f2f2s |

I was quick to rip you about the amateur design of your website.  About how confusing it was to navigate and how hard it was to understand the information.  I even pointed out that the lesser repped and much lower profile United Soccer League has a much better site in all facets.

Well, you improved a good bit!  The site is still slow to load in a lot of places, but you seem to be making all of the player names, team names, and games scores into links so I can get to what I want easily.  Also, you finally made your way into the new year and let people embed your videos on their blogs.

So, let me say thank you by putting up the video of former Atlanta Silverback (and USL All star) Mac Kandji picking up an assist in his very first game with the New York Red Bulls.

Update: And of course the video fails to load.  You can’t make this stuff up people.  I am le sigh for you MLS.

I completed and turned in applications to two MBA programs: Georgia Tech and Berkeley. I got accepted into Tech with a full scholarship and GRA position, and I got rejected from Berkeley. Now, I can make all the excuses I want about turning in my application super late (seriously like 2 days before the final deadline thanks to some slow recommendation letters) but the fact is I didn’t get in. Had I been accepted, I probably would’ve taken it. Loans, shmoans, I wanted Berkeley.

And events like this are an example why: Startonomics Conference. This is a full day event this Thursday featuring speakers from venture firms and start up companies operating in and around the Bay Area, and I am interested in pretty much every session they offer. In fact, if I was still 5 weeks younger and could fly for free I would seriously consider going out to SF for a day and spending the $195 for a student registration. So, if any students out in the San Francisco area (read: Tyler) are reading this, please go to this and tell me everything you learned.

Now, I am going to an Atlanta VC/Entrepreneur conference in about two weeks called Venture Atlanta. A friend of mine does some work with the ATDC and was able to let me know about how to register as a student for $60. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great opportunity and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot, but there are some obvious differences between the two events.

The first has more established companies and much more experienced players in the start up landscape explaining what they did to become successful. That disparity in name recognition is just kind of a given considering the relative locations of the two events. Also, Startonomics is more of an education opportunity for a lot of people, which would be a lot more beneficial for me. Venture Atlanta has presentations with people describing what their business does, but it’s mostly a networking opportunity for people looking for funding. Of course, when you throw in that basically the whole first day is invitation only it really hurts the networking ability for me.

So yeah, I’m not trying to sound disappointed, I’ve got a great opportunity coming up to meet good people and learn some things. But this head-to-head comparison pretty much sums up why I wanted to be out West and probably will be in a few years.

Oh, and by the way Berkeley, you rejected me, so please stop sending me e-mails about upcoming information sessions.

If you thought Man or Astroman using dot-matrix printers as a musical intrument was awesome, you should love this.

It’s a song entirely composed of stock sounds from the Mac’s OSX operating system.

 

As seen on The Cleverest and linked to me by Big Contrarian

You’ve finally moved up to #1 in my MLS Elo rankings.  A win over New England in Foxboro and a Houston tie against Toronto finally put you over the top.

Now stop sending me angry messages.

Remember how this was a big deal because it was the first time UGA had worn black jerseys in the modern era?  Methinks they’ve gone a little overboard.

Blackout Factouts:

UGA has blacked out 3 of their last 9 games
They have blacked out 3 of the last 6 games they were the home team
They have blacked out 2 of their last 4 SEC games

I fully expect to see 3 more this season: the Florida game, the Georgia Tech game (or the SEC Championship game if that’s an option) and whatever bowl game they go to.  These poor guys just can’t stop themselves.

HOOOO LOOK AT KNOSHIN GO!! HE WEARIN DEM THAR DARK JERZIS!

JUMP IM AGAYAN KNOSHIN!  JUMP IM AGAYAN!

Much thanks to bellytimber from the 2+2 forums.  Click for full size.

This should make your debate watching much more fun!

Wall Street Journal published an awesome editorial yesterday called The United States of Mind, which tracks the rankings of the Big 5 personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) across each of the 50 states and Washington DC.  The best part of this is the interactive page right here that lets you see the breakdown of the ranking for each state.

Well, I mean really, what else am I going to do with this information except analyze it?  So, I’m sure whenever I get bored I’ll find a new metric I want to rank against these 5 and look at correlations and put them up here.

