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One question we get asked a lot is whether it’s worth it to pre-pay for the tank of gas when renting a car.
At first, blush it seems like something you should never do. In the best case, you pay market rate for gas, and in the worst case, you pay for a tank of gas you never consume (what if your trip gets cancelled)?
At second blush, it can be worth the risk to avoid the hassle of fueling up just before returning the car. If your time and peace of mind are worth something, then maybe you should pre-pay when you are reasonably sure you’ll return it below a certain percentage full. But what percentage?
We take on a reader question of whether the stadium / home team matters for making a field goal. We pulled up the data on every field goal since 2002 (over 10,000) of them and plotted the probability of scoring as a function of the stadium in which the field goal was kicked.
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We looked at NFL punts before on Decision Science News. That’s old news. Field goals are the new hotness, and Super Bowl Sunday is coming up, so let’s look at a kicker’s chances.
We’ve taken the same data set and looked at a kicker’s chances of getting the ball through the uprights depending on the yard line the kick is from. The result is above.
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The site reddit told us about data on every single NFL (U.S. National Football League) play since 2002. We read it in and did an analysis of punting. The results are beautiful.
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Microsoft Research NYC [ http://research.microsoft.com/newyork/ ] seeks outstanding applicants for 2-year postdoctoral researcher positions. We welcome applicants with a strong academic record in one of the following areas:
* Computational social science: http://research.microsoft.com/cssnyc
* Online experimental social science: http://research.microsoft.com/oess_nyc
* Algorithmic economics and market design: http://research.microsoft.com/algorithmic-economics/
* Machine learning: http://research.microsoft.com/mlnyc/
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Microsoft Research NYC seeks outstanding applicants with strong quantitative and programming skills for a postdoctoral researcher position in the area of online experimental social science.
Deadline for Full Consideration: January 11, 2013
Last week we posted a nice theory about daylight savings time, in particular, that its dates were chosen to reduce variance in the time of sunrise. It looked plausible from the graph.
We were talking to our Microsoft Research colleague Jake Hofman who suggested “why don’t you just find the optimal dates to change the clock by one hour?” So we did. We got the times of sunrise for New York City from here, threw them into R, and optimized.
The result was surprising. The dates of daylight savings time do not come close to minimizing variance in sunrise.
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Last spring we looked at the state of the housing bubble in the US. The question of readers’ minds then was “where is it going next”?
It’s been more than a year, so let’s have a look, above.
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Last week it was announced that Facebook is rotating its ads after a certain time of exposure.
Sid Suri, Preston McAfee, and Dan Goldstein’s research may have been the source of this idea. In 2011 and 2012 the trio published a couple papers putting for and improving the idea.
MENTALLY MULTIPLY NUMBERS BY THEMSELVES
Assume you know your multiplication tables up to 10×10. Here’s how to compute the squares of numbers from 11 to 100.
