Posts Tagged basketball
Archer’s Big Bounce Experiment
I am a big fan of University of Minnesota Athletics—even more so now after they sponsored a Science of Basketball project for grade schoolers. My 9-year-old grandson Archer jumped at the chance to put a variety of basketballs to the test with my help. For the results, see the video we submitted to the UMn judges.
Archer’s findings–wood being better than rubber for bounce–stand out in graphics generated with Design-Expert software.
Archer enjoyed doing this science project. I feel sure it helped him understand what it takes to design an experiment, do it properly and analyze the result. My only disappointment is that the high-tech cell-phone app for measuring height, which I used for my experiment on elastic spheres, failed due to too much echo in the gym, most likely.
However, I discovered another intriguing basketball-physics experiment at the Science Buddies STEM website. It determines where a bouncing ball’s energy goes . This requires deployment of an infrared-temperature gun with a laser beam. Awesome! Archer will like that (if he can wrestle the laser gun away from me).
Statisticians break down March Madness brackets (and rule things in general)
Before the first round of NCAA basketball playoffs a number of pundits favored my Minnesota team to upset UCLA—one of the commentators before the broadcast last night went so far as to say they were a “lock”. Now I believe it. (They won.) However, I am doubtful they can beat Florida Sunday—gophers just do not stand a chance against gators. For a more reasoned breakdown on the odds for Sunday and beyond, see this bracket filled out superstar statistician Nate Silver for the New York Times.
People who can crunch data like Silver are in big demand these days according to Wall Street Journal Numbers Guy Carl Bialik in his column on March 2. The jobs site icrunchdata (very descriptive!) posted 28,305 openings for jobs in statistics and the like last month—up from 16,500 openings three years ago (I love data like this!).
It seems that number-herding nerds now rule, but there is a catch according to Dan Thorpe, senior director for analytics at Wal-Mart. He says that “the bulk of the people coming out [with statistics degrees] are technically competent but they’re missing the consultative and the soft skills, everything else they need to be successful.” So, which to do you prefer—good math skills (and lots of money) or an attractive personality (and many friends)? My advice is to aim for some of both.
Economists shave hairs on whether basketball games are fixed: Any bets on who wins?
In my March 26 blog I reported that ‘forensic economist’ Justin Wolfers, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, inferred point-shaving from his statistical analysis of 44,120 NCAA Division I basketball games between 1989 and 2005. This new study by University of Illinois economist Dan Bernhardt disputes Wolfer’s contention that statistics indicate point-shaving on college basketball. Perhaps it’s only natural that superior teams fall short of expectations on their winning margin. According to Professor Bernhardt “the statistical properties that Wolfers identified in his paper seem to be intrinsic to the game of basketball itself, occurring independently of whether there are incentives to point shave, and are not indicative of an epidemic of gambling-related corruption.”
It’s good that this new analysis dissipates the cloud of suspicion about point-shaving raised by the first study.