Category: WiscNet

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Latest Read: Scorecasting

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim may be the closest thing to a sports version of Freakonomics.

Moskowitz was a Booth Professor of Finance at time of publication. Today he teaches at the Yale School of Management. Jon Wertheim holds a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is Executive Editor at Sports Illustrated

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won by L. Jon Wertheim and Tobias Moskowitz

As we headed into the Easter weekend, the NFL virtual draft was the only sports headline. Coronavirus shut down all sports recently.

Scorecasting it’s worth noting, reveals the recent NFL draft number one picks, turn out equal to a number ten pick regarding rookie performance.

Yet the money NFL teams waste on top picks should change. Scorecasting reviewed the signing bonuses of Ryan Leaf and Sam Bradford, top busts from the NFL draft. Actually the Leaf vs. Payton Manning draft reversal remains popular with sports fans even today.

For all the cable sports hype regarding player performance leading up to the draft, Moskowitz and Wertheim separate the signal to noise ratio very efficiently.

The hours (upon hours) of endless player and coaching interviews, season hi-lights showcasing how each team should draft the data reveals is only good for … selling commercials. Actually fans should wise up and gain some hours back in their lives.

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Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Education Flat World Globalization Google Innovation Internet2 Network Reading Technology WiscNet

Latest Read: The Shallows

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr remains a powerful book (published 2011) regarding how our brains have re-wired in the age of the internet. I began reading just as COVID-19 began taking hold. How will our brains react to this pandemic?

the shallows by by Nicholas Carr

Over the course of Carr’s chapters the world instantly became remote workers.

According to Carr’s conclusions, our brains will re-wire again adjusting to our new global working environments. Actually this will occur within a very short period of time.

The source for his book originated from an article Carr actually wrote for The New Yorker called “is google making us stupid” back in 2008. There is a chapter dedicated to Google Search.

Does The Shallows reveal new internet changes to human behavior? No, Carr shows that history’s ‘drastic changes’ regarding access to new technology dates even beyond Nietzsche and Freud. Their technology change? The typewriter was a very dynamic change from Gutenberg’s printing press. Approaches to cognitive thought was drastically changed by the technology available to Freud’s era: powerful microscopes.

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LMSaaS

Over breakfast this weekend at a popular farmhouse two high school teachers sat next to me to discuss how their respective LMS solutions made teaching difficult. Both were from wealthy suburbs outside Milwaukee. What really peaked my interest was hearing how one spent over 45 minutes trying to add polling for in-class feedback.
LMSaaSI helped lead the adoption of a Moodle LMS at a private Wisconsin college in 2007 that is still in use today and also had the pleasure of attending a conference at UW-Madison with Martin Dougiamas the founder of Moodle.

Yet over that breakfast I was intrigued by their difficulty with all things LMS for the upcoming school year. Frustration ranged from how one teacher received no LMS training (poll example above) while the second teacher spoke about her district migrating to a new LMS vendor over the summer.

Of course no technology discussion can avoid a teacher mentioning K12 servers going offline for hours during the school day making their teaching even more difficult. Seems like teachers have a lot to confront on a daily basis in delivering education to a classroom of twenty plus students. A local LMS run from an empty closet is no longer acceptable.

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Latest read: Reliability Assurance of Big Data in the Cloud: Cost-Effective Replication-Based Storage

While focused on the task of generating data for astrophysics Reliability Assurance of Big Data in the Cloud is a worthy read when focused around designing cloud service contacts.
Reliability Assurance of Big Data in the CloudThe work of authors Yang, Li and Yuan surround capturing big data reliability, and measuring disk storage solutions including from noted cloud vendors.

Their work at Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology focused on reducing cloud-based storage cost and energy consumption methods.

They also share the impact of multiple replication-based data storage approaches based upon Proactive Replica Checking for Reliability (PRCR). That was very interesting in their research data gathering.

I found Reliability Assurance of Big Data in the Cloud also supports moving data into the cloud across advanced research networks including Internet2.

Processing raw data inside the data center impacts network models (based upon available bandwidth) in their work. Their research gathers and stores 8 minute segments of telescope data that generates 236GB of raw data. By no means in the petabyte stage (yet) but it still sets a solid understanding of contractual demands on big data cloud storage.

My interest peaked around impacts developing knowledgeable contracts for cloud services. Their background regarding data gathering and processing should influence procurement contract language. This is even more applicable when applied to petabyte data sets and the SLAs regarding data reliability requirements. Never leave money on the table when scaling to the petabyte range. Must read for purchasing agents and corporate (and university) CPSMs.

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Internet2 CyberInfrastructure Days

Supported by a grant from NSF, eight universities (including the UWisconsin System) have been funded to help support a “CI Days” event at their campus.
i2bannerCI Days are intended to bring together various sectors of the campus (Faculty, IT Staff, librarians, administrators, students and others) to better understand the needs and roles of each sector.  Its a case of “you don’t know what you don’t know” for almost every campus.

This Friday Wisconsin will introduce their initial CI Day event at UWMilwaukee with remote viewing supported around the State.  It was great to hear WiscNet’s Shaun Abshere at this session today in Q&A regarding Friday’s coming session and supported remote technologies that will be used.

UW CI Day event program at UW-Milwaukee.