Traffic Jams

In periods of high traffic, one person can have a great influence on cars behind him or her. Livescience.com describes how reaction times, lapses in attention, and erratic driving (faster or slower than other traffic or the switching of lanes) can cause ‘traffic...

Happiness

Some say that happiness can be found in the pursuit of goals. That is, happiness is achieved by wanting of things and not in actually having the wanted ‘thing.’An interesting book that I recently read is “Stumbling on Happiness” by Dan Gilbert. The book is about how...

Manufactured Fear

Some fears are emphasized by the media or politicians to create a change in our behavior to suit their purposes. John Twelve Hawks, in his essay “How We Live Now,” discusses this topic: “In his insightful book The Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner...

Good, Bad, Who Knows?

After reading a quote from Phil Mickelson, who won a golf tournament this weekend, I was reminded of a story. I’m not sure of the source of this story, but there was a farmer who used a horse to till his fields. One day, the horse escaped. The farmer’s...

Analogies in Statistics

The Mahalonobis Blog has a great entry on using analogies to teach statistics. Here is part of their entry:”An educational experiment in 1989 pitted a group of students with high reading scores, selected especially for their lack of interest in baseball, against...