Isabel, Paolo, and Frank, 

   The introduction to your paper is good -- it clearly sets up the question in a 
   very immediate and understandable way.  It's interesting that even within your
   group, there was ultimately a disagreement about what the evidence was saying 
   about this phenomenon.  I agree with you that what this really boils down to is 
   that even if shots within actual basketball games behave essentially as though they were 
   independent events from a statistical point of view, there is still a real psychological 
   phenomenon underlying the ways that players, coaches and fans perceive what happens 
   in games.  One can argue whether this is a "perception" or a "misperception" in the 
   light of the statistics, but it's real as a pattern in human psychology.  We are 
   "wired" to perceive patterns in the events around us and to invent explanations for 
   our experiences based on those perceived patterns.  

   I was hoping that all of the projects would involve doing some actual analysis of 
   data.  You essentially decided to report the results from the Gilovich, Vallone, and 
   Tversky article and others.  It would have been possible to do some more original
   work with things like what GVT discuss on page 311-312 of their article.  And that 
   is what the slate.com article by Jordan Ellenberg and the Miller and Sanjurjo article 
   I pointed out in the final project assignment sheet discusses as well.  
   
   I do think you have done a good job of presenting the main ideas from the papers you 
   looked at, with one exception:  you have not done a very good job of including 
   citations to your sources in the text.  You're certainly not intending to commit
   plagiarism, and I'm definitely *not* treating what you wrote as such. But you should 
   be aware that for writing assignments in many classes (especially in writing-heavy
   subjects like history, literature, art history, etc.), your lack of citations might 
   be interpreted that way, with significant penalties.   Even when you are not using 
   direct quotations from your sources, you need to get in the habit of including foot-
   or end-notes to identify the exact locations within your sources where facts, ideas,
   analyses, etc. that are not your own are coming from.  

   
   Specific comments:

   Page 2:  "Within this article, the statisticians conducted several different studies 
   on their main question" -- maybe "reported the results of" instead of "conducted."
   It's true they did both, but conducting the studies, then writing up the article
   giving the results are really two separate phases of a research project.  
 
   Page 2: "One may ask that if statistics can show that a hot hand does not exist, 
   why don’t these statistics just be shown to anyone who believes in a hot hand and 
   end the argument once and for all?"  This sentence does not really "work" as is.  
   Something like " ... why doesn't showing the statistics to a believer in the 
   hot hand end the argument once and for all?"

   Page 3:  "The Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky contains four different studies disproving 
   the existence of a hot hand in many different ways."  First say "The Gilovich, Vallone,
   and Tversky article" (or just put in a reference to the bibliography of the paper. 
   If that article was listed 7th, for instance, one standard way to make a reference
   would be "The article [7]."  Other people might list the items in the bibliography 
   by something like [GVT].  More importantly, what you are saying is not really
   correct.  Study 1 is intended to establish that players and fans *think* the hot
   hand phenomenon does exist, so it's different from the other three.    

   Page 5:  "In comparison to the mean probability that a player will hit a shot in general, 
   which is 52%, the probabilities of hitting a shot after missing a certain amount of shots 
   are actually higher. These statistics alone could disprove the theory of an existence of 
   a hot hand, however, we will continue to analyze the data."  Not really. Saying the 
   probability of making a shot rises after one or more previous misses does not demonstrate 
   by itself that there is no "hot hand."  You need to look at the probabilities of 
   making a shot after one or more previous hits.  Also please don't use "amount" for 
   things (like shots) that are counted in discrete units.  You can have an amount
   of butter, or milk, or sand.  But it's always a *number* of shots.  (I know it's 
   very common now to use "amount" this way in casual speech; formal writing has higher
   standards for word usage!)

   Page 7:  In terms of organization, I think it would have been better to put the 
   discussion of what the autocorrelation is (how it is computed) *before* the 
   discussion of the p-value Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky report.  

   Page 13:  "... we must entertain possible counterarguments to the statistician’s
   viewpoints."  You are talking about more than one statistician, so you want the
   plural possessive " statisticians' " (apostrophe after the s).  

   Page 14:  "their minds had been changed" -- Better to say "have been changed"
   if that change persists into the present :)

   Final Project: 

   Annotated Bibliography -- 10/10
   
   Presentation -- 33/35

   Paper -- 49/55

   Total -- 92/100  (letter: A-)