Tags: brisbane

Tags: brisbane

Tags: london

Michael Lewis has an article in the New York Times about the new empiricism in pro basketball.

Back in the day, the only basketball stats the mattered were points, assists and rebounds per game, field goal and free throw percentage. The exotic assist to turnover ratio surfaced occasionally. Nowadays hoops afficionados look at the Personal Efficiency Rating , which is defined by a rather lengthy equation. Just as Sabermetrics changed the game of baseball, PER and other stats are changing the NBA.

Some years ago I got hooked on Lewis' writing, starting with Liar's Poker. He has written a slew of good books, and the big idea in his book Moneyball is that the professional baseball industry is bad at assessing how good a player is. The models and rules of thumb that have traditionally been used don't correlate well with winning games. This means some talent is undervalued, and an opportunity exists for baseball clubs with better ways of assessing players to buy this talent cheaply. If you haven't read Moneyball, you should do so.

I wonder which other sports and industries are ripe for this kind of analysis?

The End by Michael Lewis

Letter by Andrew Lahde

A Greenwich of the Mind by Nick Paumgarten

We are in for the mother of all bear market rallies by Barton Biggs

Is There a Problem Here? by Larry Doyle

Tags: economy

Introducing Augustus Rollo Cooney.

I read the Financial Times most mornings, and I have noticed that reporting of the events of the last few weeks has featured more negative, emotive words than usual. Meltdown, crisis and armageddon, for example.

It makes sense that the word "crash" would appear more now than it had a few months previous, but a few days ago I became curious to what extent emotive words correlated with the news itself. On a whim I wrote down a two lists of words. The first list was of negative words ("worse, shock, meltdown"). I could think of 44, including some random tenses. The second list was of positive words ("rally, boost, hope"). I then wrote a script to count the frequency of these words on the front page of the FT each day over the previous month.

I know this is an unsophisticated approach, but it has the virtue of being very simple. Here is the result, with the vertical axis representing the difference in sentiment, with positive numbers corresponding to bulls and negative to bears.

There are several big movements where bear (negative) words beat out bull (positive) words by large margins on the sixth, 10th, 16th, and to a lesser extent on the 30th.

The big news on the sixth was a recap of the worst week for equities for the past six years, with the headline "Share falls increase gloom". Bear words beat bull words by 13. By contrast, the previous day bulls beat bears by one, and the lead story was "Moscow forced to shore up rouble".

Bulls beat bears by 7 on the ninth, and the headline was "Markets rally after US loans bail-out". This positive sentiment reversed dramatically the next day as bears beat bulls by 9, with the headline "US stocks suffer as Lehman falls 45%".

There is another bearish swing between the 15th, when bear words beat bull words by 5, and the 16th, where the gap had spread to 17. The headline in the FT on the 16th was "Day or reckoning on Wall St", as the market saw what was at the time its biggest one day fall since 9/11. The following day the difference spread to 23 as HBOS shares fell 40%.

I will keep an eye on the difference over the coming weeks, as one more trigger for burying gold in the back yard, and perhaps ultimately heading for the hills.

Tags: economy

As promised, here is source code for reading GPS data from the Streets and Trips USB GPS on OS X. This is the most C code I have written in a while, so don't go putting it into production!

Here's how it works:

nmea.h/.c - Structs representing nmea data, and code for reading data from the serial port, and parsing this out of a comma separated string. I have restricted myself to only parsing bits of the gga sentence, but it would be straightforward to extend this to other data and sentences.

serial.h/.c - Code for opening and closing the serial port.

main.c - A small main method that reads the nmea data and prints the lat, long and altitude to the console.

If you want to try it out, don't forget to install the serial port driver as described in my previous post. Have fun with it!

Tags: programming