PR after Week 14

The system did decently last week. It went 11-5, which isn't too impressive considering that I am only picking winners.

BAL over HOU (835) Hit
ATL over CAR (781) Hit
CLE over BUF (754) Hit
PIT over CIN (624) Hit
GB over DET (535) Miss
PHI over DAL (467) Hit
KC over SD (409) Miss
TB over WSH (267) Hit
NYJ over MIA (238) Miss
NYG over MIN (222) Hit
NE over CHI (129) Hit
DEN over ARI (124) Miss
IND over TEN (123) Hit
JAC over OAK (009) Hit

For whatever reason, I mistakenly left out 2 games from last week. This is the result

SF over SEA (306) Hit

NO over STL (133) Hit

Here are the new Power Rankings:

32	CAR	0.009
31	BUF	0.064
30	ARI	0.091
29	HOU	0.099
28	DEN	0.145
27	CIN	0.147
26	SEA	0.168
25	MIN	0.211
24	DAL	0.249
23	TB	0.259
22	WSH	0.319
21	DET	0.330
20	JAC	0.409
19	TEN	0.432
18	SF	0.437
17	CHI	0.533
16	OAK	0.542
15	MIA	0.549
14	SD	0.565
13	NYJ	0.589
12	NYG	0.639
11	IND	0.705
10	STL	0.751
9	CLE	0.764
8	ATL	0.775
7	KC	0.776
6	PIT	0.854
5	PHI	0.884
4	NE	0.927
3	BAL	0.948
2	GB	0.949
1	NO	0.955

Green Bay's run at 1st ended for the first time so far. Interesting. Let's see the spreadsheet's picks for next week, as always, from highest confidence to lowest:

ATL over SEA (793)
CLE over CIN (608)
OAK over DEN (559)
MIA over BUF (361)
PIT over NYJ (342)
CHI over MIN (262)
PHI over NYG (213)
DAL over WSH (201)
ARI over CAR (129)
TEN over HOU (102)
KC over STL (88)
NE over GB (85)
JAC over IND (59)
DET over TB (26)
BAL over NO (10)
SD over SF (1)

You may have noticed since last week that the spreadsheet isn't just simply picking the team with the higher rating to win the game. What I have done is skew the teams performance numbers more heavily in it's recent games, but only for the picks, not for the power rankings. So, power rankings are determined by the whole years performance, every single game being of equal importance. But the picks view the more recent games as more important. Let's see how it goes this week. We know we are at least 1 - 0 so far. The system picked SD in the Thursday night game with probably the lowest confidence ever (1!), but it worked out.

New States

I've always been interested in redrawing maps. I don't really have the resources to do it well, but here is an attempt at an idea I have had for a while.

First, I just pretended that Hawaii and Alaska don't exist, it just made this a lot easier and nice looking. I took all 48 contiguous states and asked "Could you redraw the state lines to create 48 new states where each state had an equal population?" So this is a result of that. Wherever I could, I tried to make the new state lines either geographically and/or culturally relevant. Also, I tried to make the shapes as regular as possible and not all funky looking. It was hard sometimes when dealing with parts of the country that I was unfamiliar with, but I tried my best. This is obviously only one of many different possible solutions. I also didn't label the map since I felt it cramped it up too much.

I split down to the counties, and redrew the borders around different counties. I used the 2000 Census as my source, where I found county by county populations (or county equivalents according to the Census).

It was kind of hard around the big cities. NY had to be broken in a sort of weird way. One state, which I will call "New York" consists of Bronx, Kings (Brooklyn), New York (Manhattan), and Richmond (Staten Island) counties, so basically all of New York City excluding Queens. Then, for the other state which I will call "Long Island", I included Nassau, Suffolk, Queens counties (All the counties on Long Island excluding Kings) and Westchester. I don't know if this one makes geographical or cultural sense, but there was really not many other ways to do it.

Los Angeles was difficult too, particularly because LA county has a greater population than the average for my new states (9.5 Million, whereas my new states needed to average around 5.8 million). Consequently, LA county was the only county that had to be split itself. I needed to take about 3.5 million out of LA county and donate it to the neighboring new state "Ventura". I did a little quick research on different parts of the county, and finally decided that the San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita Valley, the Antelope Valley and the "Westside" (as defined by the LA times), would constitute around 3.5 million, and these areas were moved into the new state of "Ventura". The rest of LA county became the new state of "Los Angeles".

The new state of "Chicago" consists of Cook and Lake counties. It doesn't really include the whole metro area, and it was split somewhat arbitrarily. The rest of the metro area were sort of divvied up between the new states of "Illinois" "Michigan", "Indiana" and "Wisconsin".

The Philadelphia metro area was also split between the new states of "Penn" and "Delaware", although most of it went to "Delaware" which included no parts of the original state of Delaware but was named after the Delaware River and Bay. The District of Columbia was included on the Virginia Side, not the Maryland Side. The state of Washington was the only one that remained unchanged. It had a population ~5.8 million in 2000, and that was also the average for the 48 contiguous states.

