TumblnVijay

Talk about buried lede. Story contains nugget that Yelp accused of offering to reorder reviews if restaurant buys ads: http://bit.ly/bnssKP

RT @SoonerSportscom: Sam Bradford’s workout leaves observers “speechless”: http://blogs.nfl.com/category/pro-days/

Acy technical ended up being huge, big difference being 3 or 5 down in those final seconds. What a season for Baylor, amazing job by Drew

Next years UK team will look nothing like this year, but I still prefer 1 & done to someone like Wall skipping college: http://bit.ly/cqbRce

I just finished migrating my Blogger blog over. I am excited, Tumblr should feel less onerous to update, I can do it from my phone, I can do it with a photo. I use Twitter and Facebook a lot, but both have their limitations when I want to persist something for future updates, so that’s the big reason I am Tumbling. In particular, I am excited about some of the innovation occurring in journalism, and would love to discuss it somewhere that’s not transient, so my goals it to make this the place and then publish to Twitter and Facebook for distribution. We’ll see how it goes!

[this post originally ran on December 24th, 2009]

On December 14th, 2009 we welcomed our son Manoj to the world. We’ve set up a Tumblr page for Manoj for those interested.

[This post originally ran on December 24th 2009]

I’ve been meaning to write a post ever since the Virginia and NJ races concluded. As feared, momentum is potentially swinging to the opposition.

I wrote an op-ed that published in the Post in July on the importance of infrastructure behind the scenes.

I am still hoping to see more process stories on the investments the Republicans are making, and whether that is fueling any of their comeback to date. While both governors races could be explained away by the candidates and situation, as was done by every Democratic “strategist” on cable news, that seems unlikely.

While I was particularly proud of getting an op-ed accepted (no strings here, honest), I have to say my Camaro posts caused more commotion!

Here’s one example from the Capital Research Center.

And one post about my innocent mention of Marco Rubio. People have asked my why I even mentioned him (since at the time, he was looking like he was about to withdraw from the Charlie Crist Senate challenge). It was entirely based on hearing him speak at the 2007 NALEO conference in Florida.

[Update: This mention is looking smarter and smarter]

[This post originally ran on September 19th, 2009 on my previous blog]

As many of my friends know, I’ve had a big love for the new Camaro. Rumors that this was solely due to my love of Transformers were greatly exaggerated. If anything, the Michael Bay POS almost turned me off completely.

However, I still liked the car, and Vibha and I had been talking about buying American next, so I tried to go shopping, with the operative word being “tried”. The experience was bad and gave me inspiration to mention it with Joel Achenbach of Achenblog fame asked if I wanted to guest post.

So I did, and it was published in July while we went to Quebec:

Guest Kit: Why Can’t I Buy a Camaro? 

The reverberations on the Internet is something that many talk about, but it is very interesting to see when it was your source material that started it.

There was some quality blogging using my guest post as source material:

WaPo blogger wants to buy Camaro, gets dealer runaround instead

Remember when you could just go to the dealer and buy a car?

One clip and comment:

May I Please Buy A Camaro Now?

And a whole other set of coverage including
a Facebook note, a repost of the autoblog within a forum, a link in a BusinessWeek blog, and a former car saleman’s viewpoint.

And of course a simple cut and paste jobs:

Government Motors screws up, tries to catch horse after barn door falls off; anybody surprised?

In fact, the Autoblog piece had as many comments as the WaPo piece. That’s shocking.

As some of the blogs mentioned, I was contacted by Chevy PR (via Twitter) the day it was posted. It took a little while to find a test drive window, but we found one and I did indeed get my test drive.

And I then did this follow up after I got the test drive:

Guest Kit: The Camaro Saga, Continued

I think it is fair to say that the follow up didn’t have quite the reaction. Sometimes you hit, and sometimes you don’t online.

Aside from the amazing research experience to see the first post hit, I did end up eventually buying a car, a 2009 Cadillac CTS-V. It is great, an amazing car to drive, and with a great interior and set of features. And it looks great!

[This post originally ran on June 20, 2009 on my previous blog]

Today’s Washington Post Op-Ed page has a great op-ed from two statisticians regarding the controversial Iran elections. Their analysis is similar to something the IRS uses to detect tax filing fraud called Benford’s Rule.

