Just a Gwai Lo: Shared

Instapaper Liked: 25 Lessons Publishers Can Teach Tech Startups | Boxcar Marketing

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:42:04 -0800

Instapaper Liked: Willard Mitt Romney by Michael Tomasky | The New York Review of Books

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:39:13 -0800

Instapaper Liked: Coding Horror: Listen to Your Community, But Don't Let Them Tell You What to Do

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:41:43 -0800

Instapaper Liked: Coding Horror: Farewell Stack Exchange

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:41:41 -0800

Instapaper Liked: From the notebook: musings about so-called ‘acqhire’ talent acquisitions | :Ben Metcalfe Blog

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:41:37 -0800

Instapaper Liked: Designers on Book Design of the Future | Publishing Perspectives

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:41:36 -0800

Instapaper Liked: Inside Instagram: How Slowing Its Roll Put the Little Startup in the Fast Lane

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:42:15 -0800

Instapaper Liked: Far From a Storybook Ending, a So-So Pitcher Turns the Page - NYTimes.com

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:30:23 -0800

Instapaper Liked: Shareable: Coworking for Introverts?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:47:16 -0800

Vimeo Likes: Twittelator Neue. Tweet Different.

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:22:16 -0800

Twittelator Neue. Enjoy a faster, fresher experience on Twitter.

Cast: Ollie Wagner

Tags: Twittelator, Twitter, iOS, 5, iPhone, iPod, Touch, UI and App

RSS Hero Shared Items: What is Sabermetrics? And Which Teams Use It?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:00:40 -0800

It is a simple question.

What is sabermetrics?

Not the history of it, but what is it, right now? What is, in our nerdiest of lingoes, its derivative? Where is it pointing? What does it do?

Last Tuesday I created no little stir when I listed the 2012 saber teams, delineating them according to their perceived embrace of modern sabermetrics.

Today, I recognize I needed to take a step back and first define sabermetrics, because it became obvious quickly I did not have the same definition at heart as some of the readers and protesters who gathered outside my apartment.

I believe, and this is my belief — as researcher and a linguist — that sabermetrics is not statistics. The term itself has come to — or needs to — describe more than just on-base percentage, weighted runs created plus, fielding independent pitching, and wins above replacement.

Sabermetrics is the advanced study of baseball, not the burying of one’s head in numbers.

Personally, I see sabermetrics as breaking down into three separate, equally important distinctions, and one massively important, yet fully amorphous unknown element. Again, fastening on our mathematics overalls, we would describe this as:

f(Sabermetrics) = statistics + scouting + business + ε

In words: Sabermetrics the study of baseball statistics, baseball scouting, baseball business, and anything yet-known or missed by myself (which is the “ε” epsilon).

More specifically:

Scouting is the more subjective study of baseball. All study is somewhat subjective — if it was not, then economists and statisticians would always agree, yet they most certainly do not.

Scouting analyzes the physical attributes and the medical attributes of a player — is he a big-bodied slugger (the type that fades early in the MLB)? does his pitching motion preclude potential elbow injuries or is he a problem waiting to happen? should he have an more open stance? is he tipping pitches? is he stepping early to first base? These are the questions scouting and only scouting can answer.

For amateur players, international free agents, and even guys working through the minors, scouting must be a major component — if not the major component of any analysis concerning them. Not only are these players likely years away from the MLB — and thereby likely to change physically and run the risk of injury — but they are also coming from leagues and schools where the available statistics and league environments produce numbers that are relatively unreliable. There is no UZR, no FSR, no Pitch F/x, no Home Run Tracker.

And at the major league level, scouting can find a problem faster than statistics can. The stats are subject to random fluctuation, but if a pitcher starts falling off the mound in a different way, a scout (or pitching coach in this case) can identify and correct the problem before the statistics — or the team’s record — can even notice.

Scouting can also provide valuable insight into a player’s mental or non-physical attributes. The statistical profile of John Outfielder may say he’s a free-agent catch:

Career: 970 PAs, 31 HRs, 18 SB, 102 wRC+, 26 years old.

But the mental scouting says: Elijah Dukes.

Dukes may be the hyperbole of a player profile in mental shambles, but the need for mental analysis remains. Teams can head off major problems well in advance if they can early on recognize destructive or dangerous patterns in a player’s lifestyle.

Statistics, in my humblest of opinions, breaks down generally — very generally — into three areas league-wide, player-specific, and game strategy avenues of research. These three distinctions, of course, overlap so much as to nearly claim they are all one. And that is fine.

