Math vs Maths

So that's where the Brits lost the 's' in Sports. They put it on the end of Math. [Link]

Penn State officials condone child abuse; Football more important

That is the only conclusion you can draw from the report of the fallout of the Sandusky case there. Is there an accessory after the fact law for child abuse in Pennsylvania? At the very least, their football program should get the death penalty. Is this the kind of character sports is supposed to develop? [Link]

After an eight-month inquiry, Freeh's firm produced a 267-page report that concluded that Hall of Fame coach Paterno, President Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz "failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade."

Freeh called the officials' disregard for child victims "callous and shocking."

"In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at the university -- Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley -- repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky's child abuse," the report said.

Paterno "was an integral part of this active decision to conceal," Freeh said at a news conference.

Asked directly if Paterno's firing last fall was justified, Freeh answered, "Yes."

School leaders "empowered Sandusky to attract potential victims to the campus and football events by allowing him to have continued, unrestricted and unsupervised access" to campus and his affiliation with the football program, the report said. The access, the report states, "provided Sandusky with the very currency that enabled him to attract his victims."

Sexual abuse might have been prevented if university officials had banned Sandusky from bringing children onto campus after a 1998 inquiry, the report said. Despite their knowledge of the police probe into Sandusky showering with a boy in a football locker room, Spanier, Paterno, Curley and Schultz took no action to limit his access to campus, the report said.

The May 1998 complaint by a woman whose son came home with wet hair after showering with Sandusky didn't result in charges at the time. The report says Schultz was worried the matter could be opening "Pandora's box."

Then, in 2001, after a member of Paterno's staff saw Sandusky in a campus shower with a boy, officials did bar him from bringing children to campus but decided not to report him to child welfare authorities.

How can the Onion compete with real life?

The Onion has to step up it's game to compete with stories like this. [Link]

Ben & Jerry's, the iconic ice cream brand famous for flavors borrowed from a broad swath of the culinary spectrum, has apologized for including fortune cookies in its "Taste the Lin-Sanity" frozen yogurt sold at a Harvard Square location in Boston.

The Vermont-founded company has replaced the fortune cookies in its honey-swirl, Jeremy Lin-inspired variety with waffle cones.

"We offer a heartfelt apology if anyone was offended by our handmade Lin-Sanity flavor," Ben & Jerry's said in a statement.

Words into Touchdowns

Predicting success of NFL quarterbacks by their speech using research to identify terrorists. [Link]

That's the assertion, mission, and business plan of an Ohio-based company called Achievement Metrics. It analyzes the speech of star college players, looking for traits such as "conceptual complexity," "need for power," and "deliberativeness." It compares similar players and correlates these traits with future performance. College wide receivers whose speech shows low levels of distrust, for example, have a greater probability of becoming Pro Bowlers than their less-trusting counterparts.

That may sound batty, but it's closely related to established social science. For decades, political scientists have counted the words and analyzed the grammar of political speeches in order to understand a leader's state of mind. In recent years, this process has become both automated and refined by algorithms and data crunching. Achievement Metrics has grown out of a company called Social Science Automation that does most of its work for the U.S. government. It is attempting to bring text analysis to nontraditional areas, like the CEO's corner office and, yes, the scouting of pro athletes.

The analysts at SSA don't say a lot publicly, as much of what they do is classified. You can get a flavor of their work, though, in a 2005 paper titled "The Distinctive Language of Terrorists." The paper discusses the technique of remote assessment, which involves gathering samples of speech and determining whether someone is likely to be a terrorist. The paper demonstrates the validity of remote assessment by analyzing the speech of political leaders and known terrorists and scoring them in such categories as self-confidence, task orientation, and distrust of others. Remote assessment sorted out the bad guys from the good with impressive accuracy—although, like all probabilistic models, it was not perfect. John Kerry, for example, was classified as a terrorist. (The speech that the study sampled came from the months in the 2004 campaign when he went negative.)

The speech cues that SSA considers important are not the obvious ones—"I want to kill all Americans!"—but rather instances of words like I and we, as well as the use of qualifiers—I maybe think I want to kill some Americans, perhaps. While that's a crude presentation of the work, you get the idea: Subtle, almost undetectable patterns can be analyzed to determine how likely a political figure is to engage in terrorist activity. Roger Hall, a consulting psychologist for SSA and CEO of Achievement Metrics, claims, "If you give us unidentified speech text, we can distinguish terrorists with 90 percent accuracy." Now you understand why they don't talk publicly about their work. Is the leader of that new group in Afghanistan blowing hot air or is he trouble? That's the kind of question the intelligence community is interested in.

Back to football. About five years ago, SSA analyst Steven Hofmann and a colleague started thinking about how their work could be applied to the NFL. At the time, the league was having trouble with a rash of arrests and suspensions, and coaches and scouts wanted to know who they could count on to stay on the right side of the law. Hofmann began collecting interviews with college stars—he needs only about two pages of text to do his analysis.