What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on December 15, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Episode 10: Making the Grade Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People Makers and Takers How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street “Further Exploration Needed in Women”—the Hidden Sexism in Scientific Research - “The inclusion of females in research—and done in such a way that accounts for cyclically changing hormones—is not something that should be left up to the goodwill of the researchers running the studies. [Read More]
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What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on December 8, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: The Smartest Guys in the Clubhouse - “It is striking, but not really surprising, that all this well-credentialed cleverness and machine-tooled efficiency tends to deliver the same solution, which amounts to more for the client and less for everyone else; that is the goal, after all.” Algorithms were supposed to make Virginia judges fairer. What happened was far more complicated. [Read More]
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What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on December 1, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Episode 94: The Goofy Pseudoscience Copaganda of TV Forensics - I knew most of the forensic techniques used in court are bogus science, but I hadn’t considered the impact TV shows could have on leading people, many of whom end up on juries, to believe they are legit. Reactions to Political Correctness Are Not Inherently Partisan - “Politically incorrect communicators may appear more authentic and certain in their views, but our preliminary evidence suggests they are also less effective in persuading, and engaging with, those who may have different beliefs from them. [Read More]
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Some Quick Math on The Quick 2 aka The Slower Loss

 Posted on November 23, 2019  |  4 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

End game spots in basketball are my favourite strategic spots to think about. One thing I think many people get wrong is going for a quick 2 when down by 3 points at the end of game (I’m looking at you announcers who love to say “you don’t need a 3”). I figured I would run through some quick math based on actual results of ~20 years of NBA games to show that teams should be more aggressive going for 3 in these spots. [Read More]
Basketball 

What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on November 17, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:

Reading 

What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on November 3, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours Gaggle Knows Everything About Teens And Kids In School - Why are we are normalizing mass surveillance? “"“One of the things [Gaggle is] teaching is not to share things, which is presumably the opposite of what many mental health professionals would say,” Igo said. If a student is afraid of being interviewed by school administrators, they may shut themselves off from adults. [Read More]
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NBA Matchup Plots

 Posted on October 26, 2019  |  3 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

There are now matchup boxscores on stats.nba.com. It can be a little hard to get a lot out of reading the data table as shown on the site. I saw a tweet from Seth Partnow with some charts showing the data in an easy to interpret fashion and decided to write some quick and dirty python code to generate the same charts. The example below is the Toronto Raptors defensive matchups in their season opener against New Orleans. [Read More]
Basketball 

What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on October 20, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: How A Massive Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions Of Dollars From Unsuspecting Boomers - “If a Facebook ad reviewer were to click the link, they would likely be taken to a “safe page,” often a hastily thrown-together food blog. But the average person would be taken to a different page engineered to make them hand over their credit card number. [Read More]
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What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on October 13, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Beware of Automated Hiring - “Automated hiring can create a closed loop system. Advertisements created by algorithms encourage certain people to send in their résumés. After the résumés have undergone automated culling, a lucky few are hired and then subjected to automated evaluation, the results of which are looped back to establish criteria for future job advertisements and selections. [Read More]
Reading 

What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on October 6, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:

Reading 

Why Corner Threes Will Still be Valuable if the NBA Widens the Court

 Posted on September 20, 2019  |  3 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

A common suggestion to reduce the value of the three pointer is to widen the court and make the three point line the same distance all around the court. The thinking is that corner threes are more valuable because they are taken from nearly two feet closer to the net so if we make the three point line the same distance all around the court that will eliminate the discrepancy between the value of corner threes and above the break threes. [Read More]
Basketball 

What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on September 15, 2019  |  2 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: 4 Reasons Why News Media Will Thrive In The Wake Of Privacy Regulation Ready to destroy a longstanding argument against raising the minimum wage? - “Now imagine you have job offers from two companies. One is much closer to your home than the other, and you value a short commute. The first company therefore can pay you a lower salary because of that differential. [Read More]
Reading 

What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on September 8, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: The Sports Gene Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer “Teddies for Timor” and the Perils of Good Intentions - “Despite numerous campaigns asking for cash instead, people persist in giving goods. These block the arrival of vital supplies, often end up in landfills, and cost millions of dollars to store and dispose of—ironically negatively impacting life-saving efforts. [Read More]
Reading 

What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on September 1, 2019  |  1 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: The spy in your wallet: Credit cards have a privacy problem The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet - “Aside from assuming a strong link between mental illness and violence, this kind of surveillance creates mistrust in the system, forcing people with mental health issues to consider whether getting help could put them on a federal watch list. [Read More]
Reading 

What I Read or Listened to This Week

 Posted on August 25, 2019  |  2 minutes  |  Darryl Blackport

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Altruism Still Fuels the Web. Businesses Love to Exploit It We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense. The Adults In The Room - “The numbers apparently do not matter to my ostensibly numbers-obsessed bosses, for reasons I can’t quite understand. When I have told them that the data show that non-sports content brings more traffic and more revenue opportunities, I have been ignored. [Read More]
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