Houston Astros|Houston,Texas| Baseball Research Analyst|Full-Time|ONSITE
The Astros are looking for a new analyst to join our R&D team. We deal with every aspect of the game, from supporting coaches developing minor league players to determining where a left fielder should stand given a certain batter/pitcher matchup. We have mountains of data, and we have an organization that is willing to listen to the analysts and try things out. If you're interested in feeding terabytes of data into powerful machines and leveraging your considerable cleverness, education, and domain knowledge to make a 3" ball go faster- we want to hear from you.
We're a generally Bayesian group, and so we're looking for someone who has experience with some Bayesian tools. On the python side we use quite a bit of numpyro (and we love JAX) and there are some RStan models floating around too. Really we want someone who thinks it's fun to stay at the cutting edge. We have a ton of data, we care about out of sample prediction, and I haven’t seen a p-value since I started working here (which is a good thing).
I found this job on a HackerNews Who’s Hiring post 8 seasons ago and I have really loved it ever since. There is freedom here to explore new ideas and technology. There is organizational buy in- If you can make a case for a course of action, you might see the team try it out on TV that night. I have 2 World Series rings with my name on them and my kids love coming to work (if I stuff them full of cotton candy). You don't have any game time duties, but you do get free tickets.
Knowing about and loving baseball is not a requirement, but it would be a plus. Don't let that keep you from reaching out. If you want to apply or just ask any questions, feel free to shoot me an email (rferguson at astros dotcom)
Please provide a salary range for the benefit of all interested.
A few years ago I presented a paper at an analytics conference and immediately had about 10 teams reach out to schedule interviews, but all discussion ended when it came time to talk money. I could never figure out what the teams were expecting to pay, but from all appearances it was "comically low" - something that made very little sense given how much teams are willing to pay for a player with a tiny WAR.
I know people who do/did work for a professional team. The justification is there is a huge line of people who want to “work in sports” so they can underpay the front office staff, and it is true. I knew a few people who stayed interns for multiple years in the hope that they would get converted into full time roles at some point.
yep - professional sports teams expect to underpay market rates for technical talent b/c they assume they'll always find people to fill the roles. They're expecting charity. If you like sports / tech / math - just do it as a hobby and get paid what you're worth at your day job.
I think it really depends on the qualifications of the individual applicant. I've been here a while and I'm senior level but I make more than I would as a professor somewhere and more than I would at the lab I used to work at. If you're interested shoot me an email and we can talk about it there, but I'm not the King of Hiring so I'm not going to throw something out there.
The reason that pay transparency laws (which probably don't apply to this position, but exist in other states) require salary ranges and not a specific number is precisely to account for the fact that different applicants with different levels of qualification may merit different compensation in the same role based on the impact they can have. So "depends on the qualifications of the individual applicant" is kind of besides the point; a wide range can account for that.
"I'm not the King of Hiring" is fair though, if you're in a jurisdiction where there is no transparency law and you're not setting policy for your company, you may well be required not to provide this information publicly and that's just how it is.
> I think it really depends on the qualifications of the individual.
You have me curious because I have never even attempted to apply for one of these upper tier jobs I see on HN. Don't companies typically know what they are willing to pay a new hire for any position? I would assume they like to figure that out ahead of time for budgeting reasons, but I don't know.
I got hired to be an analyst for a MLB baseball team off of a HN post like 7 years ago. Because of HN I have 2 world series rings! Life is very strange but I'll forever be grateful for that Who's Hiring post.
It's really up to the front office as to who gets rings and who doesn't. Not to mention, there are usually a couple of tiers of rings.
Naturally, all of the players and coaches get rings. But after that, there are various executives, owners, player personnel, etc. The "team" is more than the people on the field.
Honestly that's pretty awesome (and a genuinely amazing story); every time I've seen a championship ring, it spurred deep conversation. Admittedly it only happened three times, all for Nationals staff, but everyone was passionate about what they did.
