Monthly Archives: June 2009

There is a fascinating analysis of NBA scores by Jeff Ely and Toomas Hinnosaar on Ely’s blog Cheap Talk. Read through the comments as well which try to explain the data.

The data plotted in the chart is the margin of victory for the home team at the end of regulation (negative if they lose). There is a very pronounced spike at zero, implying that the % of games that are tied and go to OT is much higher than if it was closer to a normal distribution around a mean of zero.

There is a great video if you click through to the post, which shows how the distribution of the lead of the home team changes in the last 40 seconds of the game. Things look pretty normal till about 20 seconds are left. Something happens in the last 20 seconds that makes things converge to a tie.

The comments from readers try to explain this. The explanations that ring true to me are:

1. Shot selection – If the trailing team is within 3, it will attempt a 3 point shot. If it is within 2, it will typically go for a higher percentage shot for 2 points.
2. Fouling to stop the clock – The trailing team will keep fouling to stop the clock in the last 20s which will typically expand the lead. If they luck out and pull even, they stop fouling. If they pull ahead, the other team starts fouling.

Said differently, if the two teams are separated by 3 or fewer points in the final 20s and the trailing team has the ball, they will try to run out the clock and make a final shot attempt to tie the game (or win it if they are trailing by 1). If the leading team has the ball, the other team will foul them in the hope that they will miss a free shot and they get possession of the ball.

Ely offers his explanation here. Another thread of discussion on this is on Yglesias.

Atul Gawande’s piece The Cost Conundrum in the New Yorker has created quite a buzz. Apparently, President Obama has been recommending it as a must-read. Peter Orzag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget for the administration, referred to Gawande’s article a couple of times in the last week.

The reason Gawande’s seminal piece has caught the attention of the blogosphere and the administration is because it uses data to point the finger where so far in the healthcare debate, it hasn’t – at doctors themselves. It’s easy to blame the insurance companies or the pharmaceutical companies. They are big, powerful corporations and it is natural to assume that must be twisting the system to their advantage thus raising costs for everyone. Doctors, whom we trust with our care, are much more difficult to confront. But confront them we must. It appears that the root of the problem in American healthcare is over-care.

Doctors are paid by insurance companies (or patients) by the amount of work they do (number of visits) not by the results. Insurance companies pay a standard rate per visit. They make no distinction between the rates they pay to a doctor that provides great care and one that provides poor care. The doctor therefore has all the incentive to increase the number visits and none to increase the quality of care (above a certain minimum, obviously, otherwise they won’t be left with any patients).

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Kavya Shivashankar won the 2009 Scripps Spelling Bee Championship, as has been widely reported. I watched the last few rounds of the contest. The Bee doesn’t sound like an exciting sport to watch, but once you get into it, it can be quite riveting.

The only word that I knew how to spell in those last few rounds was ‘menhir’. Amazingly, it tripped up Aishwarya Pastapur, who tied for second place. Why did I know how to spell menhir? Because of Asterix – that amazing comic book series that is unfortunately not widely available in the US.

Three years ago, I blogged about the unusual success that Indian kids were having in Spelling Bee. The post was titled Indian-Americans and the Spelling Bee Conundrum. Only 1.8% of the college educated US population is Indian-American. But as many as 20% of the top ten finalists from 2001 to 2005 were Indian-American. Obviously, this is way outside the bounds of random variation.

Well, that percentage this year was more than 50%. 6 out the 11 finalists (Scripps list) were Indian-American. There is an interesting interview on NPR of Balu Natarajan, the first Indian-American winner in 1985. He credits this success to the North-South Foundation a non-profit that promotes education in India. NSF organizes a Spelling Bee every year in the US which effectively is the breeding ground for the National Spelling Bee winners. Kavya won the junior NSF Bee in 2004. Incidentally, Balu Natarajan, in 1985 won on ‘milieu’, which would be a softball for today’s contestants.

It is ironic that Indians, whose mother tongues all spell words the way they are pronounced, should excel at Spelling Bee which exists because of the illogical, wayward spellings in the English language.