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Textbook: Writing for Statistics and Data Science

If you are looking for my textbook Writing for Statistics and Data Science here it is for free in the Open Educational Resource Commons. Wri...

Tuesday, 30 June 2020

Cheating vs Innovation in Sports


Why do some changes in sports end up being considered cheating, and others innovation? Let's look at some historical examples for patterns.
 
In baseball, "the shift" is a strategy in which defensive players deviate, or ‘shift’ from the default locations for their positions to locations closer to where they expect the ball to land. This practice has had a measurable statistical effect on the game; hits other than home runs have become rarer, and the hits that do happen are more often singles compared to seasons before 2010. The shift is simply data-driven strategy and yet the practice is still controversial.

It seems like such an arbitrary thing to call out as unfair

Friday, 26 June 2020

When to use "the" or "a" in scientific writing





A.K.A. : "The", the definitive definite article article.


"The", while making up about 7% of all written and spoken English words, is the hardest word to get right. The rules surrounding "the" are so difficult to define that comprehensive dictionaries can spend 5 of more pages trying...


Saturday, 13 June 2020

R Packette - Fraction Matrix Operations


Open up any linear algebra textbook and have a look at the matrix entries. Are there all integers? Are they all written as decimals? There's probably at least some that are fractions. Matrices in computer programs are almost always in decimal form. The exception is symbolic mathematics programs like Maple and Mathematica. That's because computers store non-whole numbers as floating-point values instead.

Floating-points are fine most of the time, but they're often not exact. What happens if we work the fractions directly?