Raining from 3-point land; a statistical look into the NBA three-point shot

Posted on January 28, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Warriors point guard Stephen Curry attempting a three-point shot Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports; https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2017/3/6/14823068/2017-nba-scores-steph-curry-gobert-ulis-westbrook

There isn’t a jump shot in basketball more exciting than the three pointer. It gets fans off their feet, it can rapidly change the course of a game and it’s a difficult shot even for most NBA (National Basketball Association) players (the league average from three-point land was 36.2% in the 2017-2018 season). One of the most legendary three-point shots in NBA history has to be by Ray Allen of the Miami Heat in the 2013 Finals to tie the game; had he not made the shot, Miami would have surely lost the game and the Finals. In recent years there has been a revolution in the three-point shot, led by prolific shooters like Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry, which has greatly impacted the way the game of basketball is played. But just how valuable is the three-point shot?

The three-point line was adopted in the NBA for the 1979-1980 season. In that season, the average team attempted just 2.8 three pointers per game. Compare that number to present day where in the 2017-2018 season the average was 29.0 three pointers attempted per game, and this season where teams are taking a staggering 31.3 attempts per game. In the early days of the three, the few shots being taken weren’t going in at a high rate either; the average three-point percentage in 1982-1983 was a measly 23.8%, the worst in history. The three-point craze has amplified in the past 9 years; since 2010 the average three pointers attempted has risen every year, from 18.0 in 2010 to 31.3 today, a 74% increase in a relatively short period of time.

There are multiple reasons why teams are attempting more threes. Simply, a three pointer is worth one more point than a two pointer (a shot from inside the three-point line.  For a team to get six points, two three-point shots can be made. For a team to get six points shooting only two pointers, three shots must be made. In theory, a three-point shooting team can have less shots and less possessions but still score the same amount of points as a strictly two-point shooting team, if they convert on their three-point shots at a high enough percentage. This obviously ignores the fact that three-point shots are inherently more difficult to make given the further distance from the basket. However, when analyzing the average points scored per type of shot attempted, the three-point shot proves it’s worth. Over the 1998-2018 NBA seasons, “players have averaged 1.05 points per ‘above-the-break 3’ (from the top of the three-point line) and 1.16 points per corner 3 (from the corners of the three-point line). In contrast, players have averaged just 0.79 points per 2-point attempt outside of the ‘restricted area’. In other words, 100 mid-range jumpers (2 pointer) will provide 79 points on average, while 100 above-the-break 3s would provide 105”. (ShotTracker). As the data shows, it is more efficient to attempt three-point shots than to attempt mid-range two-point jump shots, or even two-point shots from inside the paint (the rectangular area close to the basket). The only type of shot with a higher points per shot average are shots from just below the basket, with an average of 1.2 points per shot attempted. Shots taken from this distance are high-percentage layups and dunks (for example, last season players successfully made 89.6% of their dunk attempts).

With more and more teams realizing the value of the three-point shot, their tactics and tendencies have changed. Teams have been gradually decreasing the number of two-point jump shots they take and increasing the number of three-point shots they take; for the first time in the 2014-2015 season, teams were more likely to shoot a three than a two-point jumper. From 1998-2018, the percentage of shots attempted from three-point range increased from 13% of all shots to 33%, while two-point shots from mid-range decreased from 38% to just 19% of all shots attempted.

 

Rockets shooting guard James Harden attempting a three-point shot https://healthytopic.org/rockets-vs-warriors-score-james-harden039s-game-winning-3-caps-off-insane-night-to-beat-steph-curry-golden-state-in-ot-cbssports-com/

In addition to it’s efficiency by itself, the three-point shot also allows other type of shots to become more efficient by spacing the court and making it easier for the offence to function. This spacing allows players to drive, cut and post-up towards the basket, resulting in higher percentage scoring opportunities such as layups and dunks. Surprisingly, the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets, who are among the best three-point shooting teams in the NBA, led the league in two-point percentage with 55.8% and 55.2% respectively last season. Houston led the league in three-pointers made per game with 15.0, and Golden State led the league in three-point percentage with 38.3% last season. With their fast-paced and three-point shot oriented offence, the Warriors have won the NBA championship three times in the past four years.

