Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Mountains and Mountains of Data
Nate Silver is known in baseball circles as the stat guru. He takes seemingly unrelated data and predicts hits and season records. He is taking his data analysis talent to political polling. His predictions of state results in the Democratic Primary were often very close to the outcomes. He often beat established polling companys offering a critique of them on his website fivethirtyeight.com. How does this relate to Educational Technology? I would argue that a skill needed for the 21st Century is the ability to analyze data. Nate wrote algorithms to make predictions from available data. This ability made him successful in the baseball and political worlds.
Read about Nate in Newsweek.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/140469
In a related story Bill James a life long Celtics fan is being credited with the Celtics playoff birth last year for his analysis of seeming unrelated statistics. Bill does statistical analysis of common stats but is also able to tag game footage to easily enable players to bring up all instances a player is at the top of the key to see if they go left or right. Bill's expertise in math and computers has made him a go to guy for the front office, players, and coaches.
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