Welcome to the Stats Professor Blog

When you have multiple appealing paths to choose from, it is difficult to decide which to take because we know saying yes to one option might prevent us from doing the others. This indecision can leave you paralyzed and waste valuable time.  

If the time will otherwise be wasted, push ahead with your plans to learn something new; even if, you aren’t sure if this is the very best thing to work on. Don’t let “the perfect” be the enemy of “good enough.”

The tendency to become numb to our good fortune is referred to as hedonic adaptation. It would be nice if we could selectively turn off this adaptation so that we could continue to reap the happiness benefits of positive life changes. While we can’t turn off this adaptation entirely, there are some ways to fight hedonic adaptation. Two of the best ways are: 1) negative visualization and 2) gratitude.

Curators are keepers or custodians of a collection (in this post I am referring to curators of knowledge), and editors are those that screen, trim, and ultimately determine the final content of a produced work. These people have a lot of power over the information that reaches us. In this country and at this time, there is a widely held opinion that information should be free, fast, unfiltered, and unencumbered, but I believe curators and editors are now more important than ever.

Spend part of your week learning to do hard things. Hard things are things that most people cannot do. Acquiring a hard to learn skill or a difficult piece of knowledge will make you sought after because rare things are typically valued. Depending on the skill or knowledge acquired, people might even pay you for your expertise. Having rare skills should increase your value to the world. Possessing rare skills will benefit you and your family.

We are taught that it is a blessing to have a cornucopia of options for everything from toothpaste to spouses. However, there are downsides to having options/choices. If our goal is to be happy, content, or satisfied, too much choice can be an obstacle to overcome.

Don’t go on a diet. Dieting and diets have been well studied. The main findings from these studies are: 1) Any form of calorie restriction will cause you to lose weight and 2) Ninety-five percent of dieters returned to at least the weight they were before the diet. That’s right. Nearly everyone eventually gains all the weight back (and often more). I’m aware of how depressing this sounds, but there is hope if you are trying to lose some extra body fat.   

There is a saying that we are the average of the five people that we spend the most time with. In my experience this is true. For some this is truer than for others, but you cannot fully prevent other people from rubbing off on you. To keep yourself growing and evolving, you need to make sure the people you are surrounded by aren’t dragging you down.

Humans have a remarkable capacity to endure and normalize both pain and pleasure. Have you ever thought about how anyone could have been happy in the distant past when they had so many hardships and so few material comforts compared to today? Have you ever thought about how people in less fortunate countries can be happier than many of the people in the US or Europe despite the differences in wealth?

Good and bad habits have a large impact on our lives because habits are actions that we repeatedly perform. We are what we do, over and over, again and again. Given the importance of habits, we should think about how to form good habits and avoid bad ones.

When something is the result of several inputs or factors, it is rare that all the inputs matter equally. Typically, a small number of inputs matters more than all the rest combined. There is a shorthand way to refer to this phenomenon. It is called “the 80-20 principle.”

Another school was attacked by a teenager with a rifle this week. Elementary students gunned down in a place that should always feel and be safe. It is a national disgrace. Students, parents, and educators should not need to worry about this sort of tragedy. Why does this seem to affect the US more than any other country? 

It should be possible to feed two-dimensional (2D) images into a computer and use artificial intelligence to create a three-dimensional facsimile of your childhood home (or other spaces) in virtual reality.

An article from The Atlantic on life without retirement included a scary fact about retirement in America.   "... the median savings in a 401(k) plan for people between the ages of 55 and 64 is currently just $15,000, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security, a nonprofit."

I thought I would take a moment to discuss the popularity of soccer in the United States. It is hard to pin down the true popularity of a sport, but I thought two important measures could serve as a barometer of the sport's popularity in the USA: Average attendance numbers for MLS (Major League Soccer) games and MLS revenue.

A video post from the Whitehouse that asked a simple question: "If someone works full time and makes the federal minimum wage, do you know how much their annual salary is?" It is clear that the people featured in the video never learned a simple method to approximate an annual salary from an hourly wage.

In a previous post, I solved a fairly famous probability problem about two or more people having a matching birthday (in a room of size n). In this post, I will show you how to program a Texas Instruments graphing calculator to perform the calculations. The result will provide you with a handy program to impress your friends while also teaching you a little about writing programs in the TI-83 graphing calculator.

This problem is a challenge for two reasons. First, the room size is not given as a constant, which means the solution must be expressed as a formula involving n. Second, even if we assumed a fixed room size, there are a lot of possible ways to have one or more matching birthdays. For example, imagine the room has just four people in it.