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Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Dhoni vs Bevan continued


Dhoni vs Bevan continued

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted – Albert Einstein

Incidentally I am planning to provide a very important piece of statistics for the nation and police department in general for the New Year 2015 i.e. as usually many people drink on 31st December evening /night and drive and some end up dying in accident, statistically speaking 31st December is a great health hazard as it causes maximum deaths on roads and hence roads must be closed to all traffic
Every war has collateral damages; every love affair has incidental beneficiaries at least the peanut vendor in beaches.

The great game of cricket is similarly the great collateral damage /incidental benefit that seeped into the subcontinent due to colonialism. Thankfully people in the subcontinent did not take to golf or rugby with similar interest and involvement and hence naturally did not shine in them. What could have been the reasons? There could be many. I do not venture to evaluate them based on statistics.
Cutting short and coming to cricket as we have adopted it and also have performed well in it we can appreciate its many facets which render it amenable to be scientifically analyzed and artistically appreciated as a great sport.
Reducing it to statistics is doing injustice to the game and its important facets its scientific techniques, its artistic skills, its many marvelous inherent dynamics and dimensions.

Why at all Sports, science and anything and everything will have to be subjected to justification through statistics- a pseudo science?
Being in a predominantly statistics driven industry, namely Insurance whose back bone is said to be  actuaries I can say the whole insurance business, if analyzed without any prejudice anyone can make out has its swings, upward and downward purely based on economic factors and market trends and not based on the products offered after all statistically analyzed number crunching and logical reasoning.
Statistically speaking Sachin is the best batsman ever produced by India but he can never be placed ahead of Sunil Gavaskar or Rahul Dravid in terms of technical perfection; cannot be compared with V.V.S.Lakshman and Azharuddhin in wrist work and ability to score of any ball anywhere on the onside; can never come anywhere near Srikanth and Shewag in flamboyance; can never be like Ganguly in reading the opposition and outsmarting them in marshalling his resources. I am confining my comparisons with batsmen within India who played mostly in his era.
I would like to maintain that Bevan was one of the best sprinters with pads on who could also play some shots with the bat.
Even statistically here is a very relevant statistical account.

I would therefore like to reiterate my old write up which was written the after the argument in my blog

and also provide below some interesting take on statistics as a subject, all culled from the internet which I found very interesting.
A statistician is a person who draws a mathematically precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.
One passed by Gary Ramseyer:
Statistics play an important role in genetics. For instance, statistics prove that numbers of offspring is an inherited trait. If your parent didn't have any kids, odds are you won't either.
One day there was a fire in a wastebasket in the office of the Dean of Sciences. In rushed a physicist, a chemist, and a statistician. The physicist immediately starts to work on how much energy would have to be removed from the fire to stop the combustion. The chemist works on which reagent would have to be added to the fire to prevent oxidation. While they are doing this, the statistician is setting fires to all the other wastebaskets in the office. "What are you doing?" the others demand. The statistician replies, "Well, to solve the problem, you obviously need a larger sample size."
Quoted by Steve Simon, www.pmean.com, and attributed to Gary C. Ramseyer's First Internet Gallery of Statistics Jokes at www.ilstu.edu/~gcramsey/Gallery.html


A statistician confidently tried to cross a river that was 1 meter deep on average. He drowned.
It is proven that the celebration of birthdays is healthy. Statistics show that those people who celebrate the most birthdays become the oldest. -- S. den Hartog, Ph D. Thesis Universtity of Groningen.
I remember seeing George Burns on TV being interviewed on his 100th birthday. He was puffing on a cigar. The interviewer made some comment about the incongruity of longevity and smoking. George Burns: "Twenty years ago my doctor told me that these cigars were going to kill me" Interviewer: "What does he say now?" George Burns: "I don't know. He's dead" –  Thylacoleo
Two statisticians were traveling in an airplane from LA to New York. About an hour into the flight, the pilot announced that they had lost an engine, but don’t worry, there are three left. However, instead of 5 hours it would take 7 hours to get to New York.
A little later, he announced that a second engine failed, and they still had two left, but it would take 10 hours to get to New York.
Somewhat later, the pilot again came on the intercom and announced that a third engine had died. Never fear, he announced, because the plane could fly on a single engine. However, it would now take 18 hours to get to New York.
At this point, one statistician turned to the other and said, “Gee, I hope we don’t lose that last engine, or we’ll be up here forever!”
Statistics means never having to say you’re certain.
Statistics is the art of never having to say you’re wrong.
Variance is what any two statisticians are at.
It’s like the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. “Well,” he explained, “I have to put some horse-meat in too. But I mix them 50:50. One horse, one rabbit.” (Darrel Huff, How to Lie with Statistics)
A statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say that on the average he feels fine.
3 out of 4 Americans make up 75% of the population.
Death is 99 per cent fatal to laboratory rats.
A statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say that on the average he feels fine.
Fett’s Law: Never replicate a successful experiment.
A Greater Than Averge Number of Legs
The great majority of people have more than the average number of legs. Amongst the 57 million people in Britain there are probably 5,000 people who have only one leg. Therefore the average number of legs is
 (5000 x 1 + 56,995,000 x 2)/57,000,000 = 1.9999123.
The Ten Commandments of Statistical Inference
1.         Thou shalt not hunt statistical inference with a shotgun.
2.         Thou shalt not enter the valley of the methods of inference without an experimental design.
3.         Thou shalt not make statistical inference in the absence of a model.
4.         Thou shalt honor the assumptions of thy model.
5.         Thy shalt not adulterate thy model to obtain significant results.
6.         Thy shalt not covet thy colleagues’ data.
7.         Thy shalt not bear false witness against thy control group.
8.         Thou shalt not worship the 0.05 significance level.
9.         Thy shalt not apply large sample approximation in vain.
10.       Thou shalt not infer causal relationships from statistical significance.
            A statistician is …someone who insists on being certain about uncertainty – Unknown
someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about  and make you feel it’s your fault – Unknown *
             
            A woman hears from her doctor that she has only half a year to live. The doctor advises her to marry a statistician and to live in South Dakota. The woman asks, “Will this cure my illness?” Answer of the doctor, “No, but the half year will seem pretty long” – Unknown *

            A statistician and the statistician’s wife were marooned on a remote island. When the wife asked how they were going to escape the island and get home, the statistician replied … “Assuming we had a boat…”
Statistics are fiction in its most uninteresting form – Evan Esar
Statistics is
The science that can prove everything except the usefulness of statistics –  Evan Esar
The art of lying by means of figures –  William Stekel
Like a bikini - what they reveal is suggestive but what they conceal is vital –Aaron Levenstein
The straw out of which I, like every other economist, have to make the bricks – A. Marshall
Yet another mistress to deceive us – Spanish proverb
             
Statistics may be defined as ‘a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty’ – W.A. Wallis
Ten per cent of all car thieves are left-handed. All Polar bears are left-handed. If your car is stolen, there’s a ten per cent chance it was nicked by a Polar bear – Unknown *
             
            There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics – Benjamin Disraeli
             
            There are two kinds of statistics: the kind you look up and the kind you make up – Rex Stout
             
            Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything –  Gregg Easterbrook
             
            Top ten reasons to become a statistician … *
- deviation is considered normal
- we feel complete and sufficient
- we are “mean” lovers
- statisticians do it discretely and continuously
- we are right 95 per cent of the time
- we can legally comment on someone's posterior distribution
- we may not be normal but we are transformable
- we never have to say we are certain
- we are honestly significantly different
- no one wants our jobs





I have omitted some very interesting adults’ only statistics jokes which I normally share with the officers of actuarial department.


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