From the category archives:

Sports Stat of the Week

Can you win in Teal?

So it is official. The Philly Flyers will play the Chicago Blackhawks for the Stanley Cup. Montreal, the third “Original Six” in the conference finals was axed by the Flyers tonight. Wow. Montreal has a losing streak a mile long (last won the cup in 1986, quarter century itch?). . . but guess who’s streak [...]

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Superstar Effect

Everyone’s favorite Intimidators The Weekend Journal recently published an article on one of my favorite topics – the Superstar Effect. They also kindly included a list of the most famous intimidators. Here is that list: Muhammad Ali – noting himself as the “greatest” and following it up with a nasty punch . . . very [...]

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Freedom of Speech

As I dig through journals for interesting tidbits I often find myself far afield from the original topic at hand, which is exactly what happened the other day. I was reading a piece on the influence the color of the box that holds your local traffic signal has on traffic flow – not the color [...]

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Stat of the Week – Monkeys and Medals

Lionel Tiger shares the history of monkeys and medal in his latest Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal. He posits that there is a biological need for humans to have games such as the Olympics Like our primate cousins, competition is in our blood. Is this just more justification for what my less athletically-inclined [...]

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Sports Stat of the Week: Old Guns, Young Guns

Sports Stat of the Week It’s all in the numbers…. Never mind what happened Sunday afternoon . . . I turned off the second display in my office and focused on teaching our Advanced Quant class. The students didn’t have to know the Boys were being destroyed by Future Rapper Favre. (Pants on the Ground? [...]

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Numbers for Nerds

If you get excited about numbers, today is a spetacular day. 010110 It is a rare opportunity to present the date in binary form (that’s not the actual binary date however). So just how rare is it? Have you figured out how many times in a century you can represent the date with 1s and [...]

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Mastery – how to know when to get back to basics

What do you call it when a defender “bounces” a puck into his own goal? Ready? . . . Heart Breaking. Actually I can’t believe I have yet to find the term . . . surely there is a term for this phenomenon given what my beloved Robi had to say about it, “I hope [...]

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Sports Statistic of the Week: Cowboys versus Giants

Brett Favre is looking royal in purple. Hard to believe he recently crossed into 40. Though they lost to the Cardinals . . . “I’m anxious to go watch it on the news because I’m pretty sure everybody is going to talk about what Brett Favre did wrong, and not talk about how our defense [...]

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Nonverbal Influence: Uniform Color

If you knew that the color you were wearing could influence the outcome of a game/deal/date, would you change what you are wearing? What’s Color got to do with it? Are TEAL uniforms (San Jose Sharks) killing any chance for a cup? This week we look at uniform color. Does it surprise you that teams [...]

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Earn 59% more Just by making one switch….

So you’re a lefty and life is tough? Stop your whining. Look at the numbers . . . you’re in pretty good company . . . if you can survive adolescence. This week we compare the salaries of left-handed pitchers with the average salary of all pitchers over the past 20 years. I can be [...]

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