Decision Science News

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE AMA INTERVIEWS (2009 edition)

PhD students in Marketing, Psychology, and Economics are now gearing up to get their “packets” ready to mail out by the fourth of July in the hopes of lining up interviews at the annual AMA Summer Educator’s Conference. Each year DSN reprints this sort of “what to expect while you’re applying” guide, first published here by Dan Goldstein in 2005.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS?
I’ve seen the Marketing job market turn happy grad students into quivering masses of fear. I want to share experiences that I and others have contributed, and provide a bit advice to make the whole process less mysterious.

WHY SHOULD ANYONE LISTEN TO ME?
I’ve been on the AMA job market twice, and the Psychology market once, and I ended up with one sweetheart of a job. As a professor I’ve conducted 20 AMA interviews and contributed to hiring decisions. I’ve been on the candidate end of about 40 AMA interviews, and experienced numerous campus visits, face-to-face interviews, offers, and rejections. I’m an outsider to Marketing who went on the market older and with more experience than the average rookie (35 years of age, with 8 years of research scientist, postdoc, visiting scholar, and industry positions).  I’ve hired many people for many academic posts, so I know both sides.

HOW TO GET INTO THE AMA JOB MARKET
First, at least a couple months before the conference, find where it will be. It’s called the American Marketing Association Summer Educator’s Conference. Strange name, I know. Get yourself a room in the conference hotel, preferably on the floor where the express elevator meets the local elevator for the upper floors. You’ll be hanging out on this floor waiting to change elevators anyway, so you might as well start there.

Next, get your advisor / sponsor to write a cover letter encouraging people to meet with you at AMA. It helps if this person is in Marketing. Get 1 or 2 other letters of recommendation, a CV, and some choice pubs. Put them in an envelope and mail them out to a friend of your sponsor at the desired school. It should look like the letter is coming from your sponsor, even though you are doing the actual assembly and mailing. Repeat this process a bunch of times. It’s a good idea to hit a school with 2 packets, 3 if you suspect they’re a little disorganized. Certainly send one to the recruiting coordinator (they may send letters to your department’s secretary telling you they are hiring) and one to your sponsor’s friend. Mail to schools regardless of whether they are advertising a position or not. This is academia: nobody knows anything. This means you may be sending 50 or more packets. You want to have them mailed by the 4^th of July at the absolute latest.

THEN WHAT?
Wait to get calls or emails from schools wishing to set up AMA interviews with you. These calls may come in as late as one week before the conference. Often they come when you are sitting outside having a drink with friends. Some schools will not invite you for totally unknown reasons. You may get interviews from the top 10 schools and rejected from the 30th-ranked one. Don’t sweat it. Again, this is the land of total and absolute unpredictability that you’re entering into. Also, know that just because you get an interview doesn’t mean they have a job. Sometimes schools don’t know until the last minute if they’ll have funding for a post. Still, you’ll want to meet with them anyway. Other times, schools are quite certain they have two positions, but then later university politics shift and they turn out to have none.

After the AMA, you’ll hopefully get “fly-outs,” that is, offers to come and visit the campus and give a talk. This means you’ve made the top five or so. Most offers go down in December. There’s a second market that happens after all the schools realize they’ve made offers to the same person. Of course, some schools get wise to this and don’t make offers to amazing people who would have come. We need some kind of market mechanism to work out this part of the system.

THE “IT’S ALL ABOUT FRIENDSHIP” RULE
Keep in mind that you will leave this process with 1 or 0 jobs. Therefore, when talking to a person, the most likely thing is that he or she will not be your colleague in the future. You should then think of each opportunity as a chance to make a friend. You’ll need friends to collaborate, to get tenure, get grants, and to go on the market again if you’re not happy with what you get.

HOW DO YOU FIND OUT IN WHICH ROOM TO INTERVIEW?
The schools will leave messages for you telling you in which rooms your interviews will be. You’ll get calls, emails, and notes held for you at the hotel reception. Some schools will fail to get in touch with you so you have to try to find them. Many profs ask the hotel to make their room number public, but for some reason many hotel operators will still not give you the room number. Naturally having a laptop and internet connection allows for emailing of room numbers. Try to take care of this early on the first day.

HOW TO TREAT YOURSELF WHILE THERE
My sponsor gave me the advice of not going out at night and getting room service for breakfast and dinner. This worked for me. Also, the ridiculously high price of a room-service breakfast made me feel like I was sparing no expense, which I found strangely motivating.

HOW DO THE ACTUAL AMA INTERVIEWS GO?
At the pre-arranged time you will knock on their hotel room door. You will be let into a suite (p=.4) or a normal hotel room (p=.5, but see below). In the latter case, there will be professors with long and illustrious titles—people you once imagined as dignified—sitting on beds in their socks. The other people in the room may not look at you when you walk in because they will be looking for a precious few seconds at your CV. For at least some people in the room, this may be the first time they have concentrated on your CV. Yikes is right. Put the important stuff early in your CV so nobody can miss it.

THE SEAT OF HONOR
There will be one armchair in the room. Someone will motion towards the armchair, smile, and say, “You get the seat of honor!” This will happen at every school, at every interview, for three days. I promise.

