How Efficient are You? The NBA's "Best Basketball Player" Calculation

February 25, 2009 - 5:20am — Michael Manoochehri

How efficient are you? Let's take your job. Add up all the number of tasks you did well today at work. Subtract the amount of mistakes you made. Divide that number by the amount of days you have worked. Such a hypothetical number might give you an estimate of how efficient you were at your job. If you had an army of statisticians observing your every move, you might be able calculate this number. And if you could accurately calculate that number for every employee in your organization, it would be very hard to argue with the boss's selection of "Employee of the Month."

Lebron jamesLeBron James currently has the highest PER in the NBA, and at this rate, he might have the highest PER in a season ever, besting even Michael Jordan's highest.

There actually are a few jobs out there that have armies of statisticians monitoring the performance of every employee, and NBA basketball is one of them. And much like your current job, basketball is a group activity in which an individual player can affect the performance of others in the group. Moneyball author Michael Lewis recently wrote, "there is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual." Unlike baseball, where games usually play out as a network of individual player situations, or football, where plays are painstakingly scripted, the players on a basketball team have the freedom to make individual decisions about what they do at every moment. For example, a player who makes a tough shot, instead of making a pass for an easy score, increases his own scoring average at the expense of the stats of another player.

However, players don't all make the same amount of money. Some players are clearly more talented than others. But in a sport where one player's stats can be so dependent on other members of the team, how does one attempt to quantify a player's value? One way is to try to calculate efficiency: How well does a player do things, without making mistakes, while in the game?

John Hollinger of ESPN attempts to answer the question of "Which player is the most efficient?" with his Personal Efficiency Rating, or PER. BasketballReference.com describes Hollinger's PER as a number that "sums up all a player's positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player's performance." The complete method of calculating a PER (along with many necessary normalizations) is here, but the quicker, dirtier, and similar NBA Efficiency Rating can be calculated using this formula:

NBA Eff. =[(Pts + Reb + Ast + Blk + Stl) - (Missed FG + Missed FT + TO)] / Games Played

So, who has the highest PER rating of all time? Well, it's hard to compare players of past generations to current ones, because rules and scoring opportunities haved changed over the years. For example, there was no three-point line in the NBA before 1979. However, many people have attempted to find ways to normalize efficiency data across each of season of not only the NBA, but the ABA as well. BasketballReference.com, for example, claims that the players with the highest career PER ratings, in descending order are: Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, David Robinson, Wilt Chamberlain, and LeBron James. Does that sound like a list of five of the best players of all time? I would say that it's not too far off. Where's "the Logo," Jerry West? #20. How about Magic Johnson? #11. Dr. J? #24.

Is it possible that a player is valuable even if they don't put up big offensive numbers? What if the player contributes to a game without contributing many of the stats featured in PER rating? I recently blogged about a great article by Michael Lewis which describes the game of Shane Battier, the "no-stats All-Star." Lewis claims that Battier's contribution to the game - for example, striving to defer to a teammate in a more efficient scoring position - is not easily measured by formulas like the PER. Instead, Battier contributes a great deal to a different stat known as the "plus-minus," which basically measures how many more points the team scores when Battier is in the game. Apparently, Battier's "plus-minus" is similar to the ratings of other All-Star players such as Carmelo Anthony.

All this being said, I think there is an even more interesting individual performance stat, and the only possible values are "Yes" or "No": Can a basketball player in the NBA score 16 points in 2 minutes? If that player is LeBron James, the answer is Yes. And the video is here.

Read More:

 

 

Howto: Set up an Android Dev Phone Without a SIM Card (Updated)

February 22, 2009 - 8:29am — Michael Manoochehri

Android PhoneI recently got a hold of an Android Development phone. One of the projects I am working on at the iSchool is to port a geolocation demo I made from the iPhone to the Android platform. Calling the task a "port" is being generous: the Apple iPhone development environment is, in many ways, very different from Google's Android SDK. That being said, there are certainly many similarities as well, including similar paradigms for accessing GPS data.

In general, both environments seem to live and die by their ancestral roots. An iPhone App's structure is basically an extension of the Cocoa environment that is used to build applications for desktop Macs. iPhone Apps are written in Objective-C, a language I grew quite fond of after just a few "Hello Worlds." Android Apps are built using plain vanilla Java, along with a huge library of Android specific classes. The Android utility and build tools are great. I love being able to plug the phone into my Ubuntu box, start a shell, and be able to run standard Unix commands directly on the phone.

