Andrew B. Collier / @datawookie

I finally got tired of booting up Windows to download data from my Garmin 910XT. I tried to get my old Ubuntu 15.04 system to recognise my ANT stick but failed. Now that I have a stable Ubuntu 16.04 system the time seems ripe.

In the first instalment of this series we gained an understanding of the various types of odds used in Sportsbook betting and the link between those odds and implied probabilities. We noted that the implied probabilities for all possible outcomes in an event may sum to more than 100%. At first sight these seems a bit odd. It certainly appears to violate the basic principles of statistics. However, this anomaly is the mechanism by which bookmakers assure their profits. A similar principle applies in a casino.

I’m working on a project in which I need to systematically parse a number of RSS and Atom feeds from within R. I was somewhat surprised to find that no package currently exists on CRAN to handle this task. This presented the opportunity for a bit of DIY.

You can find the fruits of my morning’s labour here.

A couple of my collaborators have had trouble using read_html() from the xml2 package to access this Wikipedia page.

This series of articles was written as support material for Statistics exercises in a course that I’m teaching for iXperience. In the series I’ll be using illustrative examples for wagering on a variety of Sportsbook events including Horse Racing, Rugby and Tennis. The same principles can be applied across essentially all betting markets.

Arthur Benjamin thinks that the end goal of teaching Mathematics at school should be Statistics rather than Calculus. He has a point: in terms of understanding things in the real world, Statistics is definitely more powerful. These ideas are quite compatible with those of Conrad Wolfram, who thinks that we should be using computers more extensively in Mathematics education.

Conrad Wolfram gives a thought provoking talk on a different way to teach Mathematics in schools.

Taking another look at the data from the lifespan package. Plot below shows the evolution of mortality in the US as a function of year and age.

I was rather inspired by this plot on Wikipedia’s List of Countries by Life Expectancy.

Working further with the mortality data from https://www.cdc.gov/, I’ve added a breakdown of deaths by age and gender to the lifespan package on GitHub.

I’ve added mortality data to the lifespan package. A result that immediately emerges from these data is that average life expectancy is steadily climbing.

Based on some feedback to a previous post I normalised the birth counts by the (average) number of days in each month. As pointed out by a reader, the results indicate a gradual increase in the number of conceptions during (northern hemisphere) Autumn and Winter, roughly up to the end of December. Normalising the data to give births per day also shifts the peak from August to September.

In a previous post I showed that the data from www.baseball-reference.com support Malcolm Gladwell’s contention that more professional baseball players are born in August than any other month. Although this might be explained by the 31 July cutoff for admission to baseball leagues, it was suggested that it could also be linked to a larger proportion of babies being born in August.

I’ve got a massive bunch of zip archives, each of which contains only a single file. And the name of the enclosed file varies. Dealing with these data is painful.

It’d be a lot more convenient if the files were compressed with gzip or bzip2 and had a consistent naming convention. How would you go about making that conversion without actually unpacking the zip archive, finding the name of the enclosed file and then recompressing? Enter funzip.

The cutoff date for almost all nonschool baseball leagues in the United States is July 31, with the result that more major league players are born in August than in any other month. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

A quick analysis to confirm Gladwell’s assertion above. Used data scraped from www.baseball-reference.com.

We are planning to host one of the three inaugural satRday conferences in Cape Town during 2017. The [R Consortium](https://www.r-consortium.org/) has committed to funding three of these events: one will be in Hungary, another will be somewhere in the USA and the third will be at an international destination. At present Cape Town is dicing it out with Monterrey (Mexico) for the third location.