Publications by Gianluca Baio

More football

29.10.2012

Given that Sampdoria have lost their fourth game in a row, I am not really interested in football any more (as of yesterday, I actually find it a very boring game and think we should focus on real sports $-$ of course if we manage to break the crappy run, I’ll be back to liking it…). But, because Kees has done some more work using R2jags (h...

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Gotcha!

07.11.2012

I should start this with a disclaimer, ie that I’m not really claiming any “success” with this post. But I find it quite interesting that the estimations I produced with this very, very simple model turned out to be quite good.The idea was to use the existing polls (that was a few days ago, even before the super-storm), which had been colla...

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You can’t play a broken link

12.11.2012

Just like James Morrison and Nelly Furtado say, you really can’t play a broken string. And quite similarly, you just can’t use a broken link.I always find it very annoying when, while browsing a website, I find a broken link. You fall victim to the promise of interesting things to come, only to be disappointed by the error message filling up ...

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The perks (and quirks) of being a referee

25.11.2012

The other day I was talking to a friend at work, who was rather annoyed that one of his papers had been rejected by a journal, given the negative comments of the reviewers. This is, of course, part of the game, so you don’t really get annoyed just because a paper get rejected. From what I hear, though, I think my friend was quite right in being...

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Nataniele Argento

13.12.2012

Effectively, the Italian election campaign is already in full swing, so I tried to start collecting some data to see what we are about to face. If I have time and manage to get some good data, I’ll try to replicate the analysis I made for the US election (surely Italy needs its own version of Nate Silver too?). However, there are quite a few ...

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Italian elections (1)

19.12.2012

You’d think that the last week before the holidays would be very quiet and not much would be going on. Well, if you did, you’d be wrong, I guess, as the last few days have been quite busy (for many reasons). Anyway, I managed to track down some better data on a set of recent polls for the upcoming Italian elections. Most of the public sites ...

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(Dis)Utility

13.01.2013

Mart Janssen writes me that he’s tried to run the examples for BCEA and pointed out a problem $-$ it all boiled down to a missing script, really, but thanks Mart (if you’re reading this)!I’ve now fixed the problem by updating the file Utils.R (which was responsible) to include the script for the function betaPar2 (which I use to comput...

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Job advert

12.03.2013

We finally got around to prepare everything we needed to advertise the position which will be available in the MRC grant we’ve been awarded last year.The project will run for 30 months and we’re looking for a post-doctoral candidate to work on the Research Discontinuity Design as applied to the evaluation of the effect of interventions (main...

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Posteriors vs predictives

26.04.2013

Karl Saliba writes with some queries about our football paper, which I have already discussed on the blog here. He says:Thanks to the code in the appendix I could easily replicate (by using WinBUGS) a similar analysis on any football league of my choice. I am mostly concerned with the output of Table 2 in the Results section. I understand that e...

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What the BBC isn’t telling you

30.04.2013

Yesterday Gareth pointed me to this article on the BBC website. The underlying story has to do with Meredith Kercher’s murder and the subsequent trial involving mainly her flat-mate Amanda Knox, in Perugia (Italy). As often in these gruesome cases, the evidence is pretty difficult to handle (eg because of contamination). Thus, even in the er...

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