Basketball Reference

The Wages of Wins Basket USA - Les news de la NBA au quotidien European Space Agency The European Space Agency (ESA) (French: Agence spatiale européenne - ASE) is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space, with 20 member states. Established in 1975 and headquartered in Paris, France, ESA has a staff of more than 2,000 with an annual budget of about €4.28 billion / US$5.51 billion (2013).[1] ESA's space flight programme includes human spaceflight, mainly through the participation in the International Space Station programme, the launch and operations of unmanned exploration missions to other planets and the Moon, Earth observation, science, telecommunication as well as maintaining a major spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, French Guiana, and designing launch vehicles. The main European launch vehicle Ariane 5 is operated through Arianespace with ESA sharing in the costs of launching and further developing this launch vehicle.

Advanced NFL Stats: Play-by-Play Data I've recently completed a project to compile publicly-available NFL play-by-play data. It took a while, but now it's ready. The resulting database comprises nearly all non-preseason games from the 2002 through [edit: 2012] seasons. I have not performed any analysis on the data, so what you'll get are the only basics--time, down, distance, yard line, play description, and score. It's almost exactly what I started with. Nanotechnological innovations can improve water purification Research teams are trying different approaches within the nanotechnological field to improve water membrane technologies. One of these is to improve water purification by using nature’s own water-transporting channels, aquaporins. However, constructing suitable membranes for industrial processes is a challenge. Membranes for water purification are used in many applications and different types of membranes are being developed at the moment. No membrane can filter and purify water entirely, but improvements using novel kinds of membranes are made.

A Tale of Two Cities « You’re underrating the Denver Broncos’ offense. Yes, you. I don’t care who you are. Nano electronics; new devices and incremental nanotechnology Guosheng Cheng - Yale University, USA AWAITING CAPTION ... Elena Cimpoiasu - Yale University, USA AWAITING CAPTION ... Paul Edwards - University of Strathclyde, UK SEM image of an array of gallium nitride micropyramids ... Stan Guthrie - Yale University, USA TEM image of a CVD nanowire with a 10 nm amorphous coating ... NBA Champs Team Age For a while now I’ve wanted to start mucking with the free open source software (FOSS) stats and graphing program R. I needed a dataset to mess around, so I scraped the season box scores for every NBA regular season from 1950 to 2010 from basketball-reference.com. I used Python to calculate an average age for each team by weighting each player’s age by the proportion of minutes played compared to the team’s total minutes for the regular season.

NASA spacecraft due for rendezvous with comet Tempel 1 It's not exactly young love, but some might find it romantic. On Valentine's Day, an aging Lothario that has been flitting from beauty to beauty through the solar system will make his final stop, taking pictures of a battered dowager to send to the folks back home before disappearing forever. The Stardust spacecraft, which has already taken images of asteroid Annefrank and captured interstellar dust from comet Wild 2, on Monday night will swing by comet Tempel 1.

Advanced NFL Stats: Glossary I'm a Baltimore guy, and aside from an affinity for steamed crabs and a regrettable taste for National Bohemian beer, the mid-Atlantic has given me an appreciation for the sport of lacrosse. To most North American sports fans, lacrosse must seem like some strange niche sport, like "jousting" or "baseball." But it's very entertaining and fun to watch. It's growing fast, particularly in the super-zips around DC where the ANS headquarters is.

Pass Atlas: A Map of Where NFL Quarterbacks Throw the Ball It’s very rare for an NFL quarterback to complete a pass in which the intended receiver is standing more than 45 yards from the line of scrimmage. In fact, NFL quarterbacks only attempted 175 such throws during the entire regular season last year, and only 48 resulted in completions. Joe Flacco was responsible for six of them. Until recently, this kind of factoid was hard to uncover, but like every other sport, football’s analytics are evolving quickly. Thanks to new forms of data and emerging kinds of analyses, teams, media, and fans are gaining new insights into on-field performances.

Brian Kenny and my grandmother Lackey's W-L record belies his season's value, and merits pre-game explanation. - Jim McIsaac It's not enough to kill the win, now Kenny wants to kill your grandmother's love of baseball. Every time Brian Kenny speaks nowadays, I picture my grandmother. She's 95 years old, lives in the same house she's owned since 1946 and watches every single Twins game on the TV in her sun room. She loves Dick Bremer and Bert Blyleven like they're family, and when I managed to convince Bert to talk to her on the phone at TwinsFest three years ago, she didn't stop bragging about it for months to her friends.

Football Freakonomics Nominated for a Sports Emmy I had a blast working with the NFL Network/NFL.com on our Football Freakonomics series this season, and now we’ve been nominated for a Sports Emmy in “Outstanding New Approaches, Sports Programming.” I know it’s a cliché to say that it’s a thrill just to be nominated but holy cow, it really is! Especially when you see the other nominees in our category: CBS Sports, ESPN, NBC Sports, and another NFL Network entry. One reason I had such a good time is that I love football, and I love getting to poke beneath its surface. Thanks to all!

The Toronto Raptors, SportVU cameras, and the NBA's analytical revolution New technology and statistics will change the way we understand basketball, even if they also create friction between coaches and front-office personnel trying to integrate new concepts into on-court play. The most important innovation in the NBA in recent years is a camera-tracking system, known as SportVU, that records every movement on the floor and spits it back at its front-office keepers as a byzantine series of geometric coordinates. Fifteen NBA teams have purchased the cameras, which cost about $100,000 per year, from STATS LLC; turning those X-Y coordinates into useful data is the main challenge those teams face. Some teams are just starting with the cameras, while others that bought them right away are far ahead and asking very interesting questions.