In it they write the punchline:

The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot.

I posted the article from Twitter and to my Facebook page, and got back the following concern:

intriguing. The only caveat is that the number of provinces in Iran is small - i.e., 30, for statistical analysis to be significant. Perhaps a district-wise analysis (if available) could nail the fraud. BTW, Iran coverage in India is pretty minimal - it shows up on page 20 in a newspaper like Times of India. International newspapers are the main source of good info (such as this article).

The comment made sense, inferences drawn from small sample sizes can be extremely misleading. In fact, just today, Vibha and I celebrated that our zip code was one of few in DC to appreciate in 2008, only then to find the sample size was 3 home sales!

I decided to write the authors, and got a solid reasonable reply:

We’re using the vote counts for all of the four candidates, and we have data for 29 provinces (Lorestan was omitted from the results posted on Press TV, so we didn’t use it either), so that’s 4 * 29 = 116 numbers. A sample of 116 is large enough for us to be confident in our conclusion.

The probabilities we report are, in any case, computed for the number of observations that we have: The smaller the sample, the higher the probability that digit frequencies in fair elections vary widely, so we take this into account in calculating the likelihood that Iran’s vote counts were manipulated.

There’s additional information on the methods we use in an annotated version of the op-ed, which is posted on my web site,
. Here’s the direct link to the annotated version:

http://www.columbia.edu/~bhb2102/files/Beber_Scacco_The_Devil_Is_in_the_Digits.pdf

Best,
Bernd

In my mind, this is the cleanest way to identify fraud when observers are kept out, and normal tools like exit polling are not available. The human mind can’t escape its own limitations when making up numbers.

[This post was originally posted on May 16, 2009 on my previous blog]

Every kid who becomes a sports fan has a first crush. An athlete that opens up the world of sports and competition in a way that seems like fantasy. For me, that athlete was Wayman Tisdale. A prodigious recruiting coup for Billy Tubbs, who arrived in Norman the same time my family moved there in 1982. In his first game, a loss at highly ranked UNLV, he scored 21 points in 24 minutes and never looked back. His turnaround left handed shot was the smoothest motion I’ve ever seen.

Wayman Tisdale died yesterday, at the unbelievably young age of 44, after a 2 year battle with cancer. I think for those of us who followed him closely, we thought the worst had past with the amputation of his leg. As a result, it is a big shock. This ESPN feature ran last year about his decision and recovery.



But the best thing about him which has been well chronicled was his smile. It lit up the arena, and disarmed the most ardent opponent. Wayman had fun, and while he was competitive, he never crossed that line that other athletes can easily go, he never taunted, he never lost his cool, and he was still having fun and smiling. I give him the most sincere form of respect - imitation - I smile when something is not going my way — it is something I picked up from him when I was 8.

I didn’t appreciate then how his faith grounded him. But as time went on, and other more mortal athletes crossed the screen, you realized how special and unique Wayman was. He was one of a kind, the likes of which I’ve never seen since in 25+ years of watching sports. Hopefully, someone else will come along like him, we would be so lucky.

I regret the fact that he was almost never on TV once he made the NBA. The teams he was on were so bad. I am the type of NBA fan who only watches the playoffs on TV, and I only saw him play once, when he was with the Suns, and was getting to play in garbage time of a blowout.

If the story ended there, it would be a full story, one of a college sports hero loved by an entire state. But Wayman’s short 44 years on this world were way beyond that. His music, his other passion, is a joy to listen to. I bought his album Power Forward 10 years ago, and it opened up my musical taste to jazz. If you’ve never listened to his music, I suggest you give it a try. It has a very unique style and is great calming mood music. I’ve put some of his albums below on a carousel. 

Because his NBA career was relatively modest, the media coverage is a bit confused. They know something big just happened, but they can’t put it into the boxes they’re used to. To the fact sheets, Wayman was just a 12 year NBA veteran who averaged 15 points a game and a 3 time All-American at Oklahoma. But if that’s all you see in Wayman Tisdale, you missed out on a whole world of greatness.