You won, but how much was luck and how much was skill?
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In baseball, what are the chances the winner will win again against the same opponent the very next day?
In baseball, what are the chances the winner will win again against the same opponent the very next day?
INCREDIBLY SIMPLE CALCULATIONS MADE SIMPLE Yes, we all know how to calculate 15% or 20% exactly, but it’s fun to use tipping heuristics and even more fun to make crowded graphs of how they compare to each other. (Sorry for the junky chart. Open for suggestions, in the words of Tom Waits.) Here are a […]
How many observations should you have before constructing a confidence interval?
INCENTIVES TO STATE PROBABILITIES OF BELIEF TRUTHFULLY We have all been there. You are running an experiment in which you would like participants to tell you what they believe. In particular, you’d like them to tell you what they believe to be the probability that an event will occur. Normally, you would ask them. But […]
CREATE AUTOMATICALLY UPDATED R CHARTS AND TABLES INSIDE WORD & EXCEL Decision Science News’ imagination has been recently captured by an innovative product called Inference for R. (R as in the open-source language for statistical computation.) To use it, you simply insert some code into your Microsoft Office documents. The Inference product connects to the […]
THE VALUE OF NOT FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS As Shane Frederick has noted, if you say “A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much is the ball?”, you will notice that the vast majority of your friends will say “10 cents” instead of the correct “5 cents”, because […]
ALL ABOUT REVOLUTION COMPUTING’S R DISTRIBUTION Decision Science News was intrigued by a company called REvolution Computing that got some attention of late for spinning their own mix of the R language for statistical computing and giving it away for free. So DSN asked to interview them to see what it’s all about Decision Science […]
NEW YORK TIMES STORY ON THE APPEAL OF R (click to view movie) It is no secret that Decision Science News is crazy about the R language for statistical computing. Find out why R is so great in this New York Times article. Then start to teach yourself R with our short series of video […]
useR! CONFERENCE, AUGUST 12-14 2008, DORTMUND GERMANY Impressive statistical computing types like Andrew Gelman, Gary King, and others will be presenting at this year’s useR! conference. Decision Science News might just have to hop over and check it out. The program looks great. Those interested in learning R might be interested in our Decision Science […]
SIMPLE WAYS TO DETECT AND COMMUNICATE STATISTICAL EFFECTS Decision Science News is fond of heuristics and the Simonian view that for many problems organisms face, optimization is a fiction and satisficing makes us smart. Statistics is an area in which it is easy to see precision that isn’t there and find “optima” in problems that […]