The Monthly Two Cents - October 2024 Edition
What Have I Been Up To?
School’s off to a great start! October brought us parent-teacher night, and the feedback was positive, especially around my Grade 12 stats class. It’s sparking enough curiosity that students are chatting with their families about their stats projects.
One of the big highlights this year is a March Break trip to Costa Rica with students. To help fund it, we chose World’s Finest Chocolate for fundraising. With a 50% profit margin and ease of selling, it was a clear choice. Naturally, I set up a detailed Google Sheets tracker to keep sales organized!
PhD prep has me deep into readings, and I’m working to secure data access before I begin. This means I’ve been meeting with a lot of people at the school board, planting seeds and building connections. Alongside that, October was packed with meetings for a new consulting project for other school boards. It’s a great opportunity to apply the item response theory (IRT) I’ve been learning about.
With so much on the go, self-care is a priority. I’m back in physio for my hips and shoulders, making the most of our benefits. I’m still playing hockey and badminton regularly and biking to school while the weather holds up (since, like in Game of Thrones, winter is coming). A recent highlight was a day at Nordik Spa, which outshines the spas we visited in Iceland.
My parents visited Ottawa for a weekend. We shared a fantastic meal at Dante, an Italian restaurant. The food and service were top-notch, definitely five stars, and the prices are very reasonable given the quality.
Hope you’re all well, and here’s to a great rest of the fall season!
Current Projects
This is a new section of the Newsletter. I’ll include a picture of the three projects I’m currently working on.
I’m halfway done Yan Holtz’s Productive R Workflow online course. I want to learn more about proper statistical analysis workflow as I embark on my PhD journey. The benefits of a productive workflow will continue to compound throughout my career. In particular, I want to learn how to properly use GitHub.
I have about 5 more courses left in the DataCamp Statistician in R certification.
I only have a few more lectures to rebuild for the last unit of my grade 12 stats course. It’s the only course I consistently teach so it’s worth the investment.
Two Cents
Project-centered note-taking has been a game-changer for me. I first encountered it in Tiago Forte’s PARA framework. The idea is to organize your notes by project. The same principle applies to coding projects and statistical analyses. Yan Holtz and others recommend putting all the files relevant to a project within the same folder.
I’m not sure if I fully agree with the meme below, but I agree that simplicity is the biggest factor in designing a note-taking system.
I exported my Readwise highlights to NotebookLM. The AI created this 20-minute podcast episode based on my highlights. It’s incredible!!! AI tools like these will surely be the optimal book club option. I look forward to the day when I can have a 20-minute phone call with AI to discuss what I highlighted during the week on my way back from work on Fridays.
Here are two awesome videos about Bayesian Statistics.
I removed Athletic greens (AG1) from my favourite products. They’re overpriced and lack scientific evidence to improve healthy users’ lives.
Learn how QR codes work with this Veritasium video.
Books Read This Month
I read the free chapters of Richard McElreath’s Statistical Rethinking. I’m waiting for the third edition to come out before buying the book.
I read Grading Smarter, Not Harder by Myron Dueck. It was ok. Ahead of the Curve was much better and more thorough.
I’m almost done The Art of Living by Epictetus. It’s solid. It’s a bit cliché, but it’s impressive how self-help advice for how to live the good life was the same 2000 years ago.
I started reading An Introduction to Psychometrics and Psychological Assessment by Colin Cooper. This book is good so far and will serve as a strong foundation for my PhD.
I read Appliquer le modèle de Rasch: Défis et pistes de solution par Éric Dionne and Sébastien Béland. It’s a good introduction to the Rasch IRT model. Eric is also my PhD supervisor.
I have a few chapters left in A Mathematician’s Apology.
There’s one more chapter I want to read from the Active Inference textbook. I plan to summarize my insights in an article. I skipped the super technical chapters as I’m only interested in the broad principles.
Follow my reading journey on Goodreads and catch my podcast insights on Snipd. Both sync seamlessly with Readwise, my go-to for spaced repetition and daily note reviews. Check out my all-time favourite books.
Podcasts Notes
Tons of podcasts this month. Mostly because I stumbled on the Learning Bayesian Statistics podcast. Snipd underwent a major update so let me know if you want access to my snips for a specific episode.
Robin Codding on Fluency and Strategies to Support Intervention Implementation
Preparation for university math with Darja Barr and Dan Wolczuk
Transforming education through behaviour science with Kimberly Berens
Quantum Healing and Similar Meaningless Deepities: My Conversation with Deepak Chopra
Unlocking the Science of Exercise, Nutrition & Weight Management, with Eric Trexler
Ta(l)king Risks & Embracing Uncertainty, with David Spiegelhalter
Prior Sensitivity Analysis, Overfitting & Model Selection, with Sonja Winter
Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling & Causal Inference in Psychometrics, with Ed Merkle
When should you use Bayesian tools, and Bayes in sports analytics, with Chris Fonnesbeck
Psychometrics Models & Choosing Priors, with Jonathan Templin
Regression and Other Stories, with Andrew Gelman, Jennifer Hill & Aki Vehtari