my rankings. At first, I thought this must be a mistake. How could he be ahead of Josh Hamilton who has approximately 5000 HR already. So naturally I thought I made a mistake in my code or I wasn’t running enough simulations. So I ran more simulations and checked the code and……Paul Konerko was number 1. His numbers are absolutely fantastic so far: 31R, 11HR, 33RBI. He’s also hitting .395 with a foolish on base percentage of .471 and slugging percentage of .671.
The point is Paul Konerko at number 1 is not a mistake.
Cheers.
Stat Acumen: Erik Erhardt
When I did my Master’s degree at WPI, Erik was a second year student who went on to do a Ph.D. at, I believe, the University of New Mexico. He helped me tremendously in my first year in graduate school and always seemed to have good advice (as well as “fake” good advice usually telling us to “always sum the residuals”). I haven’t seen Erik in years, but I follow his blog. His latest post links to his “Teaching Dossier“, which catalogs his teaching experience. (Apparently he was awarded “2011-12 UNM Math & Stat Outstanding Undergraduate Instructor.” Congratulations!) While that probably isn’t of interest to most people, the first 17 pages or so is his “Reflective Statement on Teaching Philosophy, Practices, and Goals”, which I found to be very interesting.
Cheers.
MLB rankings – 5/28/2012
StatsInTheWild MLB rankings as of May 28, 2012 at 1:30pm. SOS=strength of schedule
Some comments: ESPN ranking the Dodgers number 1 is an absolute joke. Yeah, they have the best record in baseball, but they also have the weakest schedule in baseball. 38 of their 47 games so far, almost 81%, have been against teams with a losing record. That is astonishing. Ranking the Dodgers number 1 is just one more reason why I don’t trust the “experts” at ESPN.
Also, for the record, Texas has a run differential of +97. The next best is St. Louis at +63 That’s quite a gap between number 1 and 2. I just don’t know how a reasonable person can argue that Texas, right now, isn’t the best team in baseball.
| Team | Rank | Change | Record | ESPN | TeamRankings.com | SOS |
| Texas | 1 | – | 30-18 | 3 | 1 | 13 |
| Baltimore | 2 | – | 29-19 | 2 | 2 | 5 |
| Tampa Bay | 3 | ↑1 | 29-19 | 5 | 3 | 4 |
| LA Dodgers | 4 | ↑1 | 32-15 | 1 | 4 | 30 |
| NY Yankees | 5 | ↑3 | 26-21 | 10 | 6 | 3 |
| Washington | 6 | ↑4 | 29-18 | 7 | 5 | 18 |
| Toronto | 7 | ↓4 | 24-24 | 8 | 8 | 1 |
| Chicago WSox | 8 | ↑4 | 26-22 | 17 | 7 | 14 |
| Boston | 9 | ↓3 | 23-24 | 16 | 9 | 2 |
| St. Louis | 10 | ↓1 | 26-22 | 6 | 16 | 28 |
| Atlanta | 11 | ↓4 | 26-23 | 4 | 12 | 17 |
| LA Angels | 12 | ↑3 | 24-25 | 20 | 17 | 8 |
| Cincinnati | 13 | ↑3 | 27-20 | 13 | 11 | 29 |
| Miami | 14 | ↓1 | 26-22 | 11 | 15 | 16 |
| Cleveland | 15 | ↓4 | 26-21 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| Detroit | 16 | ↑2 | 23-24 | 18 | 14 | 12 |
| NY Mets | 17 | ↑4 | 27-21 | 15 | 13 | 15 |
| Philadelphia | 18 | ↑1 | 25-24 | 14 | 19 | 19 |
| San Francisco | 19 | ↑3 | 25-23 | 12 | 21 | 27 |
| Seattle | 20 | ↓6 | 21-29 | 25 | 24 | 6 |
| Houston | 21 | ↓1 | 22-25 | 23 | 22 | 23 |
| Oakland | 22 | ↓5 | 22-26 | 19 | 18 | 7 |
| Kansas City | 23 | – | 19-27 | 24 | 23 | 10 |
| Arizona | 24 | – | 22-26 | 22 | 25 | 25 |
| Pittsburgh | 25 | – | 23-24 | 21 | 20 | 26 |
| Milwaukee | 26 | – | 19-28 | 26 | 26 | 24 |
| Colorado | 27 | – | 17-29 | 27 | 27 | 21 |
| San Diego | 28 | ↑1 | 17-32 | 30 | 29 | 20 |
| Minnesota | 29 | ↓1 | 15-32 | 29 | 28 | 9 |
| Chicago Cubs | 30 | – | 15-32 | 28 | 30 | 22 |
Past Rankings: 5/23/2012 5/14/2012 5/7/2012 4/30/2012 4/23/2012 4/16/2012 4/13/2012 Cheers.
StatsInTheWild search
WordPress collects search engine terms that lead to their blogs. So if someone searched “Awesome statistics blog”, was served a link to my blog, and then clicked through, wordpress would let me know.
My search terms for today are “statistics about harry potter”, “lola and eric real name”, and “eric de facto spouse”. Wonderful.
Cheers.
Stats in the Wild 
