https://www.benstenhaug.com/ Recent content on Ben Stenhaug Hugo -- gohugo.io en-US Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/finance/roth_vs_traditional/ Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/finance/roth_vs_traditional/ In The Essence of Saving for Retirement, we talked about a generic retirement account, but there are actually two types: With a Roth retirement account, you invest money that you already paid income taxes on. This is how just about all money works: You earn income, pay income taxes, and then get to use the remainder for investing or consuming. With a Traditional retirement account, you don’t pay income taxes until retirement (sometimes called tax-deferred accounts — you’re deferring paying taxes until retirement). https://www.benstenhaug.com/finance/saving_for_retirement/ Sat, 10 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/finance/saving_for_retirement/ The basic idea of retirement is that we work for a while, and then we retire either because we can’t or don’t want to work anymore. For this to be possible, you need to save for retirement while you work. The government incentivizes this saving by providing each person special accounts that have tax advantages. These accounts have fancy names like individual retirement account (IRA) or defined-contribution retirement account (401k), but to keep things simple let’s just call them retirement accounts. https://www.benstenhaug.com/life/working/ Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/life/working/ I spend a good chunk of my life working, so it makes sense that I want to do it well. Years ago, I put together a document on Principles for Knowledge Work. The document is intimidatingly long and includes suggestions like batch email, use multiple monitors, and have a weekly review. When I would try to sell someone on working like this, they would nod along for a while and then eventually say something about how complex and constraining it feels. https://www.benstenhaug.com/about/ Thu, 04 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/about/ I majored in statistics, economics, and mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following college, I taught high school math at Warren Early College High School in Warrenton, North Carolina as part of Teach for America. I then worked for 3 years at Khan Academy on the math content team. We developed content—everything from middle school to AP Calculus—that is still used by millions of students worldwide. Motivated by the possibility of leveraging the explosion of educational data gathered by organizations like Khan Academy, I started my PhD in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education in 2016. https://www.benstenhaug.com/finance/buying_and_holding/ Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/finance/buying_and_holding/ I’ve always heard that it’s a good idea to buy and hold. I thought that this was a good idea because 1) long-term capital gains tax is much lower than short-term capital gains tax and 2) to avoid transaction fees from buying and selling stocks. There is a third more subtle reason that I’ll illustrate with a simple example. Imagine I have $100 and I have access to two stocks, A and B, both of which grow 50% a year. https://www.benstenhaug.com/finance/investing_for_retirement/ Mon, 29 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/finance/investing_for_retirement/ There are many articles on things like roth vs. traditional IRAs. Very few actually walk through an example with numbers, which I find illustrative. An example Let’s take an example where I make 8k and can put my in money in a regular investment account, a roth ira, or a traditional ira. Assume that my tax rate is 25% (which is the same now, in the future, on capital gains etc. https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/data_science_pck/ Tue, 23 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/data_science_pck/ Teaching is decision making There’s a moment from teaching high school math in North Carolina that I remember especially vividly. It was an ordinary Thursday afternoon, and I felt exhausted. In the back corner a few girls were off-task, two boys were yelling out, asking to go to the bathroom for the 2nd time in the 50 minute period, the lesson I was teaching for the first time in my life wasn’t working, and my old whiteboard marker was nearly out of ink. https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/rstudio_conf_2019_poster/ Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/rstudio_conf_2019_poster/ You can find the poster on GitHub here. Background I had the thrill of presenting a poster on improving data science education at Rstudio Conference 2019 in Austin, Texas. The best part about it was how many incredible people I met working hard on and thinking deeply about data science education. https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/making_r_code_over_100_times_faster_an_example/ Tue, 08 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/making_r_code_over_100_times_faster_an_example/ You can find the blog post on the Stanford libraries webpage here. Background As a data science software consultant for the Stanford libraries, I often hear people complain that R is slow. I wrote this blog post to demonstrate that R code can oftentimes be re-written to be much, much faster. https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/research_on_teaching_data_science/ Sat, 29 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/research_on_teaching_data_science/ I wrote this as part of taking Hadley Wickham’s Readings in Applied Data Science course at Stanford in the spring of 2018. Introduction As data science skills become increasingly important, the teaching of data science becomes increasingly valuable. In the context of data science, I think of teaching not as the traditional process of talking at a whiteboard or grading worksheets, but instead as the process of creating environments and designing experiences that leads to measurable learning for students. https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/purrrplus/ Sun, 10 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/purrrplus/ See the package website. Background In my work, I often need to run a function in R many times (for example in running a simulation). If any of these runs throw an error, all progress is lost. The tidyverse package purrrr provides functionality like safely which helps but makes subsequent analysis tricky. As a remedy, I wrote the package purrrplus which allows for running a function safely with easy analysis of errors and results. https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/teachr/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/data-science/teachr/ You can find the curriculum here. Background After completing the Stanford Data Challenge Lab, I started to think about how I would teach R. To that end, I began making YouTube videos, writing articles, and designing exercises. This curriculum is unfinished for now but I plan to return to it in the future. If you only look at one piece of content, check out the 5 verbs of dplyr article. https://www.benstenhaug.com/life/benbenandblue/ Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.benstenhaug.com/life/benbenandblue/ I am very excited to tell you that Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown), Ben Eater, and I are starting a podcast about education and whatever else comes to mind called Ben, Ben, and Blue. 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