The first thing we want you to wrap your brain box around is some good, useful information. The sort of information that can help you make better decisions about your health, wealth and everything in between. In this section of our tour we are going to introduce you to information repositories and services that will, if used well, not only make you seem much smarter to members of the opposite sex but will also help you to automate, enhance and otherwise make key aspects of your life easier.
Educational Resources
Statistics 110 – Probability (Harvard) – iTunes
Statistics 110 (Probability), which has been taught at Harvard University by Joe Blitzstein (Professor of the Practice, Harvard Statistics Department) each year since 2006. Lecture videos, review materials, and over 250 practice problems with detailed solutions are provided. This course is an introduction to probability as a language and set of tools for understanding statistics, science, risk, and randomness. The ideas and methods are useful in statistics, science, engineering, economics, finance, and everyday life. Topics include the following. Basics: sample spaces and events, conditioning, Bayes’ Theorem. Random variables and their distributions: distributions, moment generating functions, expectation, variance, covariance, correlation, conditional expectation. Univariate distributions: Normal, t, Binomial, Negative Binomial, Poisson, Beta, Gamma. Multivariate distributions: joint, conditional, and marginal distributions, independence, transformations, Multinomial, Multivariate Normal. Limit theorems: law of large numbers, central limit theorem. Markov chains: transition probabilities, stationary distributions, reversibility, convergence. Prerequisite: single variable calculus, familiarity with matrices.
Banking and Money (Khan Academy) – iTunes
Videos on how banks work and how money is created.
Arming the Donkey – iTunes
Duke economist and New York Times best-selling author Dan Ariely (“Predictably Irrational”) is your host for a weekly series of informal one-on-one chats with researchers in social and natural sciences. (More Information – A Guide to Cognitve Biases)
Freakonomics – iTunes
In their books “Freakonomics” and “SuperFreakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explore “the hidden side of everything,” with stories about cheating schoolteachers, self-dealing real-estate agents, and crack-selling mama’s boys. The Freakonomics Radio podcast, hosted by Dubner, carries on that tradition with weekly episodes. Prepare to be enlightened, engaged, perhaps enraged, and definitely surprised.
Financial Markets (Yale) – iTunes
An overview of the ideas, methods, and institutions that permit human society to manage risks and foster enterprise. Description of practices today and analysis of prospects for the future. Introduction to risk management and behavioral finance principles to understand the functioning of securities, insurance, and banking industries.
This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 75 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Spring 2011.
Calculators
Compound Savings Calculator – Try It
Consistent investing over a long period of time can be an effective strategy to accumulate wealth. Even small deposits to a savings account can add up over time. This compound savings calculator demonstrates how to put this savings strategy to work.
Cost of Raising a Child Calculator – Try It
A calculator to help you understand the total costs of raising a child based on where you live.
Buying vs Renting a Home Calculator – Try It
Whether renting is better than buying depends on many factors, particularly how fast prices and rents rise and how long you stay in your home. Compare the costs of buying and renting a home in the calculator below.
Do You Have too Much Debt Calculator? – Try It
NEARLY EVERY red-blooded American is walking around with at least some debt. After all, most of us have mortgages. Many of us have auto loans. Parents and students go into hock all the time to foot college bills. And let’s not forget credit cards. The question is, do you have too much? To take the first step in assessing your debt load, use our worksheet below to see the average household balances that your peers — folks in your income and age brackets — are carrying in five major kinds of loans, plus the average total debt for each demographic group. These are 2002 numbers from SRI Consulting Business Intelligence, which surveys 3,800 households every other year. Please note that the total debt figures are not sums of the debts shown, as respondents may not have all types of loans.
New House Calculator – Try It
A calculator to show you how much home you can afford based on your current income and expenses.
Cost of Living When Moving Calculator – Try It
A calculator to show you how your cost of living will change if you move.
Food Calorie Calculator – Try It
Browse through calorie and nutritional information with this easy to use calculator and learn which foods and beverages work for your waistline and which ones don’t.
