What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on October 21, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
For the good of all humankind, make your city more walkable When courtroom science goes wrong — and how stats can fix it - A really well done comic.
Statscan may be dull, but it’s a vital institution - “For decades, Statistics Canada has been taken for granted. As the country and the world became bigger and more complex, the agency was underfunded and could not keep up.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on October 14, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Why Any Backdoor Would Be a Threat to Online Security - “We’re not being asked to choose between security and privacy. We’re being asked to choose between less security and more security.”
Risky Business Feature: Named source in “The Big Hack” has doubts about the story - I find it interesting how many security people have doubts about this story.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on October 7, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies What Happened to the Houston Astros’ Hacker? Fake Toughness Versus the Real Thing Why Employers Should Stop Giving Away Snacks - “This policy is also unfair. If you have two employees who each earn the same salary, the one that consumes more free food will be effectively getting paid more.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on September 30, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Why I’m done with Chrome - “Where Facebook will routinely change privacy settings and apologize later, Google has upheld clear privacy policies that it doesn’t routinely change. Sure, when it collects, it collects gobs of data, but in the cases where Google explicitly makes user security and privacy promises — it tends to keep them.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on September 23, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
The Real Problem With Baseball - “It’s a huge error that companies make all the time — they mistake nostalgia for a business model.” As a casual baseball fan, I can relate to a lot of stuff in here. I find it hard to find a baseball game on TV where the commentators don’t complain about the current state of the game and only mention outdated stats in their analysis.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on September 16, 2018
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Lessons hidden in sports betting markets - A good series of posts from recently hired NFL Director of Data and Analytics Michael Lopez.
Ego is the Enemy - Although I found some of the stories were cherry-picked or confirmation bias, there are still some good lessons here on how ego can hurt your success.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on September 9, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity - An overview of research into the impact of increasing political polarization. It mostly focuses on the role of sorting, the increasing alignment between party and ideology. “The increasingly clear partisan cues have been reinforced by an increasingly diverse set of media sources, many of which are overtly partisan and/or misleading.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on September 2, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking - Good read on thinking about baseball strategy while also remembering the players are human. For example, when measuring the impact of a manager, just being able to keep your team motivated and focused each day during the regular season grind is probably more valuable than all the bullpen usage decisions you make all season.
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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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