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Khan Academy is an organization that freely distributes instructional videos on all kinds of topics from algebra to organic chemistry. It’s kinda similar to my old company Flat World Knowledge in that it’s goal is to make access to educational materials free to anyone who wants them, only it focuses on video rather than textbooks and actually operates as a non-profit.

Well in an effort to make these videos more easily available to people and cut some of their bandwidth costs, Khan Academy has teamed up with BitTorrent to distribute over 2,000 videos they’ve produced. Click that link to read more from the great blog Hack Education.

This is an awesome idea on a number of levels and I’m glad to see more examples of how the BitTorrent technology, which is constantly vilified as solely a method for illegal file sharing, can be used for legitimate purposes.

The good news: Mom is much better now.

The bad news: (not shockingly) I found absolutely no way of predicting fumbles with any measure of success. The most interesting thing to me was that having a higher percentage of running plays was actually slightly negatively correlated with the average number of tackles it took before a team fumbled.

The other news: Didn’t do anything on Elo because it’s going to be an incredibly time-intensive process until I get a little better at python (which I “know” now!) and can script it all.

I’ve had a pretty stressful couple days involving lots of hospital visits and phone calls, so I need something to take my mind off everything. As usual, that means it’s time to play with sports statistics.

Two leading candidates right now:

1) Fumbles in football

How easy is it to predict who will fumble a lot? How random is the distribution of which team recovers the fumble? Under what scenarios are fumbles more likely to be recovered by the offense/defense? etc

2) MLS Elo as a predictive tool

This is the MLS Elo rating system I created. I’ve been talking with a student in Paris though (gotta love the Internet) and I think we may have made a couple improvements to it. I’m going to test these improvements against another piece of data I found recently, which is the gambling odds of every regular season MLS game from 1999 to 2009. Can Elo beat the bookies? We’ll know soon but, spoiler alert, without any adjustments it put up a 15% ROI over a season in the French league.