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Introduction Why do football clubs sack their managers? Eni Aluko has written a post in The Guardian about sacking football managers (link). In it she proposes that sacking managers does not work. She points out that in 2019-2020 "a lot of clubs have spent the season yo-yoing around the Premier League". Discussion The yo-yo teams are particularly affected by results. A heavy home defeat often raises questions about a manager. Home games are very...

The other day, I noticed this enigmatic tweet from Namita Nandakumar (link): https://twitter.com/nnstats/status/1225877278158151686 I was delighted to see this announcement and the queries it brought about. Namita's news seemed a long way from the slow writing process discussed by Anastasia Miari's Grand Dishes project. "Grand Dishes is a cookbook that preserves; an interaction between generations, a sharing of stories most powerfully told through the recipes that have seasoned these grandmothers’ lives" (link). The juxtaposition of Namita and Anastasia was...

Stephen Downes provided a link to Dominic Wyse's presentation (link) in his newsletter today (link). In his presentation as President of the British Educational Research Association, Dominic looks at the history of education as a discipline. His paper identifies three traditions in the discipline: academic knowledge traditions, practical knowledge traditions, and the interaction between the two traditions. These traditions resonate with conversation underway about the place of analytics in sport. In his paper, Dominic observes that a discipline is defined "not only as an area of knowledge, but also...

The #OptaForum was held in London on 5 February 2020 (link). The proposed presentations for the Forum were judged in November. The judges scored each proposals based on three criteria: innovation, relevance and application. "By the end of the process, six projects had been chosen for presentation, with a further two submitters invited to exhibit their proposals as posters". In December 2019, the successful proposals were announced (link). The six main presentations were: Karun Singh: Learning to watch football: Self-supervised representations for tracking...

Tanya Elias, Laura Ritchie, Geoffrey Gevalt, and Kate Bowles (2020) (link) have written about the pedagogy of small. Stephen Downes shared the link to their University of Calgary paper in his daily newsletter (link). Tanya and her colleagues revisit open education theories from the 1970s "in order to understand the ecologies that shape open learning in the present". These ecologies explore "three value pairs that constitute axes of negotiation in the open classroom":   Autonomy and interdependence Freedom and responsibilityDemocracy and participation.

The WNBL Regular Season ended on 1 February 2020 with Southside's 78v61 defeat of Sydney (link). The WNBL has moved into the Finals part of the season. The four teams in the Finals are: Southside, Adelaide, Canberra and Melbourne Boomers (link). During the Regular Season the median winning score was 82 points and the median losing score was 71 points. My ggplots (link) of the performances of winning and losing teams:

The National Gallery of Australia is holding a Matisse and Picasso exhibition at the moment (link). The introduction to the exhibition noted: Matisse & Picasso is the first exhibition in Australia to tell the story of the artistic relationship between two of Europe’s greatest twentieth-century artists. Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) met in 1906 and for more than half a century followed each other’s creative developments and achievements. The sustained rivalry between them was not only key to their individual success, it also changed...

Leicester City will host a Tactical Insights Conference at the King Power Stadium (link) on Wednesday 19 February, 2020. This is the second Insights conference at the club. The first conference This "was a culmination of six months hard work from those within the analysis department and club". The Insights day aimed to provide an educational basis for the discussion of tactical approaches in football (link). I thought it was a great innovation in open sharing and mirrored developments at the Barça Innovation Hub (link). A perspective...

Sydney Thunder has defeated the Hobart Hurricanes in a BBL eliminator game (link). Sydney batted first and scored 196 runs in the innings. Hobart were all out for 140 in their chase. 196 runs was a large total to set in BBL (there have been six totals in the BBL regular season that were greater than 196). In the regular season there were ten occasions when the team batting first set a rate of 19 runs or more per partnership. The team batting first has won all...

Introduction Like most people, I receive pull newsletters in my in box. I find these profoundly helpful. They often contain news of analytics that become tweets (link) or the stimulus for a blog post on Clyde Street. I have been using Mastodon occasionally (link). Analytics' Notes John Danaher has written about algocracy (link). His paper prepared as a chapter in the Oxford Handbook on the Philosophy of Technology considers how algorithmic governance can be "emancipatory and enslaving". John points...

Introduction VALA is holding its 20th bicentennial conference in Melbourne from 11-13 February 2020 (link). The theme of the conference is Focus on the Future. VALA – Libraries, Technology and the Future Inc. is an independent Australian based not-for-profit organisation that actively supports the use and understanding of information technology in libraries. I have been particularly impressed by the exploration of innovative practice. VALA's alert to the conference looked at the digital dexterity framework developed by the...

Introduction When I was drafting sections of the Sport Informatics and Analytics course on WikiEducator (link), I had an opportunity to look at what is to count as evidence in our work as analysts (link) and to contemplate our epistemic culture, how we come to know (link) and the construction of the machineries of knowledge construction (Karin Knorr Cetina, 1999) (link). Vigilance Once we have started to think about our culture as analysts and how we address the construction...

In honor of ds106 radio and thinking ahead to our session at Northern Voice 2011, this retro mic was suggested as a prop-- it is pretty much a plastic piece of junk- it does record audio, with noise, and it wont work at all streaming with Nicecast. But it does have a light on top. Introduction Alan Levine has had a close look at the inclusion of audio recordings in WordPress blog posts (link). He looked at SPLOT Box (link) as the host for...

Introduction The Big Bash Regular Season concluded on the 27th January with the Renegades' defeat of the Heat (link) by seven wickets with four balls remaining. During the Regular Season, there were forty-two games in which the result was decided without a Duckworth-Lewis rate being set. In these games, the median winning score was 168 runs and thee median losing score was 148 runs. The median rate set by the team batting first was 17 runs per wicket. A...

There are three games in the BBL 2019-2020 that give outliers and medians after the Sixers' game against the Heat. All three games involve the Stars who won all three games. The Stars batted first twice (v Sixers and v Heat) and second once (v Scorchers).