And isn't that great? Seriously... otherwise why bother going to a game? We'd know who was going to win based on the numbers, whether it was the Yankees because of their payroll or Man U because of their players or whoever.
Also, 50 thousand simulations of the game may sound impressive, but I wonder how many simulations you'd have to run before you generated the 49ers lining up in an illegal formation for the first play of the game, thereby giving up a penalty and a touchdown.
Finding patterns in the behavior of hundreds of thousand to billions of consumers is one thing...
I was reading the estimable Grantland's Superbowl wraps today, and found Bill Barnwell saying much the same thing I said in the blog--more concisely:
The Ravens are the 2011 Giants, or the 2007 Giants, or the 2010 Packers. They're the reminders that you don't get the full picture of a team and what they can do from a 16-game sample, just as you fail to get the entire story from a 16-game sample in other sports. The only difference is that those other sports get 66 or more games to reveal more about their teams. In football, we get 20 games max.
I just heard about that huge scandal earlier today -- what a huge outrage, with hundreds of games allegedly rigged throughout the world. Coming on top of Lance Armstrong, the most recent round of steroid-related baseball/football news, it really is disheartening.
And data doesn't count if the end result is "in the bag"; just take a look at the developing sport fixing scandal in Europe.
I recall posting not too long ago on this site I think where I equated the telemetry received from Formula One race cars with big data. Even at the time I thought it was weak and should I now track it down and delete it?
And as I always say in sports, you cannot discount heart and who wants the win more. Sounds silly? Maybe. But we see it over and over again, when the underdog beats the predicted winner because of an "impossible" catch/save/ace/return/no-hitter/touchdown--your sports' terms here. And that's so many of us love sports: You don't know who will win until the game/match/whatever is over.
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Social networking sites and search engines continue to hone the tools they use to help advertisers spread their messages, measure results, and avoid fraud.
The US National Security Agency learned the hard way that it can be dangerous to give a contractor too much money and access, with too little scrutiny. The NSA and other government agencies hire tens of thousands of contractors
a year to analyze data. Edward Snowden -- who revealed himself as the NSA leaker after fleeing the country -- was one such contractor, reportedly holding a $122,000 salaried position at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his departure.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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