"The Houston Astros are seeking an Analyst for the team's Baseball Research and Development group. The Analyst will work closely with the Director of R&D and the analytics team to conduct research and develop methods that encourage the effective understanding and application of information throughout Baseball Operations.
The role will include, but not be limited to, online video analysis and developing robust code that can be transmitted by various means including percussive impact of waste recepticles."
I feel you on the live coding. As for the physics/math data engineer, hit me up at rferguson at astros.com if you'd like, we're always looking for solid cross discipline folks
When I was in undergrad, a Cog Psych professor told me a story about an undergrad who made a poster for a regional research conference of no real consequence about the correlation between diet soda drinking and some recall task. The study and the conference were more about teaching students about research more than actually finding anything. When he and his student showed up to the conference, a representative from a low-cal sweetener producer was there, and proceeded to spend the entire conference standing next to the poster refuting the obviously amateurish research. He said for years afterwards, he'd still get mail and faxes about new research that disproved any link between fake sugar and memory problems.
All of that being said, I don't know if there is a substance that we consume that has had more research done on it than artificial sweeteners. For every study like this, there are other studies disproving them, etc. If there is an effect, the effect size is small, and I'm not convinced there is anything there. Also, I'm drinking a Diet Coke right now and in another life I was an Alz researcher so maybe I really want it to not be there.
Wait, a mysterious man showed up to an impactless meeting to basically embarrass the hell out of an aspiring undergrad research and your immediate reaction wasn't "Oh shit, these people are probably trying to cover something up."
Cause that's my immediate reaction, sounds similar to the cigarette industry in the 60s
I think that's a strong reaction. Corporate damage control and prevention of profit loss will look pretty much the same whether they're covering something up or just correcting the record. If there's a threat to profits, an industry and corporation will usually attempt to prevent or attack it regardless of any connection to the truth.
If that phrase isn't triggering your alarm bells, I don't know what to tell you...
> "If there's a threat to profits, an industry and corporation will usually attempt to prevent or attack it regardless of any connection to the truth."
Oh okay, you do get it lol.
The thing is though, it doesn't have to be like this. We allow it to be at our own mortal peril, and that isn't even remotely hyperbole.
"Correcting the record" isn't inherently malicious, and a company attacking something does not indicate a likely cover up. That reasoning is overly cynical and fallacious. I'm no fan of corporations or overlarge industries (and their respective lobbyists), but the way I see them is like large organisms. They are neither good nor evil, simply consumed by self-preservation and the drive to thrive.
I agree entirely, but it's not relevant to my point. Understanding the problems with an entity is completely different from assuming that every bad rumor about that entity is true, or taking the position that the entity can never actually be right.
You can't fight problems from a position that doesn't consider things realistically. You just lump yourself in with all the other raving conspiracy theorists.
So, now that it’s been admitted that testing for immunological blocking response (ya know, “immunization”, the thing vaccines used to do) was NOT done by Pfizer, and testing for risk to human reproduction was NOT done at all — are you still glad that everyone shut down debate about risks?
What else do you “know” is false or true, that even those who created the thing are unaware of?
Your position seems to reflect an astonishing level of hubris, to me.
They did test that the vaccine reduced risk of transmission and contraction of the disease, and testing for fertility didn't make sense anyway (and recent studies verify that it has no effect on fertility anyway) so I don't know why anybody who isn't grasping at straws would bring up anything of that sort in the first place.
I am glad that they shut down foolish misinformation like that, which is only designed to mislead people into being anxious about nothing in an effort to spread FUD about vaccines.
Bless you, but it's surreal to have such a discussion in a forum that purports to attract interesting discussion on technical topics.
Perhaps you missed the Pfizer's admission to the EU parliament that they did no such testing.
The fact that governments, researchers and medical professionals worldwide claimed they did test effectiveness against transmission (and thus claimed moral high-ground in forcing these prophylactic treatments which do not include immunization), when in fact they did NOT test, will go down as one of the most catastrophic blunders in the history of public medicine.