Average population: 5,836, 483
Standard Deviation: 239, 484

And here is the table in case anyone is interested:

New State	Population	Largest City
Alabama	6,175,885	Birmingham
Arizona	5,210,556	Phoenix
Bay	5,320,818	San Jose
Chicago	6,021,097	Chicago
Michigan	5,791,047	Toledo
Conn	5,904,389	Worcester
S Carolina	6,015,507	Charlotte
Cascades	5,960,310	Portland
Huron	6,003,160	Detroit
Penn	6,045,205	Allentown
Erie	5,947,651	Buffalo
E Texas	5,972,339	Houston
Piedmont	5,799,216	Atlanta
Illinois	6,005,298	Aurora
Imperial	5,802,483	San Diego
Indiana	5,818,156	Indianapolis
Kentucky	6,002,588	Louisville
Los Angeles	5,949,586	Los Angeles
Long Island	5,906,751	Queens
Delta	5,682,122	New Orleans
Mass	5,831,486	Boston
Maryland	6,026,708	Baltimore
Coral	6,064,038	Tampa
Gold Coast	5,952,077	Miami
Mojave	5,458,623	Las Vegas
Minn	5,725,839	Minneapolis
Missowa	5,998,069	St. Louis
Hi Line	5,798,237	Omaha
N Carolina	6,016,261	Virginia Beach
New England	5,807,561	Syracuse
Georgia	5,958,274	Jacksonville
New Jersey	5,822,286	Newark
N Texas	5,985,492	Dallas
New York	5,778,899	Brooklyn
Ohio	6,054,570	Columbus
Oklansas	5,870,816	Oklahoma City
Delaware	5,380,732	Philadelphia
Plains	5,318,721	Colorado Springs
Alleghany	5,802,187	Pittsburgh
Rockies	5,721,812	Denver
Sierra	5,343,609	Fresno
S Texas	5,737,919	San Antonio
Tenn	5,889,616	Memphis
Virginia	6,430,459	Washington DC
Ventura	5,630,622	San Fernando Valley
Wisconsin	6,010,727	Milwaukee
Washington	5,894,121	Seattle
W Texas	5,507,282	El Paso

PR after Week 13

Before I start, all of everything is done with the database having no knowledge of what happened on Thursday nights. It's just too short of a turn around for me to get it up before Thursday.


The calculations had a pretty good week 13. Here are the results from what was predicted.


STL over ARI (778) HIT
NO over  CIN (732) HIT
PHI over HOU (683) HIT
GB over SF (604) HIT
KC over DEN (583) HIT
IND over DAL (536) MISS
ATL over TB (444) HIT
CHI over DET (390) HIT
CLE over MIA (359) HIT
TEN over JAC (341) MISS
SEA over CAR (222) HIT
SD over OAK (182) MISS
MIN over BUF (101) HIT
NYG over WSH (85) HIT
NE over NYJ (37) HIT
PIT over BAL (17) HIT


I don't know why this thing loves Tennessee so much, it's two weeks now that it's picked Tennessee as the better team. This will need some investigation.


Here are the power rankings after Week 12:
 32 CAR 0.013 
 31 BUF 0.039 
 30 ARI 0.051 
 29 CIN 0.139 
 28 HOU 0.142 
 27 DEN 0.177 
 26 SEA 0.232 
 25 MIN 0.236 
 24 DAL 0.267 
 23 WSH 0.271 
 22 TB 0.278 
 21 SF 0.322 
 20 DET 0.333 
 19 JAC 0.427 
 18 MIA 0.443 
 17 SD 0.453 
 16 OAK 0.519 
 15 TEN 0.529 
 14 NYG 0.593 
 13 IND 0.627 
 12 CHI 0.645 
 11 ATL 0.691 
 10 NYJ 0.698 
 9 CLE 0.816 
 8 STL 0.846 
 7 PIT 0.861 
 6 KC 0.865 
 5 PHI 0.881 
 4 NE 0.898 
 3 BAL 0.925 
 2 NO 0.936 
 1 GB 0.958 


I changed the prediction algorithm just a little bit, let's see if it works any better. Again from most confident to least:


BAL over HOU (835)
ATL over CAR (781)
CLE over BUF (754)
PIT over CIN (624)
GB over DET (535)
PHI over DAL (467)
KC over SD (409)
TB over WSH (267)
NYJ over MIA (238)
NYG over MIN (222)
NE over CHI (129)
DEN over ARI (124)
IND over TEN (123)
JAC over OAK (009)


A couple things to note: The system doesn't seem as confident in its picks as it has been in the previous two weeks. Secondly, it is picking a lot of road winners. And since it has no knowledge of Home/Away, I suspect it will do pretty badly this week. Let's see.

Map of Music LA

I've been recently seeing maps like this and this lately. I saw another one with band/solo artists too, but I can't find it now. I know I found it on reddit, but I can't seem to hit the right key words in the title of the submission. Well, just imagine that it would be a similar thing with different musical artist.

