Wraith

I figured as much.

No, that wasn't the whole idea.

Bungee Jumper is correct that the binomial distribution for discrete variables is somewhat analogous to the normal distribution for continuous variables. That being said, some of the explanations that have resulted trying to rationalize what he said are reeeaaaally stretching logical thought. The binomial distribution, as HA initially asserted, is used when there are only two discrete outcomes from a process. Where some of the rationalizations have departed from logic is by lumping "anything else" together as a "failure." For the binomial distribution to be useful, what is defined as a success or failure has to be meaningful. Randomly selecting a possible outcome such as two or three to be "success" and making everything else "failure" is not meaningful. If I were to do that, I would not get a useful picture of the underlying probability distribution. In fact, I would need ELEVEN seperate binomial distributions to get a useful discription of the pair-of dice-rolling process (2 is successful, all else failure, then 3 is successful, all else failure, then 4....and so forth). Using the definition supplied by some of you, ANYTHING can be represented using the binomial distribution (which is true) and that representation would be useful (which is not true). The binomial distribution is VERY useful for determining the probability of getting repeated values (I rolled a 12 the first time, what are the odds I get a 12 the second time...?). In reality, the pair of dice scenario is MULTINOMIAL. The normal distribution is much more useful for describing the pair-of-dice scenario despite having to make the concession to "not-quite-continuous variables." After all, not much, if anything, in the real world can actually be measured on a continuous basis, yet the normal distribution works just fine. So, in conclusion, BJ's original comment was not wrong. But I really have to laugh at other peoples attempts to explain what he meant (as if he needs their help...). OWNED? Please! Hahahahaha.

Gee, ordinarily, you would think that the only thing required of you to move up the list would be to PLAY BETTER THAN THE PEOPLE AHEAD OF YOU ON THE LIST. I wasn't aware there was some kind of statistical criteria that needed to be met...

This is an incomplete analysis at best. Why not look at the whole game, for starters? Secondly, do you have any "analysis" from other DEs to compare it to? It's hard to take this seriously as it stands right now....

You've drawn your little arbitrary line in the sand, and you won't budge. It's either 250 yards passing or bust. It doesn't matter that you've shown absolutely zero evidence that passing more win games. It doesn't matter that others in this topic have shown that running more DOES win games. You cling to the Colts/Bills/Titans example as your only shred of evidence, but the fact is, the Titans won against the Colts by passing for 163 yards and running for 219. Do you have that short a memory that you can't remember how we lost in that Colts game, or against the Patriots in the first game? Both opponents ran more than 5:00 off the clock on one fourth quarter drive by RUNNING THE BALL. THAT IS WHAT GOOD TEAMS DO IN THE FOURTH QUARTER WITH A LEAD! But of course, none of that matters. All that matters is, you've picked a number, and damn it, that's what matters. It's either meet your arbitrary standard, or you will go home and cry and take your ball with you.

If I want to annoint J.P. Losman as pretty decent, damn it, I will annoint him as pretty decent!

You are making this waaaaay too complicated. Evaluate how well he throws, not how much he throws. Losman is 18th in passing yardage because he is 20th in passing attempts. The fact is, he's 12th in YPA, 10th in Comp. PCT, and 13th in TD PCT. Those are all statistics that are all independent of passing attempts, and that is where Losman gets to show that he is a pretty decent NFL quarterback. Yardage by itself is not very meaningful. Look at the top ten in yardage, it is littered with underperformers such as Jon Kitna (3rd), Favre (6th), Roethlisberger (7th), and E. Manning (10th). Look at the passing attempt leaders: Favre (1st), Kitna (2nd), Bulger (5th), E. Manning (6th), B. Johnson (8th), and Delhomme (10th). These are not QBs from teams that are winning many ball games....

The entire line played great. The most encouraging things I saw were that even though they let the pocket collapse a couple of times, most of the time they had a very nice pocket, and never let defenders come untouched. The Bills also succesfully ran to the right side of the line, which is huge, because we haven't seen much of that with this "new" oline yet.

