Posts from April 2018 (17)

Team Ratings for Round 11

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 61 matches played, 44 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 72.1%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 11

Here are the predictions for Round 11. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 8

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 56 matches played, 29 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 51.8%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 8

Here are the predictions for Round 8. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

From Stuff: One in six Kiwi drivers use their phone at traffic lights, poll finds

This is a bogus poll from Neighbourly, the local bulletin board/discussion site owned by Stuff‘s publisher.  It’s based on “more than 3900” self-selected members of the site, without any attempt to make the figures representative. And that’s before you get to the issue of how honest people are being about their law breaking.

There’s almost no limit to how wrong bogus polls can be. Thanks to anchoring bias, there’s a good chance you’re better informed if you don’t see the results than if you do.

For a while, the NZ media had stopped writing stories and headlines based on bogus polls, but it’s been starting up again.

Team Ratings for Round 10

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 54 matches played, 38 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 70.4%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 10

Here are the predictions for Round 10. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 7

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 48 matches played, 25 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 52.1%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 7

Here are the predictions for Round 7. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 21

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 120 matches played, 83 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 69.2%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 21

Here are the predictions for Round 21. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

The Herald website has just published another story about the imaginary and invisible planet Nibiru. That’s in addition to the nine from last year.

• 18 Nov: Conspiracy theorists claim mysterious planet Nibiru will trigger apocalyptic earthquakes
• 25 Sep: Nibiru: How the nonsense Planet X Armageddon and Nasa fake news theories spread globally
• 30 Oct: The end of the world as we know it (again)
• 23 Sep: How the nonsense Planet X Armageddon, Nasa fake news spread globally
• 19 Sep: The world is about to end, if you believe this doomsday claim
• 30 Aug: Claims new planet ‘about to destroy Earth’ and clues written on pyramids
• 23 Sep: ‘Extremely violent times will come’: TV broadcast interrupted with end-of-world prediction
• 9 Aug: Rogue planet about to smash into Earth, claim conspiracy theorists
• 4 Jan: Conspiracy theorist claims mysterious planet Nibiru will smash into Earth and the world will end in October 2017

As you see, two of the stories ask how this nonsense theory spread globally.

One says, with a splendid lack of self-awareness

Despite absolutely no scientific evidence to back up the suggestions of a rogue planet getting rapidly closer to Earth, myths about Planet X continue to be perpetuated online, according to the Telegraph UK.

Indeed they do.

An ‘insufficient data’ edition

• Data quality matters: the high rate of death reported for women giving birth in Texas seems to have been partly a data entry error.  Researchers say Approximately half (50.3%) of obstetric-coded deaths showed no evidence of pregnancy within 42 days, and a large majority of these incorrectly indicated pregnancy at the time of death. That is, these were real deaths, but not related to pregnancy. The research paper also says “Texas’ current electronic death registration system displays pregnancy status options as a dropdown list. The “pregnant at the time of death” option is directly below the “not pregnant within the past year” option”  Via Ars Technica.
• The new cancer drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda) is spectacularly effective across a wide range of tumours, but typically for a minority of patients. In the US, the FDA has approved its marketing for any tumour with a particular defect in DNA repair, but testing for that defect is not as reliable as one would like. The story in Nature News focuses on false negatives: people who would benefit but aren’t found by the test.  In New Zealand, false positives are also important: these new drugs would be more cost-effective and so more likely to be subsidised if you could avoid giving them to people who wouldn’t benefit.
• There’s a new claim that kumara got to the Pacific Islands before people did, in the New York Times, based on this research. Basically, the DNA from samples collected by the first European botanists in Polynesia has quite a lot of minor differences from modern sweet potatoes in the Americas, suggesting that its ancestors had been separated from the rest of the sweet potato lineage for over 100,000 years.  However, Lisa Matisoo-Smith and Michael Knapp from Otago argue that the samples are old enough — nearly 250 years — that the DNA will have been degraded and needs to be analysed with special obsessively-detailed protocols for old DNA.  That is, the evidence isn’t nearly strong enough to overturn the other reasons for thinking kumara were brought from South America by humans.

I have been meaning to add some additional competitions to my predictions. I have now implemented predictions for the Aviva Premiership, starting a bit late in the season, with only a few rounds to go.

Team Ratings for Round 20

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 114 matches played, 79 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 69.3%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 20

Here are the predictions for Round 20. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.

Team Ratings for Round 9

The basic method is described on my Department home page.
Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season.

Performance So Far

So far there have been 48 matches played, 33 of which were correctly predicted, a success rate of 68.8%.
Here are the predictions for last week’s games.

Predictions for Round 9

Here are the predictions for Round 9. The prediction is my estimated expected points difference with a positive margin being a win to the home team, and a negative margin a win to the away team.