The NBA has greatly changed from what it was even 10 years ago; as such, strategies that were successful back then may not be as successful today. There is one clear thing that the statistics show: the three-point shot is definitely proving to be valuable. More teams are using statistics and analytics to try to gain a cutting edge in a sport that is often decided by razor-thin margins, and the three-point shot has been shown to give an advantage to teams that can utilize it properly.  This shows the importance of using statistics in basketball and its ability to influence the actions of players on the court and improve a team’s performance, putting them in the best position to compete for the coveted championship.

 

-Sepehr Haghighat

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High on TV: Why College Students Love to Binge-Watch

Posted on January 25, 2019 by | Leave a comment

As an undergraduate, I found out that college students (especially in Canada) share similar fascination for two things : weed and Netflix.

And I get where this love stems from. They are both super addictive.

But unlike smoking cannabis, watching TV will not make you high…right? Apparently, it is very possible, under the condition that the consumption of media through TV is being done by binging.

Binge-watching television has become more common as consumers take advantage of the presence the reliable digital streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu. They provide unlimited content under an affordable subscription price. Consumers will marathon-watch TV series or films for hours, most of the time completing multiple shows in one sitting.

There also seems to be very little feeling of guilt in spending a significant portion of their day on TV. This Youtube video from AsapSCIENCE perfectly describes the possible negative consequences of binge-watching:

In fact, according to a Netflix survey, 73% of TV streamers from their survey correspondents have positive feelings towards the idea of binge streaming TV. This is more prevalent among college students. Research done towards a higher institution in 2018 found that college students agree (59.4%) and strongly agree (14.4%) that they are engaged in binge-watching. Why is it so?

Why do my peers and I love binge-watching so much?

It is not a foreign feeling. We are all stressed out. By going to college, we are free from our guardians. This is great, but adulting with peers who are as clueless is tough. Studying in college is also harder than back in high school. Let’s face it. The hard realities of academics responsibilities are repulsive. 

Not with TV. With streaming services, my friends and I can keep up with a show anytime and anywhere we want. With the many selections to choose from, we are bound to find someone among our peers who enjoy the same show, unlike marijuana, that may have bad reputation with some people. It’s a great conversation starter if compared to other kinds of hobbies that require specific skills and settings to get involved with. College is more bearable when you have friends, and talking about TV shows is the easiest way to get one. 

It could also have started from us procrastinating from school works. We may take a break by choosing to watch a half hour episode of a show our friend recommended. The show gets more intense , that hormones associated with stress (cortisol) and empathy (oxytocin) are released as we are hooked on the characters and their turn of events. We are dwelling deep into the enchanting fantasy. We are having fun avoiding reality. 

Students who are stressed out while studying will choose the most accessible entertainment- such as streaming services, accessible through the same devices they use for studying. (Image: Pexels)

Then, when we keep on watching TV, our brains starts to produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter that acts as a motivator for us to have MORE fun. Thoughts of anxiety and depression are leaving us. Instead of thinking about the assignment we are struggling with, that make us worry about our near future of job searching which are related to the work we were supposed to do, our eyes and our mind are now fixated on someone else’s story, a story we have absolutely zero responsibility on. And we are alone, without no one to tell us to stop, not our parents nor our friends. We are relaxed. It feels great, not having any burden on our shoulders. The world seems more beautiful. It feels like being hooked on a drug. We are high on TV.

That is why after one episode ended, we start watching another. And another. This continues until we tire ourselves out or a consciousness resurfaces to notify them that the break should have ended a long time ago. There are still works to do and sleep to catch up. But it is extremely hard to stop. TV is just so strangely captivating and addictive.

Maybe it is just the way we fit in with the current situation. College’s environment is associated with facilitating binge-watching through social engagement, enjoyment, stress relief, escaping reality, seclusion, and boredom. Wouldn’t it be funny if binge-watching turns to be another shared nostalgia in our future?

~ Syakirah Zainal

Update: This is the revised version of the original post written on Jan 25, 2019.

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The Biggest Natural Bomb?

Posted on January 21, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Here’s something that’ll blow your mind – beached dead whales may explode! That is if the body is tampered by people unsafely. One of the most infamous cases of exploding whales was a dead sperm whale beached in Florence, Oregon in 1970. Attempting to dispose of the rotting whale, the Oregon Department of Transportation decided to blow it up with dynamites. What could go wrong?  (asked no one).

