This will be my final post to the Smartodds Loves Statistics blog.
I started the blog in 2018 with the aim of providing a channel, mostly for people in the Smartodds universe, to illustrate and discuss the role of contemporary Statistics in sports modelling and beyond. For most people who are not statisticians the idea of Statistics is that it’s about getting numbers and sticking them in a formula. At a high level that interpretation isn’t completely wrong. But all real-life statistical applications are more nuanced than this, and I hoped the blog would serve to demonstrate that in various ways.
The blog has gone through three main iterations. Initially I was posting several times a week. These posts would often be just discussing something like a newspaper article for which Statistics had some relevance. There were also puzzles and games alongside some posts aiming to explain statistical concepts in greater depth.
Towards the end of 2019 I wasn’t sure that the blog was working as well as I’d hoped, so I put it on hold for a while. But then in 2020 Covid hit and Statistics was suddenly in the spotlight. Almost everyone was now an amateur statistician/epidemiologist and it was impossible to get away from Statistics in the media. So in March of 2020 I started posting to the blog again, but exclusively about statistical aspects pertaining to the Covid epidemic. Partly this was because Covid provided such a great illustration of the importance of Statistics. (See: Covid wasn’t all downsides.) But partly also because it was a period of considerable uncertainty, for each of us individually and for Smartodds collectively, and I wanted to show how Statistics could lead to some calm understanding in the presence of so much noise.
By May of 2020 it had become clear that life after Covid might be reasonably normal again, so I paused the blog. I was invited to restart it again in January 2022 after the Smartodds website got a re-design and it was decided that the blog might be a good way to show Smartodds’ face to the outside world. Since then I’ve been sending posts more-or-less monthly, but this time of slightly greater depth than the original posts.
It’s been great fun writing the blog. And extremely satisfying. I’ve had plenty of positive feedback and some posts have proved especially provocative. It’s totally rewarding when someone completely outside of quant-world gets into one of the posts and sends me feedback. At least one or two people – well, ok, one probably – have said they look forward to the start of a new month because I’ll be sending a new post.
However, as of the end of this calendar year, I’ll no longer be working for Smartodds. It’s been a fantastic journey, but having hit a certain age, it felt like the right time to stop.
I’m not sure what will happen to the Smartodds Loves Statistics blog now, but in any case I think it was time for a change. When I first set up the blog I envisaged different people writing posts and I’d simply be a manager of the process. That never happened and the total number of posts written by someone other than me is… let me just check the statistics… zero. Fair enough, I was the only person given time and space to actually do the writing. But if there is a negative aspect to the blog, it’s that it was entirely written from one person’s perspective.
I very much hope the blog will continue in one form or another, and reading it will be one way for me to keep in touch with Smartodds. I’m only ever an email away though, so if anyone would like to write to me about stuff connected to the blog or Statistics, about things related to Smartodds, or life generally, I’ll be very happy to hear from you.
Meantime, thank you to everyone who has followed the blog. And a special thank you to anyone connected to Smartodds with whom I’ve had any sort of interaction over the last 20 years or so. It’s been brilliant. You’ve been brilliant. I’ll miss you all.