But no doubt, if you chose to read this post based on the title alone, you've heard all of this before. I got stuck for a little bit trying to understand how to use the Android phone without having an extra SIM card. And no, don't just stick your iPhone SIM card in that thing. These instructions assume you have installed the Android SDK, and you have access to the command line programs in the "tools" directory (such as adb). So, let's just get to business... here is how you do it:

 

  1. Plug your Android Dev Phone into your computer via USB.
  2. Get into the Phone's OS... Open up a terminal and type: adb -d shell
  3. Now, change to the Phone's settings database directory, type: cd /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/
  4. Give yourself admin permissions by typing: su
  5. Now, you are going to use sqlite to alter the phone setting database, and turn provisioning on, so type: sqlite3 settings.db
  6. Ok, now you should be in the sqlite program. Use this SQL command to alter the settings database: INSERT INTO system (name, value) VALUES ('device_provisioned', 1);
  7. Now, exit sqlite by typing this (don't forget the "."): .quit
  8. Reboot the Phone by typing: reboot

When the phone reboots, you need to open up the settings screen to activate your WiFi settings.

 

  1. First, get back into the Phone's OS by typing: adb shell
  2. Now, run this command to open up the settings screen on the Phone, which will allow you to turn on WiFi: am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -n com.android.settings/.Settings

That's it... from here you can create your Google account, start developing, and even install Skype and make some phone calls over WiFi. For more information about this, check out the "Android Blogging Network."

Bill Buxton: The World isn't About Optimal Efficiency, it's About Optimal Delight

February 20, 2009 - 5:12am — Michael Manoochehri

Bill Buxton encourages quick mockups of interfaces. In this exercise, our group created a simple stateful interface mockup with post-it notes and iMovie.

One of the most important thinkers in Human-Computer Interaction and Design, Bill Buxton, visited the Berkeley Institute of Design this week to give a workshop on sketching. Buxton is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft, a columnist for Businessweek, a former professor, and he previously helped develop such software tools as Maya as Chief Scientist at both SGI and Alias.

Bill advises designers not to sketch the design of a product, but rather to sketch the "experience" of using it - and to do it quickly. Sketching is not just about drawing. Buxton, who claims to be a poor draftsman, encourages his design team to employ the proper skills to "sketch" interfaces, foamcore models, and paper versions of mechanical devices.

Special thanks to Lora Oehlberg and the other organizers of the BiD Design Clinics for making this event happen!

iSchool Students visit Sun Microsystems

February 18, 2009 - 11:22pm — Michael Manoochehri

I, along with a few other iSchool students were very fortunate this week to be able to hitch a ride with the Haas School of Business to participate in an Executive Briefing visit to Sun Microsystems.

Choosing an Audio Recording App for the iPhone

February 15, 2009 - 11:09pm — Michael Manoochehri

Recorder the AppIn gearing up to start producing e.nTangled.net Podcasts, I have been in the market for a Zoom H4. They are available at some local music stores, as well as Best Buy, but the best prices are online, and if I wait for delivery, I might not have the gizmo in time for some upcoming interview opportunities.

With the current recording equipment I own, I have two options - either lug my desktop Behringer USB mixing board, laptop and external mic around, or use my aging Olympus digital audio recorder (which records clips in some strange, non-standard audio format). Then it dawned on me - I already have a portable device that can record audio - my iPhone.

I want a recorder app that can record to a decent file quality for voice, and that is stable enough to not crash during an extended interview. Sounds simple, right? Like all iPhone utility apps, there are many many choices in the App store, and it is not immediately obvious which one suits my needs. One of the biggest problems for the consumer is that, on the mobile app store, iPhone apps are not well organized. A user who queries for "recorder" is rewarded with an unsortable parade of candidate apps - differentiated by nothing other than price, and the number of reviews.

There are many sites that specialize in reviewing iPhone apps. I compared apps on available features and price. I settled on - guess what? "Recorder," the audio capture app which appears to have the most reviews. It wins on price as well, only $0.99. I'll post a few audio clips created by this device soon!