Video of the above mentioned Oregon whale explosion, and the magnitude of its spread.
Video by: theexplodingwhale.com (which seemed to have closed their website)

The explosion threw whale bits all over the area, to as far as 250 meters away: roughly equivalent to the distance between the UBC bookstore and the Beatty Biodiversity Museum. Even though the intent with the dynamite was to dispose of the whale through blowing it to bits, More of these explosions occur across the world, when people uneducated or unknown to this danger, mess with dead whale corpse.

What causes the explosion?
You might ask, what is the scientific reasoning behind these explosions? To answer that, we must first understand a few things about what happens after an animal die. A dead animal undergoes decomposition: the process of rotting and decaying. During this process, proteins in the whale’s tissue break down, and other tissues dry out. This results in several gasses produced within the whale, including common gasses like methane and carbon dioxide. Normally, these gasses can leak slowly through holes natural to the body or holes made by hungry scavengers. However, due to blockage or the weight of the body, sometimes these orifices are forced shut, resulting in gas build-up within the corpse’s body. After enough gas build-up in the body, any disturbance to weak spots on the body surface any external sources weakening parts of the body, i.e. poking a hole in it, results in an explosion, or strong expulsion of the whale’s body contents.

Is this a whale-only phenomenon?
Are whales the only one that turns into ticking gas bombs? The answer is no, they’re not. This decomposition and gas forming process are universal across all animals, but due to the size of whales and the size of the cavities within their body, that explosion is significantly more terrifying.

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Why the Snooze Button is Anything But Your Friend

Posted on January 21, 2019 by | Leave a comment

The weekend’s over, it’s Monday morning, and suddenly it’s time to go back to another busy week of work. Your alarm clock goes off and almost instinctively – like a predator just waiting to pounce on its prey – you hit snooze.

You know that feeling all too well, and you’re not the only one. A 2014 study revealed that more than half of the American population admitted to regularly using the snooze button. It turns out that what we see as only a few extra minutes of “much-needed” sleep is doing us more harm than good.

So, what’s actually going on when we hit snooze?

A person reaching for the alarm clock at 7 a.m.
Source: The Dreaming Show

Most people who rely on alarm clocks experience sleep inertia, which is the state of grogginess and disorientation one immediately feels upon waking. The deeper the sleep stage you are waking up from, the more intensely you feel the effects of sleep inertia (and the more tempting it is to reach for that snooze button!). When we hit the snooze button and doze off again, our bodies are actually preparing to enter the start of another sleep cycle, making it nearly impossible to reach the final stage of the sleep cycle, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, within a matter of minutes. This ends up leading us to feel even more exhausted throughout the day.

According to research and Human Sleep Science expert Professor Matthew Walker, being abruptly woken by an alarm clock triggers a “burst of activity [within the nervous system that causes] a spike in blood pressure and sudden acceleration in heart rate.” This means that repeatedly bargaining for more sleep is dangerously detrimental to our own hearts.

Is there anything I can do about it?

A woman basking in the sunrise. Source: Pixabay

If you’re only realizing this now, it’s not too late to turn around and reverse this impulsive snoozing habit. Luckily for you, the road to recovery isn’t a difficult one. Perhaps set only one alarm at a later time rather than having multiple alarms to avoid interrupting your sleep or consider sticking to a consistent sleep schedule to train your body’s natural wake mechanisms. There are even sunrise alarm clocks that replace the blaring alarms with gradually brightening light to help us ease out of our slumber more naturally.

While we may have plenty of excuses to get a few additional moments of sleep in the mornings, we should have no excuse when our health and well-being is on the line.

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Posted in Biological Sciences

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Video

Stop cheating yourself! Probiotics can’t treat your stomach flu

Imagine your cousin is terribly exhausted by a stomach flu that he accidentally got during the weekend, and he pukes everywhere. Which treatment would you choose? One pill full of probiotics so that they can fight away the ‘bad germ’ that roams your cousin’s gut? Or just a simple hot water bag and a bowl of thin soup? Which treatment do you think will help you get rid of the terrible puking faster? I bet most of you would choose to take the probiotics, since from what we learnt on the internet, probiotics are effective in fighting away the ‘bad germs’ that lies inside your gut. They can adjust your gut microbes, make your skin looks better, help you digest food more efficiently, and finally build a well-regulated and healthy gut environment. More importantly, they are not as merciless as the antibiotics, which will kill whatever left in the gut and leave a gut free of both good and bad germs behind. At least, that was what most videos on Youtube say about the benefits of probiotics.