Trust in public medicine programs -- and, tragically, public vaccination programs in particular, has been destroyed, perhaps for generations.
And it is due, in no small part, to catastrophic hubris such as revealed here.
FUD about vaccines is now rampant because the extreme testing, care and attention they usually undergo was short-circuited. The resultant outcome of unnecessary carnage will be squarely on the shoulders of those responsible for this outrageous lack of scientific humility.
Your first paragraph is condescending and unnecessary.
Can you cite any sources that confirm that "governments, researchers and medical professionals worldwide claimed they did test effectiveness against transmission"? I haven't seen any, and a cursory Google search reveals articles like this [0] which confirm my memory that this was never claimed by the vaccine researchers. Independent research after the vaccines were released did find they reduced transmission significantly (for the early variants).
This reference to the Pfizer "admission" seems way more like a gotcha tactic. Pfizer never made the claim, nor was it necessary to show the vaccine was safe and served its primary objective.
No. What is condescending and unnecessary is the claim that "They did test that the vaccine reduced risk of transmission", when even the Reuters "fact check" confirms that they did not [0]
Gaslighting the HN audience into questioning our memory that we were forced to take an untested vaccine will be met with immediate and sharp reprimand. If you feel it is condescending -- then stop gaslighting. You lied, and people were forced to take a wildly experimental, potentially dangerous, untested product. Unacceptable.
Thousands of my fellow citizens were forced to leave their jobs for refusing this. Our government officials are on video claiming they had solid scientific reasons to do so, to "protect grandma". It was all lies. And you know it.
The commenter you originally replied to was wrong. Pfizer (and other vaccine researchers) never did research on transmission.
But again, can you cite any sources saying that at one point they [Pfizer and other vaccine researchers] did claim that?
The answer of course is that no, you can't, because they didn't. They didn't lie and neither did governments and health organizations. But because we were asked to vaccinate to protect ourselves and others (which worked, and was quickly backed by independent scientific research after vaccines were offered to the public), it sounds like a big gotcha lie if Pfizer says they specifically didn't research that.
Note there are ways you protect others by vaccinating other than reducing transmission. By significantly lowering your chance of hospitalization, you ensure there are more free hospital beds for those that need it (due to COVID or not).
Although they have recently admitted that the vaccine does not, in fact, reduce the risk of transmission - which might call their testing into question, no?
Blaming individuals in these scenarios is always strange to me, people mostly trust that the items they can purchase won't harm them. It's an immense burden to saddle the consumer with endless research of every product they purchase, on top of their usual time needs from work, commute, family.
No, what it has made abundantly clear is that poor incentives produce poor outcomes. There's significant penalty for underlabeling with regard to the known to cause cancer business and no penalty for gratuitous labeling. So every damn thing gets labeled to minimize potential liability and now carcinogenicity is a joke.
Yeah, that's my main takeaway from the general body of research. Sugar is awful for you in a million well-known ways. Most artificial sweeteners are, at worst, far better for your health. I'm a big fan of erythritol for most purposes.
Has there been a suspected artificial sweetener/memory issue link for a while? I could see them wanting to refute it if there were fluoride-like not very well founded concerns. Otherwise that is insanely suspicious, to the point of parody.
I work as an analyst for a MLB team. Bad calls are frustrating, but automated systems are not foolproof. It's been a few years, but there have been MLB games where the system is down completely. Can you imagine having to delay a game to get a tech out there? Woof.
But really, I think we give umps an apple watch or something that buzzes whenever the ball is a strike. That data could be available very near real time. And then, once the umps get real time feedback, you never tell anyone you're doing it. The umpires association would be down for keeping it under wraps, as it keeps the robots away, the old school "human element" folks would be happy, and the calls would get better!
Do you have any idea how many bad calls there are? I read about a study by a university that said something like 11% of ball/strike calls were missed.
