Associate Teaching Professor
Carnegie Mellon University
I enjoy learning random factoids about science. Here are some of my favorite Wikipedia articles related to math, psychology, research, computer science, and human-computer interaction.
| Benford's Law | Numbers starting with one are six times more likely than numbers starting with nine. |
| Law of Large Numbers | Empirical results will tend toward the theoretical results given a big enough sample, probably. |
| Infinite Monkey Theorem | With enough time, anything and everything will happen. |
| Borsuk-Ulam Theorem | There always exists a set of opposite points on Earth with the same temperature and pressure. |
| Fermi Estimation | Super rough estimates are suprisingly good. |
| Beta (finance) | A way of measuring the volatility of a stock relative to the market. |
| Mann Whitney U Test | Non-parametric test for comparing two samples. |
| Birthday Paradox | Given 23 people there is a 50% chance that a pair will share a birthday. |
| Monty Hall Problem | A nice puzzle where it really helps to draw out a solution tree. |
| Prisoner's Dilemma | People not cooperating hurts everyone, including themselves. |
| Zipf's Law | A thing is twice as frequent as the next thing which is twice as frequent as the next... |
| Cognitive Load Theory | You solve problems worse if you have to use too much mental effort. |
| Chunking | Our phone numbers are 7 digits long based on how we break up info in our head. |
| Insight | That eureka moment. |
| Spacing Effect | Cramming is not the best way to learn. |
| Garden Path Sentence | You parse the sentence one way until it doesn't make sense anymore. |
| Prospect Theory | People are rationally irrational sometimes, and irrationally rational other times. |
| Baddeley's Model of Working Memory | A popular model of how our memory works. |
| Electroencephalography | We can cheaply measure brainwaves induced by stress and cognitive load. |
| Framing Effect | The reason why movie theater's popcorn is priced the way it is. |
| Phonemic Restoration Effect | You still hear cuss words when they bleep it out, don't you? |
| Confirmation Bias | When you only pay attention to evidence that supports your idea. |
| Survivorship Bias | You have to look at the data points that died, too. |
| Regression Toward the Mean | Are you sure this is an effect or is it just going back to normal? |
| Type I and Type II Errors | Whether you are finding a difference when it doesn't exist or not finding a difference when it does. |
| Correlation Does Not Imply Causation | Just because red cars get in more wrecks doesn't mean it is the cars' fault. |
| Falsifiability | Some things you can never prove. |
| False Dilemma | You're either going to love this list or you're going to hate it. |
| Grounded Theory | A qualitative method that will surely get the reviewers arguing. |
| Associative Array | Any problem can be coerced into using a dictionary! |
| Tracing Garbage Collection | A beautiful means of cleaning up your garbage. |
| Separation of Concerns | Each piece of code should do something but not everything. |
| Off-By-One Error | One of the most common mistakes for any programmer. |
| Finite-State Machine | Any problem can be reduced into a state machine. |
| Recursive Descent Parser | An elegant way to write a parser. |
| Binary Search Algorithm | Cut your search space in half, recursively. |
| K-Means Clustering | Find clusters in your data. |
| TF-IDF | Measure the importance of words in a document. |
| Affordance | The means to which you do something. |
| Cognitive Dimensions of Notations | Classic usability principles for GUIs and programming languages. |
| Information Seeking Behavior | Various theories on how people seek the info that they seek. |
| Information Overload | When Amazon presents too many results you just buy the first one. |
| Widget (GUI) | Handy list of GUI elements. |
| Fitt's Law | Accurate way to measure people's mouse movements. |
| Usability Testing | How to test to see if people can actually use your thing. |
| User-Centered Design | Always remember the user. |
| Keystroke-Level Model | Surprisingly accurate way to predict how long it will take users to interact with your GUI. |