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Showing posts from December, 2012

2012-12-21: The Performance of Betting Lines for Predicting the Outcome of NFL Games

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It was the first week of the 2007 National Football League (NFL) season. After waiting all summer for the NFL season to begin, the fans were rabid with anticipation. The airwaves were filled with sportscasters debating the prospects of teams from both conferences and how they would perform. Of particular interest was the New England Patriots. They had two starters out with injuries and their star receiver, Randy Moss, was questionable for the game. New England was playing against the NY Jets and their simmering rivalry add heat to the fire. Many of the sportscasters were lining up with the Jets and Vegas was favoring the Jets with a 6 point line at home. When betting opened for the game the action on the Patriots was heavy. The shear volume of bets place on New England to win forced the sportsbooks to move the spread in an attempt to equalize betting on both sides. Eventually the line moved all  of the way to New England being a seven point favorite by game time. New England went

2012-12-20: NFL Power Rankings Week 16

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The NFL Playoffs are only a few weeks away. With the end of the regular season in sight there are a few trends that subtlety change the game. One of the trends is the weather. Tennessee is playing at Green Bay and snow is in the forecast. Another end of the season trend is displayed by teams that have clinched playoff positions. They rest their starting lineup and play backup players. That is more of a week 17 phenomenon but with Atlanta and Houston both at 12-2 for the season they may play some non-starters during the game. This ranking system is based on team performance and does not take trends like the weather into account. Our ranking system is based on Google's PageRank algorithm.It is explained in some detail in past posts . A directed graph is created to represent the current years season. Each team is represented by a node in the graph. For every game played a directed edge is created from the loser pointing to the winner and it is weighted by the Margin of Victo

2012-12-17: Archive-It Partners Meeting

I attended the 2012 Archive-It Partners Meeting in Annapolis, MD on December 3. I decided to attend at the last minute, and Kristine and Lori graciously let me have 5 minutes to talk about our project and upcoming NEH proposal.  We're looking for humanities-types and Archive-It partners to work with in evaluating our visualizations. After my presentation, I was able to make contacts with several potential partners.   Visualizing Digital Collections at Archive-It from Michele Weigle There were several nice talks in the half-day session.  The full schedule and slides from all of the presentations are available. Related to what we're working on, Alex Thurman from Columbia University Libraries talked about their local portal  to their Human Rights collection ( collection  at Archive-It).  They offer a rotated list of screenshots for featured sites and have tabs to show the collection pages by title, URL, subject, place, and language. One nice feature they'v

2012-12-14: InfoVis at Grace Hopper

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I was selected give a 5-minute faculty lightning talk at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in October in Baltimore.  Short talks are among the most difficult to prepare, especially short talks for a general audience. I decided to increase my level of difficulty for the talk by combining two topics in my 5-minute talk, information visualization (infovis) and web archiving. I ended up presenting a snapshot of the work that Kalpesh Padia and Yasmin AlNoamany did for their JCDL 2012 paper, Visualizing Digital Collections at Archive-It (see  related blog post ). Information Visualization - Visualizing Digital Collections at Archive-It from Michele Weigle The faculty lightning talks session was new at Grace Hopper, but went very well.  We had a 45-minute session and got to hear about 8 totally different research projects.  Info and slides from all of the presentations are available on the GHC wiki .  Especially for work-in-progress, this format was a great w