A look at baseball data from a statistical modeling perspective! There is a fascination among baseball fans and the media to collect data on every imaginable event during a baseball game and this book addresses a number of questions that are of interest to many baseball fans. These include how to rate players, predict the outcome of a game or the attainment of an achievement, making sense of situational data, and deciding the most valuable players in the World Series. Aimed at a general audience, the text does not assume any prior background in probability or statistics, although a knowledge of high school abgebra will be helpful.

"... a smart and energetic collection of essays on baseball statistics. Curve Ball doesn't play misty-eyed homage to baseball's traditions and conventional wisdoms.... This is great stuff.... Curve Ball makes clear how pleasurable [stats] can be, and arguably how important, to view the great American game with real precision." -- The Wall Street Journal "Rating: 4.5 out of 5. Must own!" -- Baseballnotebook.com "In [Curve Ball] Albert & Bennett explain the game in ways the conventional press - even titans such as Bill James - cannot." -- Baseball America "[The book] illustrates how statistical reasoning can be useful in teasing out the role of chance from performance in baseball to better assess ability.... Curve Ball represents another advance in the genre of baseball and statistics books." -- Journal of the American Statistical Association There is a fascination among baseball fans and the media to collect data on every imaginable event during a baseball game and to use these data to try to understand characteristics of the game. But patterns in baseball data are difficult to detect due to the inherent chance variation that is present. This book addresses a number of questions that are of interest to many baseball fans - including how to rate players, predict the outcome of a game or the attainment of an attainment, make sense of situational data, and decide the most valuable players in the World Series. Curve Ball is directed to a general audience and does not assume that the reader has any prior background in probability or statistics, although knowledge of high school algebra will be helpful.

" Quick and fun with a satisfying resolution."
VOYA
All Brad remembers about that party was that his friend Alden Whitlock drove him home. He also has the nagging feeling that while he was sleeping in the passenger seat, Alden hit something--or someone. Alden and his father, a powerful judge, deny that anything took place. Brad isn't so sure--especially when beautiful Ellen Hanson comes searching in town for her lost father. Suddenly Brad is forced to examine his cushioned world of privilege and to choose between the truth and deceit. Either way, Brad could lose....

A collection of a wide range of research papers on applications of statistics to various sports from journals published by the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society from 2000 through 2004. The anthology is divided into eight sections (Baseball, Cricket, Football, Golf, Olympics/Track & Field, Soccer, Other Sports, and Miscellaneous), each comprising several research articles on applications of statistics to the corresponding sport written by leading researchers, and each featuring an original introduction written by a leading researcher on the application of statistics to the corresponding sport. The anthology includes research papers at all levels of statistical sophistication that utilize a wide variety of statistical methods, and should therefore be of great interest to the statistically inclined sports fan as well as instructors and students of statistics who are looking for examples of interesting applications of statistics to problems in sports.

Discover some of the most innovative of the 6.5 million patents that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted since Thomas Jefferson issued the first one in 1790. Updated and reformatted from the original 2004 edition, Ingenious Patents presents each device along with background about the inventor, interesting sidebars and history, and an excerpt from the original patent application. Liberally sprinkled throughout are photos of original models and patent diagrams created by the inventors themselves and annotated to show exactly how each item works. Entries include creative commercial successes in fields as diverse as medicine, aeronautics, computing, agriculture, and consumer goods. Readers are certain to find a topic of interest here, whether it is the history behind the patent for a Pez dispenser, cathode ray tube, kitty litter, DNA fingerprinting, or the design of a Fender Stratocaster guitar.