Ah, I understand now, thanks.

The Bills played today? According to Ian Eagle, the Jets were playing themselves this week....and lost.

I disagree. I think the most telling stat of the day is that the Jets longest pass play of the game was 23 yards by Coles on a SCREEN pass against our DECIMATED secondary. We had Jim Leonhard (a guy who was out of the league the first few weeks of this season) and Coy Wire sharing time at safety, and Kiwaukee Thomas starting at corner, and all Pennington could do was dink and dunk. Since we're both basing it off what we think we saw, I guess we'll have to leave it at that.

Exactly. The MAC actually produces teams that are capable of making noise in the Big Dance. In 2001, Kent State made it to the Great Eight and lost for the second time all season. The first time they had lost that season was to Reggie's UB squad.

This leads me to believe you didn't actually watch the game. UB played 7 players the entire game (Yassin, Greg Gamble, Eric Moore, Andy Robinson, Calvin Betts, Parnell Smith, and Vadim Fedetov). UB was simply out of gas with 5:00 left to go, and it had nothing to do with strategy or coaching. A couple of years ago, when we had Calvin Cage, Mark Bortz, Jason Bird, and Mario Jordan coming off the bench, we might have won. But our bench is simply too unproven at this point in the season to go up against Pitt, which is known for the their depth.

Actually, measurement error does need to be present for the behavior Holcomb's Arm has described in his initial premise to occur. Without it, absolutely no "movement" of the scores will be seen on any subsequent retests, no matter how many times you try it.

You're point in this post, I believe, is that how extreme a person scores in regard to their OWN "mean" or "true IQ" or something determines the probability of scoring higher or lower on a subsequent retest. If I score extremely far below my "real IQ" the first time I take an IQ test, it is very probable I will score higher the second time I take the test, even though my first result was extremely high compared to the overall population mean. This is absolutely reasonable, and more importantly, true. However, you seem to be ignoring the fact that if the overall population being sampled from is normally distributed, and I ask people who scored at some extreme value, I am more likely to get someone who has a "real IQ" closer to average and scored at a more extreme value due to testing variation than I am to get someone who has a "real IQ" further away from average and who scored closer to average due to variation. That will always be the case because there are more people in the center of the distribution of the overall population than there are on the tails. As HA said, if the underlying population were uniformly distributed, this behavior would not happen. So the overall population distribution is an underlying factor and that is the point HA is trying to make here, I believe.

Did you really mean to say this? Because that is not true and goes against what you've been saying for weeks. If we continue the assumption that error on the test is normally distributed and centered at zero, the only way someone would have a 50/50 chance of doing better/worse the second time they had the test is if they had zero error (gotten the "true" IQ) the first time they took the test. Unless I've totally misread what you're trying to say.

I'm sorry, you are a f@$king moron if you actually believe what you are saying. Hell, I thought this topic was sarcasm it was so ludicrously stupid. UB loses by 3 points to the 2nd best team in the country, and you're calling for his job? Insanity. Witherspoon IS the reason UB Basketball is where it is today, a program on the rise. His recruiting ability is what lured players like Turner Battle and Mark Bortz to Buffalo and they put the team on the map. Going "in the right direction in the Mid-Continent Conference" is hardly comparable to be a major player in the MAC Conference finals for the last four years. Hell, Buffalo actually gets national media attention now and nearly got an AT LARGE NCAA bid two years ago. The basketball program was dormant before Witherspoon. Buffalo has won many big games in the last five years. Get a clue.

I still don't think you fully grasp what people are trying to tell you... We'll play the Cowboys once and only once during the regular season every fourth year. We'll play the Chiefs, Bronco, Chargers, etc., AT LEAST once every third year, with the possibility of playing them in between if they finish in the same slot in their division as us... It's impossible for the scheduling system to have us miss AFC opponents for years, unless you mean only two years, in which case I would say you're gradually exaggerating the problem.

Plummer's statistics were pretty bad his ENTIRE career in Arizona. He's had some pretty good years in Denver, at least statistically, but the stats from this year resemble his Arizona years much more than his Denver years.

