I was watching this video clip on Hello World and was fascinated to see this company/vision called HackRod.
Very cool and fitting name! If you know "hotrod" and "hacking" then you might know where this is going. I think this group of visionaries are on to something though. I love their idea and their leading steps to changing manufacturing (and doing it in such a cool, useful way).
Disclaimer: My post here isn't to diminish the importance of gender equality in the workplace especially in sports, but to emphasize the significance of data analytics in sports.
Sports use to function purely on the brains of coaches and even some general managers. However, today many sport franchises are building and relying on a team of "brains" especially data scientists.
Here's a wonderful story telling the role of data science in professional sports.
Data Science replacing Coaching Film Studies
What I love most about this story and new trend in sports strategy is my first memory seeing this in action by my head coach in football. My high school head coach would spend hours analyzing film on opponents to catch any advantage that our team could use to win the games when we played our opponents.
Example
Specifically, there was one team that had one specific offensive lineman that would position his stance according to the offensive play. If the team was going to RUN the football, then this lineman would position his right foot slightly behind his left foot (although still squared up to block) indicating he was ready to run and block any defensive lineman. If the team was going to PASS the football, then this lineman would position both feet directly squared indicating he was going to sit still and block (i.e. prepare for pass protection which is more reactive in blocking). Our defense captain even called out the play (whether it was a "run" or "pass") which created more confusion and frustration for our opposing team. Clearly, we beat this opposing team when we played them.
Rising Potential
In the NBA, we are seeing a lot of the advantages with data science especially with the rising numbers of scoring three-pointers. I'm sure there are other advantages being studied currently but I'm curious to know the defensive advantages which have yet to be highlighted like rebounding.
Let's see where else data science will become the "brains" behind the "brawns".
This is fantastic news! The capability to super-compute in the cloud is another big milestone towards the vision laid out by Microsoft. Who better to partner on such a mission than Cray?
Seems pretty cool for people interested in Data Science and crunching data especially using Python (or iPython). So, I decided to watch some YouTube videos to learn a little more.
This is pretty useful to know. Eventually, when I get the time, I'll look further into using this myself. But for now, just wanted to spread the news in case you haven't heard.
Collecting data has always been a huge deal. Marketing terms like "big data" and "hadoop" have been constantly thrown around industries in attracting companies and customers. However, what's been difficult to analyze has been images collected. Thus, this makes such APIs as the ones mentioned in the article above a pretty powerful tool. Analyzing images and creating more metadata regarding the image and updating data storing appropriately to benefit the data analytical tools applied - will be very helpful in making better decisions shaping the future of people, companies, industries, and the world.
