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In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal.

Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.

“Pretty much wherever I go, I’m bothering people, ‘Have you read this?’” said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles.

Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an accumulation of individual activities. Throwing a strike, hitting a line drive or fielding a grounder is primarily an individual achievement. The team that performs the most individual tasks well will probably win the game.

In soccer, almost no task, except the penalty kick and a few others, is intrinsically individual. Soccer, as Simon Critchley pointed out recently in The New York Review of Books, is a game about occupying and controlling space. If you get the ball and your teammates have run the right formations, and structured the space around you, you’ll have three or four options on where to distribute it. If the defenders have structured their formations to control the space, then you will have no options. Even the act of touching the ball is not primarily defined by the man who is touching it; it is defined by the context created by all the other players.

Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize.

Ann Coulter penned a column explaining why soccer is un-American. First, it’s collectivist. (“Individual achievement is not a big factor…blame is dispersed.”) Second, it’s effeminate. (“It’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys.”) Third, it’s culturally elitist. (“The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton.”) Fourth, and most importantly, “It’s foreign…Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European.”

Soccer hatred, in other words, exemplifies American exceptionalism.

For Coulter and many contemporary conservatives, by contrast, part of what makes America exceptional is its individualism, manliness and populism

An unprecedented survey of the role of the arts in the larger economy, last week’s breakdown of the GDP contribution of America’s creative industries in 2011

a joint effort of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and National Endowment for the Arts, reveals that advertising dwarfs the economic clout of every single other creative endeavor, followed by arts education in a distant second place

the total size of the arts and culture economy is 3.2 percent of GDP, coming in at $504 billion

The same statistical revolution that changed baseball has now entered American politics, and no one has been more successful in popularizing a statistical approach to political analysis than New York Times blogger Nate Silver, who of course cut his teeth as a young sabermetrician. And on Nov. 6, after having faced a torrent of criticism from old-school political pundits -- Washington's rough equivalent of statistically illiterate tobacco chewing baseball scouts -- the results of the presidential election vindicated Silver's approach, which correctly predicted the electoral outcome in all 50 states.

Today, there are several dozen ongoing, public projects that aim to in one way or another forecast the kinds of things foreign policymakers desperately want to be able to predict: various forms of state failure, famines, mass atrocities, coups d'état, interstate and civil war, and ethnic and religious conflict. So while U.S. elections might occupy the front page of the New York Times, the ability to predict instances of extreme violence and upheaval represent the holy grail of statistical forecasting -- and researchers are now getting close to doing just that.

In 2010 scholars from the Political Instability Task Force published a report that demonstrated the ability to correctly predict onsets of instability two years in advance in 18 of 21 instances (about 85%)

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters.

Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.

the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.

Round numbers are psychologically powerful. And that power has been freshly demonstrated in a new study exploring the behavior of pro baseball players and takers of the SAT.

For the baseball players, the researchers, Devin Pope, of the University of Chicago, and Uri Simonsohn, of Penn, focused on whether hitters thought the difference between a .299 batting average and a .300 average was more important than the minuscule .001 difference in performance it implies.

The study also found that high-school juniors who took the SAT were substantially more likely than their peers to re-take the test if they scored just below a round number

More 5inShare Email Print A defendant in the Atlanta Public Schools case turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail on April 2. (David Goldman/AP) Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Emily Richmond asked whether high-stakes testing caused the Atlanta schools cheating scandal. The answer, I would argue, is yes... just not in the way you might think. Tests don't cause unethical behavior. But they did cause the Atlanta cheating scandal, and they are doing damage to the teaching profession. The argument that tests do not cause unethical behavior is fairly straightforward, and has been articulated by a number of writers. Jonathan Chait quite correctly points out that unethical behavior occurs in virtually all professions -- and that it occurs particularly when there are clear incentives to succeed. Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead. It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat. For Chait, then, teaching has just been made more like journalism or baseball; it has gone from an incentiveless occupation to one with incentives.

Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"

Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth.

Major League Baseball is teaming up with a sports apparel retailer to help with a national shortage of personal protective equipment for health care workers.

The shortage is causing health care workers to resort to desperate measures and save supplies intended for a single usage.

The first batches were made out of uniforms from the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Yankees. The MLB said as production and distribution grows, they'll use other teams' jersey fabric.

He is, on the contrary, seized by the conviction that science is beset by sloppy statistical maneuvering and, in some cases, outright fraud. He has therefore been moonlighting as a fraud-buster, developing techniques to help detect doctored data in other people’s research. Already, in the space of less than a year, he has blown up two colleagues’ careers.

In a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, he and two colleagues—Leif Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Wharton’s Joseph Simmons—showed that psychologists could all but guarantee an interesting research finding if they were creative enough with their statistics and procedures.

By going on what amounted to a fishing expedition (that is, by recording many, many variables but reporting only the results that came out to their liking); by failing to establish in advance the number of human subjects in an experiment; and by analyzing the data as they went, so they could end the experiment when the results suited them, they produced a howler of a result, a truly absurd finding. They then ran a series of computer simulations using other experimental data to show that these methods could increase the odds of a false-positive result—a statistical fluke, basically—to nearly two-thirds.

Majid, who gave only his first name to protect his safety, collected hair and urine samples, clothing, tree leaves, soil and even a dead bird. He shared it with the Syrian American Medical Society, a humanitarian group that had been delivering such samples to American intelligence officials, as proof of possible chemical attacks.

United Nations inspectors have taken the first steps to destroy Syria’s chemical stockpile.

Many Syrian doctors have fled; those who remain describe dire conditions where even the most basic care is not available.

much of this angst can be interpreted as part of a noisy but inexorable endgame: the end of white supremacy. From this vantage point, Americanness and whiteness are fitfully, achingly, but finally becoming delinked—and like it or not, over the course of this generation, Americans are all going to have to learn a new way to be American.

What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware Americans are of what they are, of what their culture already (and always) has been.

The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion.

The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.

When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. Long-form reading, listening and viewing habits are giving way to browse-and-choose consumption. With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span. - Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at George Mason University We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society.

One Duke University student was famously quoted in a 2006 Time magazine essay telling his history professor, "We don't read whole books anymore."

Now there are lots of websites that present whole books and concepts in nano form

It’s not just that 47 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate. Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy.

One important fact is that the brain works in some ways like television transmission, in that it processes stable backgrounds without much attention and moving parts more intensely and differently.

Recent research in babies shows that they respond most to unexpected events and use these to evaluate the environment and learn.

But, the over arching analysis of visual signals depends on what is expected.

From 2008 to 2020, the average speeds of all major league baseball pitches combined rose by between 1.5 mph and 2 mph.

But MLB pitchers aren’t the only expert throwers; most healthy people can throw faster than our much stronger chimpanzee relatives, who max out at around 30 mph. A study of boys from the ages of 8 to 14 who were only moderately trained in throwing could still throw two times faster than chimps.

Humans are the only species that can throw well enough to kill rivals and prey. Because throwing requires the highly coordinated and extraordinarily rapid movements of multiple body parts, there was likely a long history of selection favoring the evolution of expert throwing in our ancestors.

Free market” is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society.

Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services

Both parties undertake the exchange because each expects to gain from it. Also, each will repeat the exchange next time (or refuse to) because his expectation has proved correct (or incorrect) in the recent past.