A historical collection of our writing.
I ended the previous Uncertainty Wednesday post asking whether an expected value always exists. Going back to the definition, the expected value is the “probability weighted average of a random variable.” So let’s construct an example of a random variable which does not have an expected value. We […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
I woke up this past Friday (the 13th) to a DM on Twitter saying that Continuations was down. I immediately tried to open the site on my phone and was greeted by an ominous: At first I figured that maybe Tumblr was down. A quick check of other Tumblrs revealed that not to be the […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means. I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die). Well, for a sample of size […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
I am excited about a new open source project called idyll. Here is how Matthew Conlen, the lead author, describes idyll The project seems like an important step in the direction of an interactive learning environment that seamlessly combines text, mathematical formulas, code, graphics. Creating […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Last Uncertainty Wednesday, we started to look at the behavior of the mean of a sample by repeatedly drawing samples. We used a sample of 10 rolls of a fair die. We know that the expected value of the probability distribution is 3.5 but we saw that the sample mean can deviate substantially from that […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
I was going to write a post today about how liquidity in financial markets goes down as concentration of holdings goes up but then I woke up to the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas last night. I have written extensively before about the need for better gun control, so won’t rehash that […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
