Webinometry

Retire Sooner by Ignoring Financial Advisors

Rathan Haran — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:06:46 +0000

The recent market activity and what we saw in September 08 and March 09 is why people should not listen to any ‘investment professional’ who tells you to invest based on how old you are. It’s ridiculous to apply the “average” growth rate of the market without considering where in the market cycle you are [...]

Dean’s List Released

Rathan Haran — Thu, 13 May 2010 01:11:27 +0000

We released a pretty cool trivia application, called the Dean’s List Trivia Game, which is available in the Android Market. I had a lot of fun working on this project, and a lot of help as well, and it came together pretty nicely when it was all said and done. The crazy part about building this [...]

How Bad is my Fantasy Baseball Team?

Rathan Haran — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:54:26 +0000

I’m sitting in 9th place, 67 whopping points behind the league leader after the first month of the baseball season. That’s pretty awful. The question is, do I have any hope? I decided to take a statistical approach to see if I should jump ship on my team, or try to hold through this miserable [...]

We Are The World Part 2

Rathan Haran — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:42:13 +0000

I’m not really sure how I feel about this. For a pretty powerful and inspiring song, I’m not sure it really needed a remake, especially since it seemed a little B+ in the star power department. I guess someone was compelled to do this and the earthquake in Haiti coupled with the 25th anniversary of [...]

How Mint.com Can Fix The Banking Industry

Rathan Haran — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:18:14 +0000

So you are unemployed, with no job prospects in sight and a healthy mortgage and family to worry about. You are not alone as a staggering 17% of Americans are currently out of work (sorry, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is a more realistic vision of the jobless rate, not the 10% that you [...]

Stats in Sociology – Not Boring Version

Rathan Haran — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:23:54 +0000

Hans Rosling shows you how to to make stats cool again. Visualization of data is a great learning tool, and creating ways to do this will be of great value to those with less mathematical sophistication than others. The insights that Hans Rosling was able to illustrate in this presentation were pretty amazing as well, and [...]

The Perfect Fantasy Football Play

Rathan Haran — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:09:49 +0000

I’ve been playing in a fantasy football league with the same group of guys for about ten years now, and like many others of you out there, I just can’t win. It seems like everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, from a missed extra point to the NFL reviewing game tape to change [...]

Bill Belichick + Statistics = Usually Good Outcomes

Rathan Haran — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:48:33 +0000

I’ve been a die hard Giants fan for as long as I can remember, and although I was technically alive and barely remember parts of the 86 season (and nothing from that Super Bowl), the 90 Super Bowl team made me love the G-Men . They had me at Mark Ingram’s 3rd and 13 conversion. Bill [...]

Music and Math

Rathan Haran — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:30:18 +0000

This is just unbelievable. The sync between music and math is undeniable. It’s shocking to see an audience, a random group of individuals untrained in music, be able to use the power of the pentatonic scale. Don’t Worry, Be Happy!

Predicting the World Series using Python

Rathan Haran — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:45:51 +0000

Last week, I’ve started to learn Python through a peer-to-peer learning session set up through nextNY. The material that we’ve gone through has made learning programming very easy to wrap our heads around, and the environment of cooperative learning has been awesome. I’m looking forward to being a Python ninja* pretty soon. With four and half [...]