THE TIME COURSE
There will be two minutes of pleasant chit-chat. They will propose that you talk first and they talk next. There will be a little table next to the chair on which you will put your flip book of slides. You will present for 30 minutes, taking their questions as they come. They will be very nice. When done, they will ask you if you have anything to ask them. You of course do not. You hate this question. You make something up. Don’t worry, they too have a spiel, and all you need to do is find a way to get them started on it. By the time they are done, it’s time for you to leave. The whole experience will feel like it went rather well.

PREDICTING IF YOU WILL GET A FLY-OUT
It’s impossible to tell from how it seems to have gone whether they will give you a fly-out or not. Again, this is the land of staggering and high-impact uncertainty. They might not invite you because you were too bad (and they don’t want you), or because you were too good (and they think they don’t stand a chance of getting you).

DO INTERVIEWS DEVIATE FROM THAT MODEL?
Yes.

Sometimes instead of a hotel room, they will have a private meeting room (p=.075). Sometimes they will have a private meeting room with fruit, coffee, and bottled water (p=.025). Sometimes, they will fall asleep while you are speaking (p=.05). Sometimes they will be rude to you (p=.025). Sometimes a key person will miss an early interview due to a hangover (p=.025). Sometimes, if it’s the end of the day, they will drink alcohol with you (p=.18, given conditional on it being the end of the day).

HOW YOU THINK THE PROCESS WORKS
The committee has read your CV and cover letter and looked at your pubs. They know your topic and can instantly appreciate that what you are doing is important. They know the value of each journal you have published in and each prize you’ve won. They know your advisor and the strengths she or he instills into each student. They ignore what they’re supposed to ignore and assume everything they’re supposed to assume. They’ll attach a small weight to the interview and fly you out based on your record.

HOW THE PROCESS REALLY WORKS
The interviewers will have looked at your CV for about one minute a couple months ago, and for a few seconds as you walked in the room. They will never have read your entire cover letter, and they will have forgotten most of what they did read. They could care less about your advisor and will get offended that you didn’t cite their advisor. They’ll pay attention to everything they’re supposed to ignore and assume nothing except what you repeat five times. Flouting 50 years of research in judgment and decision-making, they’ll attach a small weight to your CV and fly you out based on your interview.

IF ENGLISH IS NOT YOUR MOTHER TONGUE
Your ability to speak English well won’t get you a good job, but your inability to do so will eliminate you from consideration at every top school. Understand that business schools put a premium on teaching. If the interviewers don’t think you can communicate in the classroom, they’re probably not going to take a chance on you. If you are just starting out and your spoken English is shaky, my advice is to work on it as hard as you are working on anything else. Hire a dialect coach (expensive) or an english-speaking actor or improviser (cheaper) to work with you on your English pronunciation. In the Internet age, it’s quite easy to download samples of English conversational speech, for instance from podcasts, for free. It’s also very easy to get a cheap headset and a free audio recorder (like Audacity) with which to practice.

TWO WAYS TO GIVE YOUR SPIEL
1) The plow. You start and the first slide and go through them until the last slide. Stop when interrupted and get back on track.

2) The volley. Keep the slides closed and just talk with the people about your topic. Get them to converse with you, to ask you questions, to ask for clarifications. When you need to show them something, open up the presentation and show them just that slide.

I did the plow the first year and the volley the second year. I got four times more fly-outs the second year. Econometricians are working hard to determine if there was causality.

HOW TO ACT
Make no mistake, you are an actor auditioning for a part. There will be no energy in the room when you arrive. You have to be like Santa Claus bringing a large sack of energy into the room with you. The interviewers will be tired. They’ve been listening to people in a stuffy hotel room from dawn till dusk for days. If you do an average job, you lose: You have to be two standard deviations above the mean to get a fly-out. So audition for the part, and make yourself stand out. If you want to learn how actors audition, read Audition by Michael Shurtleff.

SOCIAL SKILLS MATTER
From the candidate’s point of view, everything is about the CV and the correctness of the mathematical proofs in the job market paper. However, for better or for worse, extra-academic qualities matter. Here are two examples. 1) The Social Lubricant factor. Departments get visitors all the time: guest speakers, visiting professors, job candidates, etc. Some departments are a bunch of folks who stare at their shoes when introduced to a new person. These departments have a real problem: they have nobody on board who can make visitors feel at ease, and sooner or later word starts to spread about how socially awkward the people at University X are. To fix such problems, departments sometimes hire socially-skilled types who know how to make people comfortable in conversation, and who know how to ask good questions during talks. Also, interviewers assume that people who can talk a good game will be star teachers. 2) The Soft Sell factor. Many people succeed in academia not because they are often right, but also because they are masters of making other people feel like they aren’t wrong. Defensiveness or determination to embarrass when responding to critique is a sure way to blow an interview.

HAVE A QUIRK
One of the biggest risks facing you is that you will be forgotten. Make sure the interviewers know something unusual about you. My quirk is that I worked internationally as an actor and theater director for over 10 years; I even had a bit part in a Conan O’Brien sketch. It has nothing to do my research, but people always bring up this odd little fact when I do campus visits. Some bits of trivia are just more memorable than others.

