… to Smartodds loves Statistics.
This blog is intended for employees and clients of Smartodds. Its aim is to raise awareness of statistical issues and to encourage statistical thinking within the company.
Posts will be of various types – references to statistical applications, explanations of statistical techniques, interactive exercises, discussion of statistical problems, references to statistics in the media, and much else besides – but written in a way that recognises that not everyone connected to Smartodds is a statistics expert. Hopefully it will turn out to be interesting and entertaining.
Though the aim is to raise the profile of statistics within Smartodds, and though Smartodds is primarily about sports, the items in this blog will not be exclusively about sports statistics. Some will be, but many won’t. The point is to help all of us understand better the way statistics is, or could be, used within Smartodds, and that can often be done best without specific reference to sporting issues. Probably you’ll find some posts more interesting than others, depending on your own tastes, but I hope throughout the blog there’ll be something for everybody. So please stick with it even there are some posts that don’t interest you much.
As well as following the blog regularly, there are different ways that you can contribute. You can:
- add comments to any of the posts;
- ask questions or request clarification, also through the comments section of each post;
- publish your own posts, perhaps giving links to a news article that has made an interesting (or terrible!) use of statistics; or perhaps simply discussing something statistically-related that’s of interest to you;
- mail me (at stuart.coles@smartodds.co.uk) asking for a post that covers any particular topic;
- contact me (again at stuart.coles@smartodds.co.uk) or using the contact page to provide feedback on the blog.
The more interactive the blog is, the more successful it’s likely to be. So, please do get involved. Even negative feedback is helpful: partly so I can try to improve things; partly so I can wrap the blog up if it’s not serving a useful purpose.
So, I hope you join the ride, read the blog and contribute yourself whenever you feel like it. Let’s see if we can find a better definition of statistics than this one:
