What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on August 26, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It - A good read reviewing studies on the negative health impacts of bad work environments ranging from long work hours, lack of job control, lack of health insurance and instability and stress from layoffs. It also has a good chapter on how people get “trapped” in a bad work environment and excuses they will use to avoid getting out.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on August 19, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
2018 RITSAC Morning 2 - I haven’t watched all the talks from the RIT Sports Analytics Conference yet, but I enjoyed both the talks by Matt Cane and Seth Partnow in this video.
How Accessible is Psychology Data? - Two researchers contacted the authors of 111 of the most cited papers in psychology and psychiatry to try to get access to the underlying data.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on August 12, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much - Interesting read on the impacts of scarcity focusing mostly on money and time. I found the parts on tunneling and slack the most interesting. A lot of the studies seemed relatively new, so it will be interesting to see if the findings hold up to future research.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on August 5, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Facebook Lenses - A unique perspective to the reaction to the drop on Facebook’s stock price.
CatBoost - the new generation of gradient boosting - Anna Veronika Dorogush How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions - As I was reading this I was wondering how I hadn’t heard this story before and then I saw that the court case started September 10, 2001.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on July 29, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
How to build an npm worm Anatomy of a malicious script: how a website can take over your browser - Interesting breakdown of a malicious script that opens a bunch of popups.
Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News - Good read on the history of using the internet and social media as a tool of influence from al-Qaeda’s use in the early days of the internet to the rise of ISIS to the current active measures used by Russia.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on July 22, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Why We Sleep - I knew sleep was important but this book opened my eyes to just how important it is to get 8 hours of sleep each night. Decades of studies are cited detailing how a lack of sleep hurts your short and long term health as well as memory and decision making abilities.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on July 15, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
How to Save Investors From Themselves Why businesses fail at machine learning Facebook Won’t Make the Bed It Lies In - Same thing applies to YouTube.
The Downsides of America’s Hyper-Competitive Youth-Soccer Industry - I’d imagine there are similar issues with other sports and early specialization. If I was a kid today I don’t think I would enjoy playing sports near as much as I did growing up.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on July 8, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World - A great book on the limits of artificial intelligence/machine learning. Computers are great for simple, boring tasks but as the problem gets more complex issues can pop up.
The Marshmallow Replication - You Are Not So Smart Podcast - The marshmallow test is one of the most famous psychological studies.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on July 1, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
How Performance Evaluations Hurt Gender Equality - I like that this included suggestions to minimize bias based on the existing research.
When the Robot Doesn’t See Dark Skin - Using facial recognition to make real life decisions is a bad idea.
Organizing Data Science Teams (with Jonathan Nolis) - This was probably my favourite episode of the Data Framed podcast to date.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on June 24, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Firefox Is Back. It’s Time to Give It a Try. - I switched to Firefox recently because of its privacy features.
Bias detectives: the researchers striving to make algorithms fair Bad Science - This book should be required reading in the current state of misleading/clickbait headlines for stories designed to bring out an emotional response.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on June 17, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
The Distracted Mind - The main changes I will be making after reading this book are keeping my phone in another room when working and not using a phone/tablet/computer or watching TV within 30-60 minutes of going to sleep at night.
Trustworthy Data Analysis Why the Best Things in Life Are All Backwards - “Effort and reward have a linear relationship when the action is mindless and simple.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on June 10, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion Undo Button - There are a lot of opinions on whether Microsoft buying GitHub will be good or bad for programmers. That speaks to how important GitHub is.
In Praise of Extreme Moderation Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test - “Ultimately, the new study finds limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on June 3, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
The Biology of Desire The Reading Brain (Why Your Brain Needs You to Read Every Day) - Part of the reason I started making these posts was for personal accountability to read more.
An Advocacy Group for Startups Is Funded by Google and Run by Ex-Googlers - It is always important to know where the money is coming from.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on May 27, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
No Pain, No Brain Gain: Why Learning Demands (A Little) Discomfort - Learning needs to be uncomfortable for it to stick.
The Benefits of Admitting When You Don’t Know Built in the Soo: The Kyle Dubas story - Dubas has been painted as an analytics guy but he started out as a scout who was willing to challenge conventional wisdom.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on May 20, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Debiasing the corporation: An interview with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler - Interview with Richard Thaler on how to combat biases to make better decisions. Key items include writing stuff down to keep a record of the thought process that led to a decision and welcoming opposing view points to avoid making mistakes you would have never considered.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on May 13, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Learning Is a Learned Behavior. Here’s How to Get Better at It. - Learning how to learn helps you get better at learning new things. Setting specific targets, stopping to think if you really understand something and reflecting on what you have learned are all things you can do to help improve your ability to learn.
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Boston Crash Map App
Posted on May 7, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
The city of Boston publishes a lot of data on their open data hub . One of the the recently released datasets is their crash records . It contains the date, time and location for all incidents where a public safety response was dispatched. I made an app that puts the locations on a map where you can filter by crash type, year, month, day of the week and time of day.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on May 6, 2018
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
On Coaching #74: Alex Hutchinson - Good podcast on the balance between going by the watch and training by feel in distance running. As someone who may sometimes go too far on the feel end of things, there was a lot of good stuff in here.
Hockey Analytics: A Game-Changing Perspective - This book focuses on the next steps for hockey analytics emphasizing three key areas - transition, clear paths and power plays.
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The Impact Your Offense Has On Your Defense
Posted on May 5, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Basketball is a free flowing game of alternating possessions. As a result, how your offensive possession ends impacts the results on the ensuing defensive possession. If you score, your opponent has to take the ball out of bounds and inbound it, which gives you extra time to get back on defense. That extra time to get back on defense helps your defense compared to if you missed a shot and the other team got the rebound.
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NBA Efficiency by Rebounder Position
Posted on May 1, 2018
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
I recently shared my possession data and wrote a brief post on how to use it to dig deeper into pace. Today I’m going to do some exploratory analysis on that data to breakdown the efficiency on possessions following a missed field goal based on the position of the rebounder. Intuition would suggest that when a primary ball handler gets a defensive rebound it should create more fast break opportunities and lead to a more efficient offense.
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