The important note here is that statistics was long-neglected. Branch Rickey and F.C. Lane were about the only two true sabermetricians from baseball’s beginning to modernity because they understood that the contemporary branch of statistics was sorely under-utilized and sorely out of date.

So, in the early 2000s, with the help of the Internet and Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, the world of baseball statistics boomed into a full-fledged fan obsession. Of course, Moneyball, both the book and the movie, helped create a dangerous pendulum swing — the arena of baseball study shifted so heavily into the realm of statistics that scouting began to garner a negative connotation — which is not good.

Lastly, we have the business aspects baseball study. Sadly, because our information is limited, we cannot dive as fully into this field. We may have attendance numbers, ticket prices, contract payouts, and general economic data, but we still lack a vast amount of information and must reverse-engineer answers to our most pressing questions — say, how much does Albert Pujols or Ichiro Suzuki actually bring in annually outside of their on-field production? We do not know for certain, but we can guess.

For clarity’s sake, I see the business branch breaking down into at least four subsets: contracts (which we have almost full information on and have made great strides in understanding), media deals (of which we know very little — only the briefest of press releases give us information on this matter, to my knowledge), stadiums (which include a whole bucket of issues ranging from national to local), and economics (or how the game relates to, is affected by, and affects the national and international economy).

Are these distinctions I am making somewhat arbitrary and not entirely universal? Yes. Hell yes. I have done my best to analyze the general wings of baseball, but I fully recognize this is just one man’s logic. As more voices offer feedback and more fields are uncovered, the breakdown should grow and shift and be thrown out entirely and resurrected later. At current, though, this breakdown makes sense to me.

To neglect any one of these three known branches (as well as the pursuit of the unknown) is to be an incomplete and sub-optimal organizations. It is not to be a losing team, mind you. It is my understanding the Philadelphia Phillies are very much a scouting-heavy and statistics-light organization, yet they have been wildly successful. Likewise, the Seattle Mariners and Cleveland Indians are widely considered fully sabermetric teams, but they have failed to reach a level of sustained success like the Phillies.

In the saber team lists, I used the terms Highly Analytical Organizations, In Between Organizations, and Old School. I confessed in the comments how I longed for better terminology — because I imagine all MLB teams are highly analytical, even if they employ zero statisticians.

So, let us use this three-branch break down to redefine our list of 2012 sabermetric teams. If we look at the teams once again, and analyze where their analytical leverage seems to come from, whether it is coming from just business and scouting or all three branches, we get this:

Alphabetical by mascot. And remember, this is as of 2012.

3 Branch Organizations

Oakland Athletics
Houston Astros
Toronto Blue Jays
Chicago Cubs
Arizona Diamondbacks
Cleveland Indians
Seattle Mariners
San Diego Padres
Pittsburgh Pirates
Texas Rangers*
Tampa Bay Rays
Boston Red Sox
New York Yankees

2-to-3 Branch Organizations

Milwaukee Brewers
St. Louis Cardinals*
New York Mets**
Philadelphia Phillies
Chicago White Sox

2 Branch Organizations

Los Angeles Angels
Atlanta Braves*
San Francisco Giants
Miami Marlins
Washington Nationals
Baltimore Orioles
Cincinnati Reds
Colorado Rockies
Kansas City Royals
Detroit Tigers
Minnesota Twins

1 Branch Organizations

Los Angeles Dodgers**

*I’m especially unsure about these teams.

**Given the Dodgers’ and Mets’ financial problems,
they are the only two teams who appear to be without
analytical leverage from the business branch.
This may have changed recently.

I would like to reiterate (from the last piece) that these are merely my perceptions (coupled with community suggestions). If you work or worked for one of these teams and I have gotten the team’s placement wrong, please feel free to alert me to the oversight. Naturally, I weigh insider’s perspectives more heavily.

Bradley Woodrum

RSS Hero Shared Items: Fail Worse

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:23:19 -0800

Ranked 104^th in the list of the most highlighted passages on Amazon’s Kindle website is a short clipping from The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris: ‘“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.’

The first half, of course, is a quotation from Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1983), and it must have struck a chord with Ferris’ readers. But for some reason, Ferris fails to take the opportunity to allude to Beckett anywhere else in his million-selling guide on “How to Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.”

What a missed opportunity! There’s so much more Beckett prose that’s totally appropriate to co-opt in a self-help book. How about, “Is not a uniform suffering preferable to one which, by its ups and downs, is liable at certain moments to encourage that view that perhaps after all it is not eternal?” That’s a useful one! Or even: “For me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.”

