Basic Stats U Need #2: T-Test
Aug 23, 2017
Part 2: the t-Distribution We saw in the previous post that if X is a random variable and the population distribution of X is normal with mean \(\mu\) and standard deviation \(\sigma\) (variance \(\sigma^2\)), then the distribution of the sample mean \(\bar{X}\) for samples of a given size \(n\) is normal, with mean \(\mu\) and standard deviation of \(\frac{\sigma}{\sqrt{n}}\), which we can write \(\bar{X}_n \sim N(\mu,\frac{\sigma}{\sqrt{n}})\).1 More exciting, we saw that by the Central Limit Theorem, the sampling distribution will be normal regardless of the original population distribution if the sample size is large enough.
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Basic Stats U Need #1: Z-Scores, Sampling Distns, LLN, CLT
Aug 8, 2017
Hello! This is the first in a series of posts that cover topics typically encountered on any Introduction to Statistics course syllabus (yes, that is to say frequentist). The idea was born out of a desire to blog about the Analysis of Variance and its many forms, but I soon found myself addressing pre-requisites, which led to tangents and lemmas that took on lives of (and ballooned into posts of) their own.
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Swapping an HDD for an SSD in a Low-End 2017 Laptop
Jul 17, 2017
In less than two day's time, I was able to purchase my third computer from a perfect-craigslist-stranger (without issue!) and replace the hard disk with a solid state drive, and I wanted to take a minute to document the experience here; if you are interested only in a rough guide for SSD installation for a 2017 HP laptop, you are heartily encouraged to skip down several paragraphs.
The computer in question is an HP 15-ba113cl that the original owner bought in February 2017 from our local Costco for around $400.
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Cleaning and Operating a 100-Year-Old Sewing Machine
Aug 4, 2016
My wife Lindsay let me co-blog about fixing up a century-old sewing machine!
Check it out here:
http://www.lindsaywoodward.com/2016/07/cleaning-and-operating-a-100-year-old-sewing-machine.html/
DIY e-books: Manipulating scanned PDFs with command-line tools
Jun 1, 2016
The Memory Dynamics Laboratory is having something of a book club this summer, but the crucial volume was proving difficult to find; it had been out of print for many years and the UT library system only has a single copy! I proudly volunteered to do the hunting-up and ferreting-out because I have at my disposal a skill-set unique to the hyper-stingy tech-savvy long-term student, i.e., time-honored and hard-won methods for coaxing any book I please from the depths of the internet (way too many hyphens going on here).
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♫ Summer Running: Not Very Fast! / Summer Running: Pain in my Ass! ♫
Aug 30, 2015
Every couple of days I force myself to go outside and run about 2-4 miles. I do not enjoy it. It makes me feel like I am dying every time; I gasp and wheeze and, even after showering I stay uncomfortably sweaty for a few hours. Worse still, I do not feel “energized” or whatever other vital sensations people claim to derive from exercise; if anything, I feel especially fatigued afterwards, and this only gets more pronounced as the day progresses.
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Summary/Review of "How Can The Mind Occur in The Physical Universe?"
Aug 29, 2015
I found out about John R. Anderson almost immediately upon discovering intelligent tutoring systems a few years ago; he and his research group at Carnegie Mellon have blazed the way forward with these technologies. Their Cognitive Tutor, for example, is currently #5 out of 39 interventions in mathematics education, as evaluated by the US Department of Education's “What Works Clearing House". I learned that, notwithstanding these educational pursuits, his life's work had been more about developing a “cognitive architecture” – a model of how the structure of the mind and its components work together to achieve human cognition.
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I Finally Read "A New Kind of Science"
Jul 1, 2015
This book made me think new thoughts; this is rare, so I am posting about it.
If you read nothing else in the post, read the end.
“A New Kind of Science” is a 13-year-old book preceded, and regrettably often prejudged, by its reputation. Many of the criticisms that have come to define the work are valid, so let's get that part out in the open. The book can be read in its entirety here; it is enormous, both physically (~1,200 pages) and in scope, which has led to a limited and specialized readership lodging many legitimate, though mostly technical, complaints.
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Laudato Si Pope-pourri
Jun 21, 2015
It's not everyday that I want to read something a Pope wrote. In fact, today, June 19, 2015 was the only day I have ever wanted that, if memory serves. Today I read Papa Francesca's second encyclical, entitled “Laudato Si – On Care For Our Common Home". It was a unique experience to navigate to w2.vatican.va, download an essay the Pope just wrote about environmentalism, and then read it on my computer.
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Forgetting as "Interference" during Consolidation and Retrieval
Jun 14, 2015
The singular exception is provided by the human ability to remember past happenings. When one thinks today about what one did yesterday, time’s arrow is bent into a loop. The rememberer has mentally traveled back into her past and thus violated the law of the irreversibility of the flow of time. She has not accomplished the feat in physical reality, of course, but rather in the reality of the mind, which, as everyone knows, is at least as important for human beings as is the physical reality.
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