PROFILE OF A PIONEER IN JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING The following is extracted from a profile in the current American Psychologist written by Josh Klayman and Don Kleinmuntz: Klayman, J., & Kleinmuntz, D. N. (2007). Benjamin Kleinmuntz (1930 –2006). American Psychologist, 62(7), 698. (My father sent this my way. Growing up in Pittsburgh, I always […]
READ TEXT FILES, RUN MODELS The Decision Science News R video tutorials continue with number 2. (If you missed that last one, you will want to watch R Video Tutorial Number 1 first.) The Goldstein pedometer dataset can be downloaded from http://www.dangoldstein.com/flash/Rtutorial2/pedometer.csv High Res Version: http://www.dangoldstein.com/flash/Rtutorial2/Rtutorial2.html Topics covered this week include: Tricking R into starting […]
LEARN R BY JUST WATCHING For this week, Decision Science News has created a video tutorial on how to get started using the R Language for Statistical Computing. (The tutorial is best viewed in your browser’s full-screen mode, try pressing F11 in Windows). R is free and open source, and constantly being improved upon by […]
IMPACTFUL, IMPROBABLE EVENTS CAPTURE THE IMAGINATION Decision Science News is noticing how attention is turning towards the unlikely events that can change the world. Institutions are undergoing epidemic preparations. Harvard Business Review has an feature on pandemics with two sections written by noted decision science researcher Baruch Fischhoff. A podcast is available here. A book […]
A CHANGE OF WEIGHT REVEALS NEWTON’S FLAW Interestingly, Newton’s enumerated solution to Pepys’ problem is correct (see previous DSN entry), but the logic is wrong, as Statistician Stephen Stigler points out. The problem is now solved by with bionomial distribution: the probability of A is the greatest. For those who speak R, the probabilities are […]
QUESTION FROM A LETTER TO NEWTON In 1693, Samuel Pepys wrote Isaac Newton a letter asking for help solving a probability problem: Which is most probable? A. Six fair dice are tossed independently and at least one “6” appears. B. Twelve fair dice are tossed independently and at least two “6”s appear. C. Eighteen fair […]
MINDLESS SIGNIFICANCE TESTING Some well-made points grow old while no one pays attention to them. One of the most embarrassing for social science is its categorical perception of p-values. Tender of kindred Web site Andrew Gelman and Hal Stern have an article whose name says it all: The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” is […]
PXLAB: FREE PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT SOFTWARE You could spend a lot of money on software that runs psychology experiments and takes care of: precise timing, control over blocks & randomization, graphics presentation, online data collection, and more. Or, you could use PXLab which is free and open-source, which means your are allowed to adapt it to […]
STIGLER’S LAW OF EPONYMY Statistician and Historian of Science Stephen Stigler told Decision Science News about a useful law. Stigler’s Law of Eponymy: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. This useful principle helps one think twice before attributing a “named” statistical construct to the person for which it is named. Gaussian distributions, […]
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SUNK COSTS The sunk cost effect is sometimes called the Concorde fallacy Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer asked a group of 48 people the following scenario involving sunk costs: As the president of an airline company, you have invested 10 million dollars of the companyâs money into a research project. The purpose […]
Subscribe to Decision Science News by Email (one email per week, easy unsubscribe)
