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The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.
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The new article is called Potential effect of physical activity based menu labels on the calorie content of selected fast food meals. These authors tested four variant menus “(1) a menu with no nutritional information, (2) a menu with calorie information, (3) a menu with calorie information and minutes to walk to burn those calories, or (4) a menu with calorie information and miles to walk to burn those calories”. The authors found, as before that calorie counts decreased the amount of calories people chose to consume, and that exercise equivalents (telling you how much walking time or walking distance you’d need to burn off those calories) increased the effect.
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In response to last week’s surprisingly popular “How to tell which side the gas cap is on”, we received a number of emails, one by our friend and co-author Preston McAfee, who shares a tip that also helps driving by letting you know in advance on which side your exit will be.
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We’ve written before about using information grids when communicating risks to the general public. We like them. Turns out they are also called pictographs and, as we learned from an email from Brian Zikmund-Fisher, icon arrays.
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Ben Franklin had views on how to make a decision.
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At Decision Science News, we love the commitment devices. But, as we’ve have spoken about, we have mixed feelings about them, including the nagging concern is that commitment devices they may not lead to deep-seated changes or habit formation.
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At DSN, we’ve been playing a bit with FetchClimate Explorer from Microsoft Research. It lets one define regions of the globe over which it superimposes spatial and time series data concerning temperature, precipitation, sunlight, and, pictured above, wind speed.
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THE BERLIN NUMERACY TEST We’ve written before about the challenges of communicating risks. Can people understand the risks inherent in their savings plans, loans, surgeries, or medications? This week, researchers have published a new instrument designed to very quickly assess exactly that (www.riskliteracy.org). We introduce the Berlin Numeracy Test, a new psychometrically sound instrument that […]
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A famous finance professor once told us that good diversification meant holding everything in the world. Fine, but in what proportion?
Suppose you could invest in every country in the world. How much would you invest in each? In a market-capitalization weighted index, you’d invest in each country in proportion to the market value of its investments (its “market capitalization”). As seen above, the market-capitalization of the USA is about 30%, which would suggest investing 30% of one’s portfolio in the USA. Similarly, one would put 8% in China, and so on. All this data was pulled from the World Bank, and at the end of this post we’ll show you how we did it.
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It is not uncommon to have two computers at work, four at home and a server out on the wild, wild internet (that’s what we have, anyway … wait, we forgot one in London). How to keep all these files in sync? Here are our file synchronization tips.
