A blog about statistics, physics, programming, graduate school, and generally whatever I find interesting or amusing. Warning: I am boring.
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Further adventures with ICP accelerometers – October 14, 2023
Adapting accelerometers to ordinary recorders with phantom power, and listening to the sound of bridges.
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Powering accelerometers for fun, profit, and field recording – February 12, 2022
What if you could hear the inside of a watermelon? Building an ICP signal conditioner for accelerometers and measurement microphones.
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Using statistics and cognitive science to understand how students learn statistics – February 6, 2020
For the past two years, we’ve been conducting research on how students learn statistics. What have we learned so far?
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Books of 2017 – February 2, 2018
Brief reviews of a selection of books I read in 2017.
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Books of 2016 – February 26, 2017
Brief reviews of a selection of books I read in 2016.
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R’s Lists and its Detestable Dearth of Data-Structures – September 12, 2016
A deep dive into R’s inner workings.
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Simpson’s Paradox and Statistical Urban Legends: Gender Bias at Berkeley – May 8, 2016
Statisticians love to illustrate Simpson’s paradox with a gender bias lawsuit at UC Berkeley. It never happened.
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Review: James Boyle’s ‘The Public Domain’ – February 17, 2016
An excellent introduction to modern intellectual property policy.
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A flexible implementation of Conway’s Game of Life – January 25, 2016
Implementing the game in Racket with pluggable rules.
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Review: Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ – January 23, 2016
If you don’t finish reading this, you merely prove his point.
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Statistical Computing Postmortem – January 22, 2016
Reflections on teaching statistical computing to statistics PhD students.
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Where are the interactive textbooks? – December 17, 2015
Why are “interactive” textbooks so often full of useless diagrams, pointless videos, and stilted writing?
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How much is a mole of monkeys? – June 1, 2015
Asking the important questions in extreme monkey aggregation.
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The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics Education – October 19, 2012
Why students should learn mathematics.
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Shut Up and Listen to Your Students – October 19, 2012
Why lecturing doesn’t work. An overview of physics education research on interactive teaching methods.
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Other good statistical blogs include (warning: obviously biased sample)