Saving for College Calculator – Try It
Saving for a child’s education requires a long-term plan. And, like saving for retirement, the earlier you start the plan the better. Use this college savings calculator to help develop or fine-tune the education savings plan. Click the “View Report” button for a detailed look at the results
Mutual Fund and ETF Screener – Try It
A screener to help you select among the universe of mutual funds and ETFs based on a variety of criteria. (More Information – A Guide to ETFs)
Health Finder Calculators – Try Them
Use these personal calculators to evaluate your health and lifestyle choices.
Tool Kits
- Intrade – Attempting to predict the future like only the free market can.
- 538 – Politics and statistics married on the altar of confidence intervals.
- FactCheck – Politics as if politicians at least attempted to tell you the truth.
- Givewell – A detailed guide to getting the most bang for your charitable buck.
- Weather.gov – All the same weather, none of the wet bias.
- Shouldlabs – Decoding the choices that drive your life and helping you make better ones.
- Bankrate – Helping you to pick better financial thingies.
- Longbets – A place to put your money where your forecasting model is.
- ETFdb – A exhaustive guide to the only investment vehicle most normal people need.
- Worldometers – A real-time pulse of the world’s major statistics. (USA Edition)
- Wolfram Alpha – It will do your calculus homework for you, and other stuff too, I guess…
- Freebase – Structured data about pretty much anything.
- Quora – An answer to almost anything from people who might actually know.
- Epicurious – It’s like owning every cook book made in the last half century.
Entertainment
- Feedly – All of your favorite news in a fancy magazine format.
- Netflix – Replacing your Cable subscription one movie at a time. (Alternative – Hulu Plus)
- Pandora – Radio for people who hate everything on the radio.
- Audible – Books where people talk a lot.
- Kindle – An excuse to replace all those silly book shelves with more high definition televisions.
Health
- Fitbit – A place to obsessively track all the details of your health. (Alternative – Withings)
- Medline Plus (NIH) – Less likely to make you think you have a rare, incurable disease than most medical databases. (Alternative – Healthfinder.gov)
- Supertracker (USDA) – Helping you plan a diet slightly better than your Big Mac Cleanse.
- Symptom Checker (Web MD) – Will either help you diagnose a cold, or make you think you’re dying.
- Choose My Plate – All the nutrition information fit to read and then immediately ignore.
- 23 and Me – Help science help you learn what might kill you in 50 years.
Business
- Mint – The perfect service to monitor your startling bouts of over consumption.
- Bizfilings – Start a business in less time than it takes you to regret your poor business decisions.
- Legalzoom – Common legal issues made simpler through the application of automation.
- HR Block – Doing your taxes has never been less mind numbing.
- Freshbooks – Billing for people who never want to think about billing.
- Libre Office – It’s like Microsoft Word but free, so it’s almost nothing like Microsoft Word.
- Dropbox – Stores, syncs and makes all your favorite documents available from anywhere. (Alternative – Google Drive)
- Skype – It’s everything we expected out of the phone of the future short of Martian long distance.
- GotoMeeting – Hold meetings from the comfort of your home.
- Mailchimp – Making it easier for you to send out your poorly conceived email newsletters.
- Survey Monkey – Ask people questions, get people’s answers.
- Wufoo – They make forms that will make you look like you know something about web design.
- 37 Signals – Productivity and project management software that you might actually use.
Automation
- Mechanical Turk – The Internet’s most glorious sweat shop. (Alternative – Cloudcrowd)
- Manpacks – Socks, underwear and condoms delivered straight to your hovel. (Alternative – Trunkclub)
- Moontango – Essentials for women with a very broad definition of essential. (Alternative – Hoseanna)
- IFTTT – Helping you to automatically do things that you are currently not manually doing. (Alternative – on{x})
Experiences
- Wiki Travel – All of the fun of traveling distilled down a set of well-edited wiki articles. (For when it’s time to actually buy tickets)
- Points – A place to keep track of all of those persnickity rewards programs. (A more proactive solution)
- Air BNB – Travel the country, sleep in other people’s homes.
- Zipcar – Why own a car when you can borrow random vehicles off of the street in a short term rental arrangement. (Alternative – Uber)
- Liquid Space – Work around the world in the comforts of someone else’s office.