Welcome  to  Public  Health  moment from  the  University  of  Minnesota. It's  March  Madness  time. The  NCAA  basketball  playoffs  begin  March  13. Let's  say  you're  in  an  office  pool and  you  need  advice  in  picking  winners. Who  do  you  call?  How  about  Brad  Carlin, a  biostatistician  at  the  University  of  Minnesota. First  of  all,  I  think  you  should pick  with  your  head  and  not  your  heart. For  the  most  part,  the  seating  committee  gets  it  right, and  the  higher  seeds  are  better  teams. And  so  if  you  pick  the  higher  seed,  every  chance  you  get, you  have  just  maximized  the  probability  you  will  win those  games  and  therefore  maximize your  expected  points  in  the  tournament. Is  there  a  downside  to  that  strategy? Your  sheet  will  be  too  similar  to everybody  else's  if  you  do  that. And  so  if  you  do  win,  you'd  wind  up  having to  share  the  money  with  a  bunch  of  other  clowns. And  so  what  you'd  much  rather  do  is  make a  few  key  changes that  don't  reduce  your  chance  of  winning  too  much, but  make  you  very  different  from  the  other  guy. So  if  you  change  one  game, which  would  it  be  a  game  in  the  first  round  or  later? I  think  you'd  do  better  by  changing one  game  in  the  last  round,  right? If  you  were  to  change  one  team, I  would  change  the  champion with  another  public  health  moment. I'm  John  Finnegan.