Forbes recently published an article ranking America’s top 20 most creative cities. As with any rankings, context and criteria have to be taken into account. Usual suspects like Boston, San Francisco, and New Orleans were present in the top 20, but one city was amiss. The city that I reside in now, Houston, was nowhere to be found.
“Hey Chandler, want to play with me next season?”
There seems to be a lot of revisionist history going on in the wake of Chandler Parsons’ departure north to Dallas. Many are saying that Parsons is actually overrated and that Trevor Ariza will be a better fit anyway. This is all summarized neatly by one article on BleacherReport that I felt compelled to respond to. “One could argue that Ariza is actually an upgrade at small forward.” The author is right, there are numbers that favor Ariza. But statistics without context do not do much good, so I decided to examine the evidence a little closer. What can I say? Chandler Parsons is one of my favorite players. Have to make an attempt to defend him.
I dribbled a basketball for the first time in a month yesterday. Yeah I was out of shape and just starting my conditioning again, but it didn’t matter. All that I cared about was that I was able to run around on the hardwood without worries or restrictions. The last time I was able to do that, I had to have surgery later that night.
Let’s get this out of the way. Based on Nate Silver’s models, Brazil had a 1 in 4000 chance of losing by six goals. By that same model, Brazil had a 65% chance of victory, even without Neymar and Thiago Silva [1]. And there is no statistical model I would trust more than something Nate Silver created (John Hollinger being a not-too-close second).
Even if you take the reasoning that statistical models don’t really care about the difference at the extremes, that 1-in-4000 is not that distinguishable from 1-in-400, this beatdown was still an all time outlier, as in this was one of the most unexpected scorelines in history.
“Financing dreams, creating solutions.”
That was the motto of my firm during my foray into the mortgage-banking world. Our aim was not to simply sell a 30-year loan at a steadily rising interest rate, but rather to connect our clients to the means towards achieving the American Dream of owning their own house.
I entered the industry as a naïve teenager who thought doing business was only about selling products and making profits. How wrong I was.
There were/are some big developments over the weekend and taking place currently in the sports and business worlds, so I wanted to focus this post on a discussion of various links and items. You know, just over two weeks ago, I was wondering how I was going to stay productive at work with the World Cup on. Suffice it to say, as I rehab from surgery (more on that at a later date), my questions were answered. I now have time to watch all the soccer games I want. Which brings me to the first item…
I was recently reading an article, The Role of Engineers: Designing Society, written by Angelene McDaniel and it definitely caught my interest. It deals primarily with how the engineer ‘shapes’ society. The article argues that engineers design systems, but those systems actually design society as we know it. Just as the engineer accounts for the various conditions his design must endure, he must account for the various societal conditions his design will create.
My Three Senths: Sports. Business. Life. 