No 60: No News Sundays

Hey everyone,

So I’ve decided not to read any news on Sundays from now on. I think having a break once a week would be good for my stress, especially during these next three weeks as I really have to focus on studying. Statistically, I only have about a 45% chance of passing this sitting, and only about a 25%-35% on the upper examinations based on historical evidence. Realistically, I have to keep in mind that I might fail at one point, and even most good students fail somewhere along the way. Most of us are pretty open about when we fail an exam – and there’s no stigma against it, although it doesn’t feel good when it happens. I feel OK about this test, and my study progress is slightly better than that of MLC so we’ll see how it goes, though there is more information to learn this time around.

That being said, I don’t want to put all of my eggs in one basket, so I still make sure to spend time on other things that I find important. I went for a 3 hour ride Saturday morning around Clear Lake before visiting my parents. Chris Langley, a fellow racer on Bike Barn, decided to forgo racing at Coldspring because he was “out of shape,” and pulled for the last 20 minutes at 30mph while I barely managed to stay on his wheel, my heart pounding at 176 bpm. It’s nice that I’m still able to hold that heart rate, which is a sign that I haven’t lost too much fitness. I’m pretty bummed out about missing racing this weekend, or having to miss 2-3 months out of every year to study for these tests. The material itself is actually pretty interesting, but the pressure of exams can be mentally exhausting, and I think most statisticians would agree. In the end I think, it’ll be worth it.

I sacrificed some of my study time to finish up a Sociology book I’d been reading for the last couple of months. It was really fascinating, although a lot of it went over things that I already knew so it wasn’t the most efficient use of my time. It mainly focused on inequality with respect to wealth, rights, and gender, and discussed some of the theories by Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. I was somewhat disappointed as it didn’t focus much on human interaction on an individual or group basis. On the contrary, the style was more macro-oriented and dealt with human relations by class or nationality. Overall, I’d recommend it to most teenagers…I’d be disappointed if a high school graduate weren’t aware of the huge gap in living standards between Denmark and the DRC, for instance…or perhaps, the fact people in other countries have a greater life expectancy than those in the United States, even though they spend less on healthcare.

I’ve got a lot of interesting projects planned as soon as June starts. I’ll finally get around to reading the Cyclist’s Training Bible, and after that I’ll get started on Vonnegut’s Player Piano and Perry and Bratman’s Introduction to Philosophy. I also have some races planned this summer in Louisiana, where I went last year and had a lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to it.

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59: A Few Updates

Hey everyone,

Studying is going alright, but it looks like it’s taking over all my other activities so I won’t really have any creative projects to write about until the end of next month. I’ve managed to stay in shape so far, and by pure coincidence, I ran into one of my former UT teammates, Stephen, during a training ride at Memorial Park. He’s moved down here for the long term, which is pretty cool given that Ken and I are in the same general location. In the meantime, I’ve planned some projects in the back of my mind that I might want to start as soon as I finish my exam:

1. Monty Hall Simulation
2. N-Back
3. Project Euler
4. .GPX and .TCX data extraction

The first project, The Monty Hall Problem, involves a game-show situation in which a contestant chooses one of three objects, each hidden behind a curtain. Two of the objects are something undesirable, like a goat, and the other object is something desirable, like a fancy sports car. The hostess reveals one of the goats and asks the contestant if they wish to change their mind. It turns out the answer is the player should switch, which seems counterintuitive upon first exposure since most people would erroneously assume that there’s still 50/50 chance of getting a fancy sports car regardless of choice. The general proof of the problem involves Bayesian Statistics. I’d like to do a simple VBA simulation of this scenario to see how it works empirically, and perhaps in this way I can gain an intuitive understanding of how this new knowledge affects the conditional probability.

For the second project, I’d like to reconstruct a game called N-Back using VBA as a prototype, and then wxPython for the final version. N-Back is an iterative game in which the player must recognize patterns from say, 1,2,…,n iterations ago. It’s a game that tests the working memory of the player. I think this would be a very good exercise for GUI programming.

One of my friends recommended that I give Project Euler a try. It’s a website that has a bunch of problems that you can solve efficiently by constructing algorithms. I heard that attempting to recreate solutions in different programming languages is a good way learn new languages.

The fourth project involves the .GPX and .TCX data files that contain the training data I pull from my Garmin. It’s possible to convert them into tables that you can import in to R for statistical analysis. The plotting features of the free Garmin Training Center software are very limited, so I’d like to create a platform using R to make it easier to slice and compare two different data sets.

Other than that, I’ve been given some neat projects at work where I’ll be able to take a look at some huge data sets using SQL Server. I’ve also signed up for a meeting with the Houston-R users group on Wednesday, at which we’ll discuss the use of R in predictive modeling competitions.

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