However, is it true? Is it possible for just a small pill of probiotics to have the ability to save your gut? How good are these small, almost invisible to naked eyes creatures? The answer,unfortunately, is no. In the case of a gut inflammation caused by virus or bacteria, the probiotics can do nothing better than simple placebos. According to two recent big studies in the U.S., probiotics are inefficient in preventing the development of moderate-to-severe gut inflammation, and symptoms of the researched subject shows no difference against the placebo group.

One of the research mainly focused on Lactobacillus rhamnosus and L. helveticus, both are commonly used probiotics. Participants of this research are 3 to 48 months old children that has been diagnosed as gastroenteritis, commonly known as the gut flu or the stomach flu. In this study, participants were randomly selected and separate into two groups, one receives the probiotics while the other group receive the placebo for two weeks. At the end of the study, the outcome of the participants were evaluated to determine if the probiotics or the placebo had treated their illness.  Among all the participants who received the probiotics, 26.1% of them developed into a moderate-to-severe gastroenteritis, while 24.7% of the placebo group developed a moderate-to-severe gastroenteritis. This means that the probiotics is of no use in preventing the development of moderate-to-severe gastroenteritis.

cartoon shows how probiotics help us to regulate a healthy life

So what exactly should we do when we are facing a gastroenteritis? And is it true that probiotics are all useless? Researchers have not given a clear answer yet. What is true is that next time when a stomach flu strikes, do not panic, before purchasing the expensive probiotics, keep asking yourself do you really need it.

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Posted on January 14, 2019 by in Biological Sciences, Issues in Science, Science Communication

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Starving cancer: testing claims of disease prevention with intermittent fasting

Posted on January 14, 2019 by | 2 comments

As the title suggests, yes I don’t eat breakfast *gasp* so I fast for the majority of the day with the first meal being after 12pm, and my second meal with hopefully no snacks in between at 6/8pm. And might I add, most days I limit my carbohydrates intake, meaning no bread, no rice, no sweet happiness.

And why do I go through this trouble and pain you might ask – after looking at my genetic data and family history of cancer combined with very popular research in nutrition emerging in the media, I decided I can take this matter into my own hands and experiment on myself what works best and maybe see results as these studies progress long-term. I started listening bits here and there of podcasts, particularly first FoundMyFitness and then slowly incorporating The Joe Rogan Experience into the repertoire; so these diet changes have taken over my life, with Dr. Dominic D’Agostino being the keynote speaker of this long conference I’m attending since this summer.

Starving cancer: Dominic D’Agostino at TEDxTampaBay by TEDx Talks

Intermittent fasting can be done in various ways, with only 2 days of the week calorically restricted, or the way that I chose – time restricted – done with 16hrs fast and 8hrs eating frame. This approach has existed for ages really, mostly practiced by some religions, but now we’re seeing not only positive effects in terms of weight loss, but also disease prevention, improved biomarkers like insulin resistance, and simply put a better way of life. Moreover, the diet comes with incredible research supporting cell autophagy and repair, and longevity claims thanks to DNA repair. When combined with a carb-limiting diet like ketogenic diet, tumour cells are under intense metabolic stress leading to apoptosis, as those depend mostly on glucose for their life cycle. Also, since you eat at specific times and limit carbohydrates, your energy levels will have fewer spikes (i.e. no sugar highs and crashes) and your body will run at its optimum levels.

I admit, this is hard to wrap your head around let alone commit to such a lifestyle change, as we cannot imagine giving up sweet glucose; but fear not, our brain is flexible and can adapt to the new energy source *ketones* that we can see in the diagram below as beta-hydroxybutyrate going through Krebs cycle generating ATP for our body’s energy:

Finally, I wanted to point out that while the media makes this seem like the cure-all option with sparkling headlines, this is definitely not the case, as we learn in pharmacology “cure-all = probably BS”. A lifestyle change in diet usually has to come hand-in-hand with an exercise regimen, and of course, this promising research has not yet shown its future face. In the meantime, I will continue to experiment with this and maybe kill my family’s cancer (?) I’ll let you know in some years. Research, investigate, get informed and maybe try yourself?

-Nicole Bostan

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Posted in Issues in Science, Science Communication

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