So, for starters today, we’re going with GDP per Capita, because what’s more important than money?

First though, a quick primer on what all of this means:

Correlation is how closely things are related and is measured on a scale from -1 to 1, with 0 being neutral (no effect).  The closer a correlation is to 0, the less of an effect the two variables have on each other.

A correlation of 1 means that the two variables are directly related, so they go up exactly together.  A variable always has a correlation of 1 with itself.  A number like .8 means that two variables are very closely positively related.  Height and weight have a very high correlation because tall people tend to be heavier.  

A correlation of -1 means that two variables are inversely related, so that when one goes up the other goes down the same amount.  Years of schooling and number of welfare checks picked up is probably a good example of a highly negative correlation (although I don’t have any information to back that up in front of me).

R-squared is simply the correlation coefficient squared.  It basically tells you how much of an effect one variable has on the other.  Note that the values won’t always add up to 100%, which means that there is some fraction of variance unexplained, or due to factors outside of the variables shown.  

Finally, two major points.  First, please don’t think that these factors are in any way the only ones affecting each other.  There are a ton of variables that aren’t being accounted for here, and this should be taken as nothing more than an academic exercise.  Secondly, and God knows this has caused people much smarter than you to make horrible decisions so pay attention here, CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.  There is no way to say that these numbers show that more openness leads to a higher GDP per capita or that a higher GDP leads to more openness.  In fact, both of these may be due to some unknown variable, so please please please keep that in mind.

With all of that covered now, here’s the good stuff.  If the images are blocked by a sidebar or something, click on them to open the image in a new window:

So, what can we see here?  Well, there’s really only one pair I would consider significantly correlated and that’s the agreeableness/conscientiousness pair.  Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion are the most strongly correlated variables on the whole, and they are all positively correlated with each other.  The most surprising result to me is the negative correlation between openness and extraversion.  It’s not that high, but the fact that it even exists doesn’t make much sense to me.  Neuroticism is really interesting to me, as it seems to have little to no correlation with any of the other traits.  In fact, excluding the GDP pairs, it has 3 of the 4 lowest correlations attached to it.

As for the 6th variable, openness is the only one of the big 5 traits positively correlated with GDP per capita.  Both agreeableness and conscientiousness are about as strongly negatively correlated and openness is positively correlated, while extraversion and neuroticism are two of the most insignificant correlations on the entire chart.

So, there you go.  There’s round 1.

Georgia Tech has proven pretty much all of the doubters wrong.  A triple option can be a viable offense even in Division I football.  Now, time will obviously tell whether or not Paul Johnson can build a team with this offense that will compete for a National Title, but there should be no problem competing for Conference titles if this keeps up.

Minus a few terrible penalties and one of the worst timed turnovers in the history of GT football (don’t worry AJ Suggs’s interception in the endzone against FSU, you’re still the worst I’ve seen) Tech would be 4-0 right now and in the driver’s seat of the ACC Coastal division.

I got to go to the game yesterday against Mississippi State and sit in the Alumni box, which was awesome.  Watching the game with people who have been following Tech for over 50 years, comfortable seats, free food and Sweetwater, and a 38-7 win.  All around a pretty great day.

Jonathan Dwyer went off

Michael Johnson showed up big time (that’s his FG block)

And the game was never really in doubt.

Only bad part was Nesbitt coming up lame on the first series.  So long as he can come back (and we basically have 3 weeks off with a bye, followed by Duke and Gardner-Webb so he should) we’ll be in great shape.  Jaybo ran the offense really well yesterday, but I’m not sure he has the arm to cause trouble in the passing game.  Plus, with this offense you really need to have 2 quarterbacks who can go at any time since there’s such an increased risk of injury.

Anyway, I’m not worrying about injuries today, I’m celebrating the marked improvement this team has made in 240 minutes of game time.

Two tests (financial accounting and financial management) and one case(IT management) to go.

Thursday/Friday/Saturday is going to be so nice.

“Calvin is so so def”

13 rec, 236 yds, 2 tds

Truth homie, truth.