Not baseball

Some Post-Oscar Thoughts on Forecasting

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FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right

Nate Silver is taking some guff for his foray into Oscar predictions. What is revelatory in this 538 post is how his venture into understanding why he missed two of three contested Oscars tracks his approach to baseball projections.

The model may be wrong, but that’s fixable. Which is why PECOTA gets better every year. What isn’t, as Nate so politicly admits, are the vagaries of unprojectable circumstances. Nate found out that projecting six Oscars with a dubious data set focuses much of the attention on the vagaries and the unprojectable. Um, he got them wrong.

Which is why his protracted explanations in this post are both admirable, he’s trying to figure it out, and a little sad–didn’t we trust him because he knew that already?

Regular readers know that I admire Nate’s work, but that I also think his great insight into projections is one of marketing. Not statistics. Nate figured out how to get everyone to ascribe the failure of his subjects to follow his model to his subjects, rather than to him. That isn’t a bad thing, it is a perfectly fine (perhaps brilliant) way to convey the confidence interval, but it doesn’t do much to help us explain the large swath of the numbers (in my case Baseball, in Nate’s, all of them) that are unpredictable.

Is Nate Silver Funnier Than Steven Colbert?

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I’ve always thought that the virtue, if you want to call it that, of baseball prospectus’s PECOTA was a marketing angle. By defining confidence intervals it inverts the projection process. The projection is assumed right, and it is the player’s peformance that deviates. I met Nate a few years ago at a dinner and I was surprised by how much I liked him. We rode to Brooklyn together on the subway afterward and, while I wasn’t surprised by how much he knew about baseball projection, I was impressed by how open he was to other ideas.

Nate’s new venture is a website tracking and adjusting public opinion polls about this upcoming election we’re having. It’s called fivethirtyeight.com and it’s full of interesting facts, opinions ideas, and though avowedly nonpartisan, they’ve got Obama with a 90 percent chance of winning the election. That sounds good to me.

Nate was just on the Colbert Report and he’s really funny.

But probably not as funny as  Colbert, at least not for the long run.

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

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Tom Gjelten’s Website

Cover of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
Cover of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba
This isn’t a post about Cuban baseball, though that’s an apt subject. As some of you know, one of my gigs is making websites for good books. You can see other book sites we’ve done at Booknoise.

I bring this up now because Tom’s site has been done and for some reason there has been a problem with Google indexing it. The initial issue had to do with the cloaking/forwarding service his registrar put on, and then it’s been slow going getting it into the system. It’s in there now, and I’m hoping to give it a little boost with a plug here and there. Tom is an NPR correspondent, so he has scores of stories and pages devoted to him the WWW already, something we have to overcome.

Plus, you might like the book, even if it’s about rum and politics rather than baseball.

And if you’re looking for some popular history to read, I can’t make a better recommendation, unless it’s John Capouya’s Gorgeous George.

Embedded in Iraq

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t r u t h o u t | Michael Massing

My old poker buddy went to Iraq recently, and writes in his usual clear way about complex issues with nuance and understanding. There isn’t anything particularly new here, but while he considerings the success of the surge and the rather divergent positions the two presidential candidates have taken on the war, Michael explores the merits of each side’s thinking and what the means next year and five years down the road. Well worth reading, and not even inside baseball in it’s metaphorical sense. Instead, fine reporting and clear analysis.

Water Technology Online

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Brought to you by Grand View Media

My wife’s third book is arriving in stores. It’s called Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought it. As you might guess, it’s about drinking water and the recent phenomenon of people buying water in little bottles.

It is perhaps understandable, given the subject, that a trade organization like the International Bottled Water Association might be a little defensive about their trade. What’s amazing is that they’ve attacked Elizabeth’s book, issued a “media advisory” about it, volunteered to appear at media events, described in smushy detail its shortcomings,  and yet they clearly haven’t read the book.

I know this because they get it exactly wrong. Elizabeth’s book is a carefully researched  examination of drinking water (they say it should have been about drinking water), and she assiduously examines the benefits and costs of both bottled water and tap (they say it should have been a launch point for an examination of drinking water and environmental protection, which is in fact exactly what it is). That she makes this journey not only informative but also fun isn’t a surprise to those who’ve read Garbage Land and The Tapir’s Morning Bath.

But clearly the bottled water industry is running scared. They find a book on Amazon about them and assume the worst, butcher the author’s bio (or is an association with National Geographic meant to undermine Elizabeth’s credentials?), and issue a press release that is a paragon of ignorance and muddled meaningless writing. Their motive, to protect their industry, is to attack first with vague hifalutin-sounding jargon intended to discredit without actually addressing any of the issues at hand.

I’m linking to it here because I’m blown away by the stupidity and fundamental dishonesty of these PR people. And because their opposition is a good reason to read Elizabeth’s book and get the real story about our drinking water.

Bill James shares his method to determine when a college basketball game is out of reach.

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Slate Magazine

A week or two ago I posted at pattonandco.com (Barry Bonds) that Bill James’ recent work seemed shoddy. The ideas weren’t fully thought through, and the execution was haphazard. But that was about his baseball work.

This story is good fun, even if Bill reveals himself as a Huckabee supporter, and has a bit of fun with figuring out who is going to win basketball games (which on a practical level might save someone wasted hours, depending on how many basketball games they watch).

The most excellent thing about this is that it doesn’t matter if the method works or not. Here is Bill James having some fun, and that’s fun for us. Bravo.