by Craig Marker | Feb 27, 2007 | Uncategorized
From Mike Damone of Fast Times at Ridgemont High:”Act like wherever you are, that’s the place to be.”
by Craig Marker | Feb 26, 2007 | Uncategorized
The Social Science Statistics Blog has an entry about a recent article describing 51% of women now living without a spouse. Here is an excerpt:”Fully understanding the assumptions and limitations of a study is challenging enough for those performing the...
by Craig Marker | Feb 26, 2007 | Uncategorized
Steven Levitt wrote about a study that looked at smoking and PTSD. Here is an excerpt:The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry recently published a paper on the relationship between smoking and post-traumatic stress disorder. This newspaper report on the article starts out...
by Craig Marker | Feb 22, 2007 | Uncategorized
From the Mahalonobis Blog:”if you want to be good at checkers, and you are 7, a good strategy is just not to make mistakes, wait until your opponent makes one, and capitalize. If you are playing a skilled player, you need to develop a strategy that...
by Craig Marker | Feb 15, 2007 | Uncategorized
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...
by Craig Marker | Feb 14, 2007 | Uncategorized
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...
by Craig Marker | Feb 13, 2007 | Uncategorized
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...
by Craig Marker | Feb 12, 2007 | Uncategorized
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...
by Craig Marker | Feb 7, 2007 | Uncategorized
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...
by Craig Marker | Feb 5, 2007 | Uncategorized
According to the announcer at last night’s game, the NFC has won the coin toss 10 consecutive times. He indicated the probability of this happening is extremely low. To calculate this probability, we need to assume that the coin is balanced (thus, there is a 50%...
