How many days is five months

“How many days in five months” is a very strange question to write a post about but I am learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And using Ahrefs keyword research tool I found out the question is a very good keyword to target. At the end, I explain how to calculate it using Excel (or any spreadsheet).

This is what Google tells us:

how many days is five months
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I drive a Pareto

Not an Italian luxury car.
No. Pareto was the Italian economist that came up with the 80/20 rule. He figured out 20% of the richest families held 80% of the wealth (this is probably worse nowadays). More generally stated, the 80/20 rule says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the inputs, you spend 80% of your time doing 20% of your tasks, etc, etc.

i drive a pareto
My 1997 Honda Civic on the Skyline Drive in Colorado
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A neural network approach to college football rankings

The usual image of an artificial neural network:

What follows is a paper that I wrote in the Spring of 2001 for an “Introduction to Neural Networks” class that I took as part of my Master’s degree. It is mostly a review of someone else’s paper on the subject, except that I wrote the network in Excel and ran it on that year’s football season games. Fun, fun. Continue reading “A neural network approach to college football rankings”

McNemar’s test and Simpson’s Paradox (and the “hot hand” in basketball)

hot hand basketball

(I wrote this paper in 2007 for a Statistics class I took while trying to do a Ph.D. I am sharing it here for posterity.)

McNemar’s test is a non-parametric method used on nominal data to determine whether the row and column marginal frequencies are equal. It is applied to 2×2 contingency tables with a dichotomous trait with matched pairs of subjects.

Simpson’s paradox is a statistical paradox in which the successes of several groups seem to be reversed when the groups are combined. This seemingly impossible result is encountered often in social science statistics and occurs when a weighting variable, which is not relevant to the individual group assessment, must be used in the combined assessment.

The paper evaluates the potential effect of Simpson’s paradox in McNemar’s test results and conclusions.


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