Hard as it might be to accept, none of Beckett’s work is ever going to reach even one tenth as many people as this little crumb of Worstward Ho taken out of context. Not Waiting for Godot, not Endgame, not the Trilogy, not How It Is. “Fail again. Fail better” is on T-shirts, mousepads, mugs, and posters, including one by the same company who did “Keep Calm and Carry On.” It’s been quoted (inaccurately) by Mary Louise Parker’s character on Weeds. In addition to The 4-Hour Workweek, it does inspirational duty in books like What’s Stopping You: Why Smart People Don’t Always Reach Their Potential and How You Can, Innovation Leaders: How Senior Executives Stimulate, Steer and Sustain Innovation, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Great Customer Service, as well as providing the title for Fail Better!: The World’s Worst Marketers and What We Can Learn from Them and Epic Fail Better: How to Get Rich Off Internet Memes.

(OK, not that last one. But there really is a Fail Better Farm in Maine which sells, amongst other things, organic carrots.)

“Fail better” is now experimental literature’s equivalent of that famous Che Guevara photo, flayed completely of meaning and turned into a successful brand with no particular owner. Worstward Ho may be a difficult work that resists any stable interpretation, but we can at least be pretty sure that Beckett’s message was a bit darker than ‘Just do your best and everything is sure work out all right in the end.’ And yet it’s only because Beckett’s name is attached to the quotation, and because a lot of people think of him as a sage without quite knowing what he stood for, that it has spread so widely. It wouldn’t have survived as an authorless proverb.

How disturbing you find this probably depends on the degree of your Beckett worship. Maybe he would have hated it if he were still alive. Or maybe he would have thought it was funny. I certainly do. Watching a liturgy from such a gloomy and merciless author getting repurposed to cheer up mid-level executives is like watching a neighbour clear out their gutters with a stick they found in the garden, not realizing the stick is in fact a human shinbone. When Beckett talks about failure, he’s often talking about how language can’t withstand the weight of the meaning you want to put into it, and in that sense his unintended ubiquity is ideal: what better argument for the feebleness of determinate meaning than the tawdry afterlife of “fail better”?

If you are ambivalent about Beckett’s philosophical positions, this phenomenon might even be comforting. A few months ago, I decided to follow the orders of Donald Barthelme’s celebrated undergraduate literature syllabus and work my way through “Beckett entire.” I’ve enjoyed it, but what I don’t find very engaging or persuasive, especially in such huge doses, is Beckett’s insistence that everything must end in darkness and deafness and decay. So I like to play a sort of existential game of paper, rock, scissors. Perhaps optimism can’t hold out against pessimism; but even pessimism can’t hold out against the banal, silly, tiresome, but essentially well-meaning advance of the everyday platitude. There’s no demonstration of life’s futility or language’s emptiness that is so profound it can’t one day be turned into a reassuring fridge magnet, and that thankfully helps to put pessimism back in its place.

That said, I would give my full support to a law that forced anyone who’s ever misused “Fail better” to read the whole of Worstward Ho a few times, plus Company and The Lost Ones for good measure. After that, we can move on to the important work of selecting a new Beckett quotation to neuter. A few paragraphs after “fail better”, we find the following:

“No choice but stand. Somehow up and stand. Somehow stand. That or groan.”

That sounds like a perfect fit for Timothy Ferris’ second book, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. Perhaps it could be the epigraph to the next edition.

Ned Beauman

Twitter Favorites: GoDuke: #DUKE WINS! #UNC LOSES! #classic http://t.co/o7gnHhUu

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:01:34 -0800

GoDuke: #DUKE WINS! #UNC LOSES! #classic http://t.co/o7gnHhUu

Twitter Favorites: gruber: You know what? Fuck Duke.

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:42:48 -0800

gruber: You know what? Fuck Duke.

Vimeo Likes: Deluge

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:47:47 -0800

300.000 Norwegians move house every year. If the pattern made by this process could be compressed into one short animation, what would would it look like? What could you learn about your society from such an animation, if anything?

Deluge is a C++ application designed to answer these questions. The underlying data was generated by cross referencing Norwegian tax records from 2006 and 2007 to find changes in postal codes.

More here:
vis.bengler.no/deluge

Cast: even westvang

Tags: visualization, data, migration, migratory, data visualization, norway, norwegian, moving, relocating and nex5n