Its absolutely amazing to me that this tracking data is just being displayed for everyone except the umpires. Apparently just to troll us with how bad they are.
I think pretending it's just the umpires is just sad and won't work out because everyone will know. We will notice that they are no longer making so many horrible calls.
Honestly if the MLB doesn't get robot umpires going for the strikezone within the next few years, I may start watching Wiffleball exclusively instead. Much more modern game. An average group of kids who know that plastic and PVC pipe exists are able to have a fun, safe and fair time.
It's like most people are trapped in the 19th century.
I'm a data scientist (for an MLB team that will win the WS this year!) and I love this. Of course this isn't a whole end to end evaluation platform. But we will get 300-500 applications for a position sometimes, and often folks have no business applying and this would be a great way to filter out some of the noise. Great job!
Funny story. Someone, let's call him Mr. Unlucky, sent me $1700 via zelle a few months ago. I called my bank and asked them about it and they had no info. About a week later, a guy emails me saying he meant to send the money to his land lord John.d.Doe@gmail.com but instead sent it to me, John.Doe@gmail.com. Both me and this unlucky dude called the banks, called Zelle, etc trying to get the charges reversed. No luck.
So lucky for this unlucky guy, I had been receiving John.D.Doe's email for about a decade on and off. I had sent the guy mistaken emails and sort of had a dialog with him. I knew he was in real estate. I emailed him and he confirmed that this unlucky guy was indeed renting from him, and his rent was this $1700 amount. So I took a leap of faith that this guy hadnt been playing a long con on me and forwarded the money. It was reckless and probably stupid but it wasn't my money and I felt bad for Mr. Unlucky. Zelle was no help, had no protection, and allowed this silly mistake to be made. Mr. Unlucky sent me a nice note and we both commiserated about the flaws in Zelles systems. I don't think I would use them.
I used to browse the "who's hiring" every month, even though I had a job I loved. I saw an ad for an MLB team (Astros) looking for an analyst, which was super interesting to me. I sent in an application, went through the process and ended up taking the job.
I don't browse them anymore, there is no way there is anything better for me out there right now.
All of these brain training products are suspect. Evidence for far transfer (training in one task transferring to a different domain task) is surprisingly hard to find, and empirical findings otherwise tend to disappear or diminish when replicated.
Many of the pro-brain-training camp have already begun to shift the goal posts. First it was 'simple games increase IQ,' which turned out to be difficult to prove when well controlled studies were performed. Now it's more along the lines of 'These simple games might have preventative effects against age related declines!,' which is an even harder claim to actually prove given the difficulties performing well controlled studies on aged participants.
In the cognitive science world, if we discovered a solid far transfer paradigm, especially one which transferred to something like G(eneral Intelligence), it would be our anti-baldness pill\flying car\4-day cellphone battery. People thought that these working memory transfer effects were the real deal and got very excited about it, money poured in, and the water got muddied by all these scientists with conflicts.
I obviously don't put much stock in working memory training. I wish it worked like they said, but I don't think it does. If far-transfer shows up at all, it's tiny, and doesn't persist after delay.
" The 20 studies included here were all completed between 2008 and 2013....Sample sizes of treatment groups varied between 7 and 36 participants, and control
groups between 8 and 43"
"net effect of n-back training on Gf
outcome measures, about the equivalent
of 3–4 points on a standardized IQ test"
ie: very small groups, tiny effect. Sounds dubious to me, like much research in the social "sciences"
Considering the standard deviation for IQ is 15 points, I wouldn't drink an extra glass of water per day for another 3-4 IQ points, let alone play a training game for any extended amount of time. 3-4 points is statistically meaningless.
What is your point? The parent made no error in his language. The inferred meaning of 'standard deviation' in this context is 'standard deviation for distribution'. The parent referred to an improvement of 3-4 IQ points, not standard deviations.
The parent claimed a 3-4 point in an individual's IQ is statistically meaningless by point to the standard deviation of IQs for an entire population. That is either (a) misguided or (b) intentionally misleading.
