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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Atlanta, GA | Posted: April 7, 2009
CNN - April 7, 2009
Once in a while, a gut feeling and some human instinct can out-think a computer. A professor says people, not computers, were most successful at predicting the NCAA basketball tournament. That's what happened this year at the NCAA men's basketball tournament, as computer models trying to predict the outcome of March Madness generally fared worse than their human counterparts, said Joel Sokol, a professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. "This year, it was sort of revenge of the humans, in a way," he said. It's a trend for computer scientists like Sokol and statistics junkies to use online data to try to pick the winners of the notoriously random tournament. About 40 people and groups use Internet statistics -- like team records and point margins, for example -- to publish such reports on college basketball, said Kenneth Massey, whose Web site, masseyratings.com, lets users compare the analyses. For more>>>
