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Showing posts from March, 2015

Probability and Cumulative Dice Sums

Some Potentially Useful SQL Resources

Some potentially useful SQL resources - explanations, visualizations, exercises, games, classes. A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins Datamonkey Introduction to Database Management Systems SQL Island Adventure Game PostgreSQL Exercises Public Affairs Data Journalism SQL Teaching's GitHub repo (if you're curious) Stanford's Self-Paced Database MOOC Hackr.io's SQL Section (good to check occasionally) Practical skills of SQL language SQL Teaching (learn SQL in your browser) SQLZOO - Interactive SQL Tutorial The Schemaverse: a space-based strategy game implemented entirely within a PostgreSQL database Treasure Data: Learn SQL by Calculating Customer Lifetime Value

Who Controls the Pace in Basketball, Offense or Defense?

During a recent chat with basketball analyst Seth Partnow , he mentioned a topic that came up during a discussion at the recent MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference . Who  controls the pace of a game more, the offense or defense? And what is the percentage of pace responsibility for each side? The analysts came up with a rough consensus opinion, but is there a way to answer this question analytically? I came up with one approach that examines the variations in possession times, but it suddenly occurred to me that this question could also be answered immediately by looking at the offense-defense asymmetry of the home court advantage. As you can see in the R output of my NCAA team model code in one of my public basketball repositories , the offense at home scores points at a rate about \( e^{0.0302} = 1.031 \) times the rate on a neutral court, everything else the same. Likewise, the defense at home allows points at a rate about \( e^{-0.0165} = 0.984\) times the rate on a neutral c