The standard deviation of a non-identical population has no relation to the statistical significance of a change for an individual.
Let's say the standard deviation of heights for males is 2.8 inches; that is what some of the internet claims. Let's use two standard deviations as statistically significant. That means, if someone woke up one day and was 6'3" instead of 5'10", that was not a "significant change" because they only changed in height by 5 inches.
Standard deviation for a non-identical population is completely unrelated to the significance of changes for an individual.
It's also possible that it results in an IQ increase only for a specific subpopulation that you may or may not be a part of, e.g. the linked metanalysis says that "international studies tend to find more transfer than U.S. studies" and it does not seem as though the effect for the U.S. studies was significantly different from zero.
How can you claim a quarter of a std dev is statistically meaningless? Seems to me that's dependent on the confidence intervals involved not the standard deviation.
If you're of average IQ, an improvement of 0.2 standard deviations is about 8 percentiles of the population - the difference between being 15th in the class and being 12th or 13th. May not sound like much, but if we assume that translates directly into income (i.e. people of 10th percentile intelligence earn 10th percentile salaries) then that's the difference between a salary of $52k and $63k.
At the high end it's even more pronounced as the tail thins. Going from +2SD to +2.2SD is the difference between 98th percentile and 99th.
Bearing in mind how loosely IQ and income are correlated IRL, and the opportunity cost of brain training vs devoting the equivalent time to job-specific learning, I'd say it's far from clear a 0.2 SD boost in adult IQ should lead to any change in income at all.
If it was 1 SD, the difference in ability would be rather more difficult not to notice.
In the metanalysis, Hedges' g is 0.24. Hedges' g is a less biased measure of Cohen's d, and Cohen d between 0.2 and 0.3 as a "small" effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#.22Small.22.2C_.22...). Of course there are plenty of caveats to assigning importance to effects of different magnitudes without regard to what is being measured, but this isn't a very large effect.
Here are a few ways you might be interested in measuring effect size:
- if the environment changes such that this effect becomes operative, what sort of change should I expect in terms of z-scores? ("how does the effectiveness of damping sound with crumpled paper compare to the effectiveness of mining with dynamite?")
- if I aim to change a quantity using this effect, what sort of change can I expect relative to the existing known ways of changing the quantity in question? ("How many laborers could I replace with one bundle of dynamite while ending up with the same size of hole?")
- if I see a change of so many standard deviations in some intangible variable, (a) what sort of effect will I see further down the pipeline in the variables that I really care about, or (b) is that amount subjectively worth the effort? ("If I have $600,000, can I make a bigger hole by hiring and outfitting diggers, or by buying and detonating dynamite?")
You're insisting on the first of those questions and only the first. The comment I responded to is explicitly phrased in terms of the third question, and 3-4 IQ points is quite significant in terms of tangible knock-on effects. It's also worth noting that an intervention yielding 3-4 IQ points is staggeringly large in terms of question #2, losing out to curing malnutrition but beating basically everything else. It is so large as to seriously damage the credibility of the result, given what we already know about efforts to raise IQ.
"The size of this increase on IQ test score correlates highly with the methodological concern of whether a study used active or passive control groups. This indicates that the medium effect size is due to methodological problems and that n-back training does not increase subjects’ underlying fluid intelligence but the gains are due to the motivational effect of passive control groups (who did not train on anything) not trying as hard as the n-back-trained experimental groups on the post-tests.
The remaining studies using active control groups find a small positive effect (but this may be due to matrix-test-specific training, undetected publication bias, smaller motivational effects, etc.)"
This is really great! I'll have to look into this when I have a little while. Thanks for passing it on. Just on a glance, I disagree that it really shows much of an increase though. Just glancing at the forest plots of those effect sizes tells me that this isn't a very strong effect at all (if it's there).
