The Science of Crowd Counting & 3 Ways to Teach Kids Estimation
Patricia introduces the science of counting crowds and methods to show kids how to estimate large numbers.
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Tag: statistics
Daily #DadJoke for February 21, 2016
The problem with math puns is that calculus jokes are all …
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Falling for Chuck, Part Two: NIPS – a Screen, Not a Diagnostic
What would you think if your doctor called to say there was a 99% chance that your baby had Down Syndrome?
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Daily #DadJoke for February 14, 2015
Bob couldn’t be with his wife on Valentine’s Day until his marine mammal wildlife study completed…
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Living the Lefty Life in a Righty World
Patricia rants about how many kitchen gadgets and appliances are designed expressly for right-handers.
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Science Literacy: Statistics Shmatistics
Reading GeekMom will make your day 39% happier, your children 50% smarter, and the world 100% better. Hmm…maybe learning about statistics would help.
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The Manga Guide to Calculus and Statistics
Dakster explores the world of learning calculus and statistics with manga!
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Learning Statistics With Tea
Have fun learning statistics with your kids by polling friends and family about their drinking habits: drinking tea!
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Another Reason to Love Maps! American Dialect Maps Show Our Language Quirks
I happened across an article on the North Carolina State University research blog. One of their statistics graduate students has taken data from a decade-old Harvard University linguistics survey and turned it into graphical magic.
The survey is Dr. Bert Vaux’s Dialect Survey, which was conducted in 2002 and included over 30,000 Americans from all 50 states (even though the maps only show the contiguous 48 states).
What NCSU student Joshua Katz did was take the geolocated data from that survey and apply a “k-nearest neighbor” smoothing algorithm to estimate the likelihood at every point in the U.S. of using a particular dialect or word choice.
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No Starch Press Manga Guides Make Science Fun
Have you ever read a textbook cover to cover? I’m in grad school. I’ve had to do it more than once. It usually requires massive amounts of caffeine and re-reading a lot of pages. Well, there’s some good news. No Starch Press has The Manga Guide series on textbook topics, such as statistics, electricity, and molecular biology. The manga books are written by Japanese subject matter experts. They have been translated to English and (thankfully) rearranged to read from left to right.
Continue ReadingThe Best of Kickstarter 2012
While I’ve got Kickstarter on my brain, I thought I’d point you to Kickstarter’s “Best of 2012” slideshow. It encapsulates another huge year for the crowd-funding site in a series of highlights.
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Answer: Present Game
It turns out my kids are experts at determining expected value: the size, weight and number of presents under the tree have now been precisely determined and weighed against each other to determine fairness, which, it also turns out, is …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week Solution: Back to School Bugs
Everyone has had that dream that wakes you up in the middle of the night. You know the one, where you suddenly remember that you are not only still enrolled in school, but it is also finals time, and …
Continue ReadingGeekDad Puzzle of the Week: Back to School Bugs
After some 104 days of summer vacation, Max and Nora are back in school. One of the big things that my wife Allison and I are concerned about is the fact that most schools are “breeder reactors” for coughs, sniffles, …
Continue ReadingGeeking Out on Kickstarter Statistics
I’m not a huge stats geek, but I do enjoy looking at things like Kickstarter’s yearly round-ups. However, it’s apparently hard to dig up more specific details about Kickstarter projects which did not hit their funding goals. Kickstarter’s own stats …
Continue ReadingChoosing the Best Fantasy Baseball Stats to Track
Statistics are the foundation of a good fantasy league experience. While there are a number of complicated formulas that can tell us how good a player is, the trade-off for that level of precision is that the numbers become too …
Continue ReadingExperts Explain How to Choose a School by the Numbers
Last week I wrote a somewhat half-baked post describing simple numbers that parents can use to pick an elementary school (the first and second were solid!). This week, I called around to get experts’ take on the topic. Here’s what …
Continue ReadingChoosing a School by the Numbers
Lately, my wife and I have been staring slack-jawed at elementary school options, little ropes of drool hanging zombie-like from the corners of our mouths – and so we’ve decided to cede our choice to the numbers. But when you …
Continue ReadingGeek Celebrates Hanukkah With Science: Day Three
Unconventional holiday traditions are fun for the whole family! So far this year, my family has celebrated Hanukkah by launching rockets indoors and constructing small boats in order to sink them. Today we’re delving deeper, into the very language of science. That’s right; it’s math time. Roger Bacon said, “Mathematics is the gate and key […]
Continue ReadingSkylanders In-Game Stats Revealed
After the popularity of our Skylanders card stats, I started collecting together the in-game starting stats for each Skylander Character. These are the figures that actually determine how each toy performs in the game. It has been interesting to see …
Continue ReadingThe Scripps National Spelling Bee: Some Fascinating Facts
We are in the midst of the 84th Scripps National Spelling Bee Week in the Washington, D.C., area. I’ve watched the competition with interest most years — although not with the same enthusiasm my family watches the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest every July 4th! I find it especially cool that ESPN chooses to air […]
Continue ReadingHow Stephen King Taught Me Percentile Rank and the Normal Curve
I was driving my ’58 Plymouth Fury on a long trip out of Boulder, Colorado to a strange town in Maine, when I stopped at a hotel along the way for a needed caffeine boost. A man in glasses and …
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How Stephen King Taught Me Percentile Rank and the Normal Curve
I was driving my ’58 Plymouth Fury on a long trip out of Boulder, Colorado to a strange town in Maine, when I stopped at a hotel along the way for a needed caffeine boost. A man in glasses and a way with words came over and asked, “So, what do you know about percentile […]
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