Everywhere in the thread there were discussions about which artists should be assigned to a certain state. California, being the most populous state, obviously had a lot of contenders. I got the idea that you could probably do one for the whole of California, maybe by county. In my mind, I tried to decide who would go into LA County and I was struck by the same sort of gridlock.

So I brought it down even a further level and thought that you can just do one for LA and try to map where the famous bands of LA originated. Some of these were hard to place and I had to do some reading about the history of the bands to assign them some sort of location. There was also sometimes some ambiguity as to whether I should include them or not. For example, 2pac was born in NY, raised in Baltimore, moved to the Bay Area, but eventually settled in LA, where he reached celebrity. He also boasts of his ties to LA more than any of those other cities. I just tried to include what was fair. I also didn't want to include individual members of bands that were already represented either. So NWA counts for Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and Eazy E. And it's not all super accurate as to "where they originated" but I tried to do the best I could and not just cram everybody into Hollywood. I also tried to have as broad of a variety of genres as I could.

The map includes most of LA County (save the Antelope Valley and farther north. I would have loved to include Frank Zappa, but he would just be an island up there by himself in Lancaster) and about the northwestern half of Orange County.

In case you can't figure it out: GnR = Guns N Roses, SOAD = System of a Down, RATM = Rage Against the Machine, RHCP = Red Hot Chili Peppers. If you don't know what NWA stands for, I'll just let you look that one up yourself.

PR After Week 12

First let's take a look at this week's prediction results. I instantly noticed that my 1 and 2 both lost without looking at the numbers. I was a bit disappointed, but did find some diamonds in the rough.

I will order Week 12 games by the discrepancy of their Power Ranking Score (PRS). This would reflect the confidence that my system has in it's pick. The pick is just assumed to be the team with the higher score.

PIT at BUF (Confidence = 802)
The system has PIT as a winner. This pick almost went awry, as you would have noticed if you heard about Buffalo's comeback heroics. PIT was still a winner so this was a CORRECT pick.

CAR at CLE (782)
The system picked CLE as a winner. Despite the close game, again, the system picked the CORRECT winner.

TEN at HOU (657)
The system picked TEN as a winner, but they were shut out, so this was a terribly INCORRECT pick.

NO at DAL (638)
The system picked New Orleans CORRECTLY.

STL at DEN (577)
CORRECT

NE at DET (576)
New England wins, CORRECT pick.

CIN at NYJ (538)
Another CORRECT pick.

TB at BAL (533)
Baltimore wins, CORRECT pick.

KC at SEA (452)
Kansas City, CORRECTLY picked.

PHI at CHI (332)
Chicago wins convincingly, the system picked PHI, its second favorite team, but it was the INCORRECT winner. You may also notice the dramatic drop in confidence. The system is getting to its more uncertain games.

GB at ATL (319)
The system's favorite team was beaten, meaning both its top 2 teams went down. Atlanta wins, making this an INCORRECT pick.

SD at IND (316)
The system picked Indianapolis, which lost. Yet another INCORRECT pick.

JAC at NYG (309)
The system CORRECTLY picked New York as the winner

MIN at WSH (309)
The system picked Washington to win INCORRECTLY.

SF at ARI (149)

The system was not very confident in its San Francisco win, but they won convincingly, making this a CORRECT pick.

MIA at OAK (51)
The system had the least confidence when picking Oakland to win, and they lost. Making this an INCORRECT pick.

You may have noticed that as the confidence rating dropped, so did the success of the system. The overall performance was 10-6.

For this week at least, the important cut off seemed to have been at 0.400 confidence. The system had a +400 confidence in 9 games, of which it picked correctly 8 times.

So without further ado, here are the updated power rankings (excluding HOU v PHI on Thursday)

32 CAR 0.010
31 ARI 0.054
30 BUF 0.058
29 MIN 0.159
28 HOU 0.173
27 DAL 0.180
26 CIN 0.183
25 SEA 0.232
24 DEN 0.237
23 TB 0.264
22 DET 0.295
21 JAC 0.313
20 SF 0.352
19 WSH 0.383
18 OAK 0.390
17 MIA 0.458
16 NYG 0.468
15 SD 0.573
14 TEN 0.653
13 CHI 0.686
12 ATL 0.708
11 IND 0.716
10 NYJ 0.800
9 CLE 0.816
8 KC 0.820
7 STL 0.831
6 NE 0.838
5 PHI 0.856
4 BAL 0.896
3 PIT 0.912
2 NO 0.915
1 GB 0.956

And here are the Picks for Week 13 and confidence values, from most confident to least:

STL over ARI (778)
NO over  CIN (732)
PHI over HOU (683)
GB over SF (604)
KC over DEN (583)
IND over DAL (536)
ATL over TB (444)
CHI over DET (390)
CLE over MIA (359)
TEN over JAC (341)
SEA over CAR (222)
SD over OAK (182)
MIN over BUF (101)
NYG over WSH (85)
NE over NYJ (37)
PIT over BAL (17)