And there is also the so called 'file drawer' effect. I was at one of the big cog psych conferences a few years ago when a colleague was asking around -'Do you have any failed to replicates for WM training?' Everyone was so excited with the original Jaeggi 2008 paper, went out and tried it, and had a tough time replicating what turned out to be a severely flawed study.
Not to say that I'm not open to the idea. I'd love for it to be true, I just think large-effect-size effects are not often mired in the controversy that this one is. They're hard to find.
Because JumpCrisscross's post [0] implies that w1ntermute cherry picked a component of the Gwern meta-analysis to prove his point while the next paragraph refuted it.
So it definitely transfers 'near'. You'll get better at the dual-n-back test. And possibly other visio-spatial working memory tests. But the question of far transfer- will it make you smarter- is probably not. Here is a link to a 2015 meta-analysis that looks at the question of working memory training (including dual-n-backs) transferring to other working memory tasks:
That's exactly, if my understanding of changes happening to brain while performing any activity in general is correct, what should happen - you get better at doing that activity. So, unless your work contains some kind of dual-n-back activity, you are not getting better at it. You get better at work by doing work, not by playing brain game.
I am really happy they got fined for this deception.
I'm sure that same mobile telephone was capable of far less than a smartphone. I remember my Nokias being able to last for days on end (unless I played a lot of Snake!)
While I wouldn't trade my current smartphone for one of those, I do miss the lack of battery anxiety, and wish the manufacturers would make models for those of us who aren't obsessed with thinness. An iPhone 6 at 5/8" (15mm) would be awesome.
Nope, it's just bad software engineers. Africa has those pretty very battery friendly "smart phones" and they do everything that yours does, probably without the fancy games.
I've been tweaking my Android tablet's code (10" screen), profiling, setting up all of the possible GPU optimizations (whole UI is whenever possible displayed using it) and this is the result.
While that is pretty awesome, and I've played with Android tweaks to get better battery life in the past, the software doesn't seem like the biggest consumer of power. These days I generally I see >80% of battery power being used by the screen, so no matter how well optimized the software/cpu/gpu is, actually using the device is going to kill the battery.
Added: With Timur's Kernel and some rtc/wakeup/governer tweaks I can get at least 2 weeks on my nexus7.
Africa's "smart phones" (whatever that means) are usually a feature-phone with a web browser. Much less capable than a smartphone
Turn off wifi and 3G/4G see how long your smartphone battery lasts. Oh I did this recently with an old phone, it lasts around 4 days as well (and that's with an old battery)
Also a lot of apps abuse smartphone processing updating how many times per minute
But screens and processing power still cost a lot of energy
The Astros are looking for a new analyst to join our R&D team. We deal with every aspect of the game, from supporting coaches developing minor league players to determining where a left fielder should stand given a certain batter/pitcher matchup. We have mountains of data, and we have an organization that is willing to listen to the analysts and try things out. If you're interested in feeding terabytes of data into powerful machines and leveraging your considerable cleverness, education, and domain knowledge to make a 3" ball go faster- we want to hear from you.
We're a generally Bayesian group, and so we're looking for someone who has experience with some Bayesian tools. On the python side we use quite a bit of numpyro (and we love JAX) and there are some RStan models floating around too. Really we want someone who thinks it's fun to stay at the cutting edge. We have a ton of data, we care about out of sample prediction, and I haven’t seen a p-value since I started working here (which is a good thing).
I found this job on a HackerNews Who’s Hiring post 8 seasons ago and I have really loved it ever since. There is freedom here to explore new ideas and technology. There is organizational buy in- If you can make a case for a course of action, you might see the team try it out on TV that night. I have 2 World Series rings with my name on them and my kids love coming to work (if I stuff them full of cotton candy). You don't have any game time duties, but you do get free tickets.
Knowing about and loving baseball is not a requirement, but it would be a plus. Don't let that keep you from reaching out. If you want to apply or just ask any questions, feel free to shoot me an email (rferguson at astros dotcom)
https://www.teamworkonline.com/baseball-jobs/houstonbaseball...