The first quarter of the Houston game is not overly inflating his splits for the first quarter all year. He has been pretty consistenly rated in the mid-90s in the 1st and 4th quarter and in the 70s range in the 2nd and 3rd quarter all year. Starting and finishing strong and playing crappy in the middle does seem to be Losman's hallmark at the moment. I can think of worse modes of operation to have, but I would be very interested in finding out why Losman is so much worse in the middle of games. I suspect it is because the passing game, either by design (from Fairchild) or just in practice (Losman), get's very conservative in the middle of games. I've seen the gunslinger-like play from Losman in the beginning of many games and at the end of many games, but the Minnesota game is the only one that stands out in my mind where Losman was consistently good for the entire game. This is definitely an area of improvement for Losman.

Isn't that what makes debate fun? You always know the other guy is coming back for more...

You’re right, my initial response was only addressing whether an IQ test will show variation. Taken in the larger context of this debate, I can definitely see how it could confuse the issue. I did not do a very good job of making a distinction between measurement variation and population variation. I guess what I should have said was that in every test there are two broadly defined sources of variation: A) The thing BEING tested B) The thing DOING the testing A very basic definition of a “capable” measurement system is that the variation from measurement system (source B above) is sufficiently small that variation from the process (source A above) can be seen. In other words, the noise does not overwhelm the signal. There is an extreme opposite case where an extremely incapable measurement system can demonstrate zero variation but be totally inaccurate. This is often the case when the measurement system or test lacks sufficient resolution (called gage resolution). In that case, the test will probably show no variation but may show bias (the error PDF standard deviation = 0 and mean != 0). This is what I was getting at with my yardstick and micrometer example. In a lot of cases, the two sources of variation are very distinct. But in my example above, regarding the IQ test, the difference between process variation and measurement variation is not well defined. Is the amount of adrenaline in your blood stream a controllable factor (in which case, any variation it causes in the test score would be measurement variation) or not (in which case, any variation it causes would be process variation). This becomes even more ambiguous when you consider that adrenaline levels can be PARTIALLY regulated (removing any outside stimulus from the testing environment) but you cannot keep the test subject from daydreaming…. Of course, I know next to nothing about IQ tests, so this particular example may be totally useless. I have no idea if adrenaline affects how well you perform on an IQ test. But the points remain that: everything shows variation; just because a test exhibits no variation does not make it an adequate test; there are two broadly defined categories of variation in a test, and occasionally it gets difficult trying to figure out which category various factors belong to. It’s an interesting subject. One I wrestle with a occasionally in my day-to-day work.

Where the heck were you hanging out? I lived in Buffalo for four years and never heard racial slurs with any kind of regularity. There was the occasional idiot, of course, but no more than anywhere else I've ever lived. As for anti-semintism, that is an interesting perspective given that Buffalo has a pretty significant Jewish population, at least in some areas.

Let's stop calling it "luck" and start calling it "variation." If you've got a test or measurement system that shows no variation, you have either an incredibly good test, or an incredibly bad one. It either means the test procedure has minimized the variation to such a minimal level that the measurement system is incapable of discerning the variation, or the measurement system is so bad that it is incapable of discerning the variation when it is not at a minimal level. These are really the same thing, because we get to define how minimal is minimal enough. I could measure the length of something that is nominally supposed to be 36 inches long with a set of micrometers and with a yard stick. If the lengths are varying on the scale of .001 of inch, the micrometer will probably show variation and the yard stick certainly won't. Which measurement system is more capable? Disregard the fact that you'd need a very strange set of mics to measure something 36" long with.... Everything in the real world shows variation. That includes human intelligence. There are plenty of outside factors that affect your ability to think, such as the amount of rest you've had, caffeine in the blood stream, distracting factors, etc. How you think, solve problems, and answer questions, varies to some extent over time. If a test of human intelligence shows no variation, it simply means it is not capable of detecting the variation. Sometimes, that's acceptable, sometimes it's not.