WHAT SET OF COINS MINIMIZES THE AVERAGE NUMBER OF COINS NEEDED TO MAKE CHANGE? We draw your attention to the cleverly-titled article What This Country Needs is an 18 Cent Piece. It’s a piece of recreational mathematics that asks the question “what set of coins minimizes the average number of coins needed to make change”? […]
PERCEIVED TEMPERATURE (CELSIUS EDITION) Click to enlarge (If you would like to see the Fahrenheit version of this post, please go here.) So, we were wondering, what’s this heat index we hear about? We went to the Wikipedia article on it. It is an index that combines air temperature and relative humidity to convert a […]
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EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE AMA INTERVIEWS (2018 edition) The old (above) and new (below) AMA logos PhD students in Marketing, Psychology, and Economics should send their “packets” out by the fourth of July in the hopes of lining up interviews at the annual AMA Summer Conference. Each year DSN reprints this […]
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GOING FROM ONE CHESS PLAYER TO MANY CHESS PLAYERS Click to enlarge We were wasting time on the internet one day an saw a post entitled Probability of a chess piece being moved on move X in a Vassily Ivanchuk game. It featured this graphic. Click to enlarge We then thought, “this post involves chess […]
HELP SHAPE THE NEXT GENERATION OF INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS TOOLS IARPA (the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) seeks thousands of people to test the analytic methods developed for the CREATE (Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation) program. CREATE is a multi-million-dollar, multi-year R\&D effort to improve the core process of intelligence analysis for national security: making […]
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DIGGING THE JUST NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE We were getting an egg and cheese on a roll at a deli the other day and started chatting with the cashier about politics and he said that two people were like 19 vs 20. We said, “19 vs 20, what’s that mean?” He said, “It means basically the same […]
1.6 MILLION SQUARE KILOMETERS OF GARBAGE IN PERSPECTIVE This Nature Scientific Reports article gives an update on the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is estimated to be four to 16 times larger than previously estimated: 1.6 million square kilometers. While the article does show the patch along with latitude and longitude lines […]
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RUTH VS DIMAGGIO We were looking up the wording of a joke we wanted to tell our kids: A guy has a talking dog. He brings it to a talent scout. “This dog can speak English,” he claims to the unimpressed agent. “Okay, Sport,” the guys says to the dog, “what’s on the top of […]
THAT’S ONE WAY TO GET “A” PAPERS FROM YOUR FACULTY Table 5 Comparison of Average Amount of Cash Awards for a Paper Published in Selected Journals When we first saw this image on Facebook, we thought it was a joke. But then we downloaded the paper and found that indeed, there’s a practice of paying […]
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REGIONAL DIFFERENCES We came across this weather.com story on what people consider “sweater weather” in different states, and thought that the topic seemed just silly enough to be of interest to decision science news readers. Not much value we can add here. How about some stats? Mean sweater weather: 58.6 F (14.8 C) Max sweater […]