 

 

Moneyball Author Michael Lewis on the "Sabermetrics" Approach to Basketball

February 15, 2009 - 6:56am — Michael Manoochehri

I just got done reading a fascintating NYT article by Michael Lewis on the use of statistical analysis in NBA Basketball. Lewis primarily focuses on the Houston Rockets' Shane Battier, who produces average stats in the scoring, assists and rebounding department. And yet, when Battier plays, the Rockets tend to win far more than they do when he has missed games due to injury. If Battier is so average, how can this be?

One interesting statistic that Lewis covers is called "plus-minus," which is basically what happens to a team's score when the player in the game. If a player is a "plus-minus" 3, it means that his team is averaging 3 more points per game then the opposing team when the player is on the floor. An superstar like the Celtic's Kevin Garnett might average about a 10. League MVP Steve Nash once had about a "plus-minus" of about 14 in his best year. What is the very average Shane Battier's "plus-minus?" It's been up to 10, but on average it's been 6, which turns out to be about the same as all-stars like Vince Carter and Carmelo Anthony. So, if you are playing "Moneyball," and you have to choose between a Vince Carter and a Shane Battier? You go with "average" Battier, of course, and save yourself millions of dollars in player salary. It's a great read!

Lewis, by the way, writes about other aspects of sports... if you have never read Moneyball, or the raised-by-wolves football book "The Blind Side," add them to your GoodReads list!

India Digital Heritage Project Documents both the Tangible and the Intangible

February 12, 2009 - 6:28am — Michael Manoochehri

UC iSchool Rock Star Mohit Gupta sent in a link to a project from his alma mater, Microsoft Research India. The India Digital Heritage Project is an attempt to "collect, store and share data on architectural sites and stimulate research in visualization, computer vision, graphics and related fields."

Check out the Ars Technica article about it.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:3bd42ab0-8cf3-4c1a-9526-76dae0e20882&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=shared" target="_new" title="India Digital Heritage Project: Sri Andal Temple">Video: India Digital Heritage Project: Sri Andal Temple</a>

The "Author's Guild" wants the Robot in your Kindle 2 to Pipe Down

February 11, 2009 - 5:46pm — Michael Manoochehri

The Author’s Guild, which claims to be “the nation’s leading advocate for writers’ interests in effective copyright protection, fair contracts and free expression” since its founding in 1912, appears to be upset over the text-to-speech feature in Amazon’s upcoming Kindle 2 eBook device.

I can’t locate the press release from the Author’s Guild, but from the news reports I have read (quietly to myself, and not out loud) it appears that the Guild is trying to make the case that reading a book “out loud” violates the copyright owner’s right to exclusively create “derivative works based upon the work.”

I would argue that the text-to-speech feature of the Kindle 2 does not produce a derivitave work, but rather is an alternative way of accessing the material one has already purchased. I would describe it as analagous to, say, plugging in an external monitor to the device in order to see the text more clearly. I would also ask if this feature really impacts the Audio Book market - do people generally buy Audio Books as alternatives to regular text, perhaps for a unique performance experience?

[Originally posted here.]

P.W. Singer on the Daily Show: Does the Culture Drive the Technology, or Vice-versa?

January 31, 2009 - 6:05am — Michael Manoochehri



Allowing Rural Communities to Tell their Own Stories: Community Narrative Systems

November 19, 2008 - 5:52am — Michael Manoochehri

The following was a final essay written by Michael Manoochehri and Carol Chen for Tapan Parikh's 2008 "Developing Rural Computing Applications" course at the UC iSchool.

One application of Information Technology that we would like to explore further is the potential for communities to tell their own stories about the what they see as the most important needs that they have. A common thread of the lecturers featured in the Designing Rural Computing Applications course is the idea that communities know best what they need, and that researchers should spend a great deal of time learning, acknowledging, and helping members of rural communities achieve their goals.

Many of our guest lecturers advised students to not only spend a great deal of time assessing the most pressing needs of people on the ground, but to also to commit a great deal of time to determine these needs. Lee Thorn, for example, advised us to leave “80% of all the solutions in the hands of the people.” Yet there seems to be a communication gap between technology advocates and rural citizens in the developing world. The course has also produced quite a lot of debate about how technology can best serve rural communities.

ICTD should not just be focused on providing gizmos to rural communities. Information technology should also be thought of as a tool to allow rural communities to tell their own stories and provide insight into their own needs. What are the most pressing problems in a particular community? Is it education? Lack of roads? Lack of health care?

Syndicate content