DON’T GIVE UP
Never think it’s hopeless. Just because you’re not two SDs above the mean at the school of your dreams, doesn’t mean you’re not the dream candidate of another perfectly good school.

Many candidates don’t realize the following: The students are competing for schools but the schools are also competing for students. If you strike out, you can just try again next year. I know a person in Psychology who got 70 rejections in one year. I know a person in Marketing who was told he didn’t place in the top 60 candidates at the 20th ranked school. The subsequent year, both people got hired by top 5 departments. One of them is ridiculously famous!

RUMORS
Don’t gossip. All gossip can mess with your chances. Gossip that you are doing well can hurt you because schools will be afraid to invite you if they think you won’t come. Gossip that you are doing poorly can hurt you because schools that like you will be afraid to invite you if they think no one else does. Sometimes people will ask a prof at your school if you would come to their school, and the prof will then ask you. To heck with that. Just say that if they want to talk to you, they should deal with you directly.

The danger of rumors can be summed up by the following story. At ACR in 2003, I was having a beer with someone who confessed, “you know, my friend X at school Y told me that they want to hire you, but they’re afraid your wife won’t move to Z”. I was single.

SHARE YOUR OWN AMA HORROR STORIES
I am more than happy to publish anonymous AMA horror stories as part of this post. You can reach me at dan at dangoldstein dot com.

WHAT DECISION SCIENCE NEWS HAS LEARNED ABOUT JET LAG

Since Decision Science News moved to London in 2005, its numerous staff have many trips between the US and Europe. In all of this going back and forth, the DSN staff has figured out how to completely beat transatlantic jet lag. The secret is realizing that “jet lag” isn’t the problem.

What is jet lag? Webster’s defines it as “a condition that is characterized by various psychological and physiological effects (as fatigue and irritability), occurs following long flight through several time zones, and probably results from disruption of circadian rhythms in the human body”. Decision Science News prefers the shorter and more accurate “baloney”.

Travelers don’t feel lousy after flying to Europe because of the new-agey concept of jet lag. They feel lousy because of sleep deprivation.

A typical NY to London flight leaves at 10PM and lands at 10AM (5AM New York time). In New York, passengers usually don’t sleep during taxi, takeoff and a movie, which puts them to bed around 1AM. Then they sleep, but wake up soon after for their omelette, melon, and landing procedures that start around 4AM (NY time). A little advanced algebra shows that 1AM to 4AM makes for only 3 hours of sleep. The disciplined can squeeze in 4 hours, but nobody, even braggarts, feels good after 3-4 hours of sleep.

We at DSN posit that the transatlantic trip feels lousy because of sleep deprivation, not because of jet lag. Since this is a science website, let’s consider the evidence:

• If jet lag is primarily to blame, you should feel worse after traveling from LA -> London than from NYC -> London. Sleep deprivation theory predicts to opposite. We at DSN have tested this numerous times after stays of various durations and it turns out, amazingly,  that it is easier to transition between LA and London than NYC and London. On the longer flight (LA -> London is over 10 hours) you can sleep 6-7 hours and accordingly don’t wake up in London feeling sleep deprived.
• Those who stay on the clock of the departure city feel no ill effects of crossing time zones.  Though passing through time zones and being exposed to daylight at different times should mess with your  “body rhythms” under the mystical “jet lag” theory, it does not.
• The concept of jet lag would suggest that one would feel equally lousy traveling East to West as West to East since the same number of time zones is crossed. However, every transatlantic Tom knows that West to East is harder than East to West because there’s no sleep deprivation on the latter trip.
• Those who take the day trip to Europe have little trouble adapting to the new time zone.

Fine, it’s not jet lag. But how, the DSN reader may ask, does this help us? As our parting words, we leave you with The Decision Science News Guide to Feeling Great after the Transatlantic Trip from the US to Europe.

The Decision Science News Guide to Feeling Great after the Transatlantic Trip from the US to Europe

• If you start on the West coast, sleep on the plane.
• If you start from the East coast or Midwest, take a hearty two hour nap when you land in Europe in the morning. Put the alarm clock on the other side of the room (or use Clocky) so you will have no choice but to get up after 2 hours. Despite our claims about feeling great, this will actually feel lousy, but is the only tough part. After said nap, you have lengthened your total sleep from 3-4 hours to 5-7 hours. Thanks to the well known phenomenon of arrival adrenaline, you will easily power through to a normal local bedtime. The next day, you’ll feel surprisingly well adapted.

Decision Science News only gives prescriptions for things it knows about. If you, dear DSN reader, have tips for flying between other countries / continents, please share them in the comments.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/araswami/1948449158/

SUBJECTIVE PROBABILITY UTILITY AND DECISION MAKING CONFERENCE 2009

Decision Science News will attend the Subjective Probability Utility and Decision Making (SPUDM22) conference, which will be held in Rovereto (Italy) from Sunday, the 23rd till Thursday, the 27th of August 2009.

The deadline for the online submission of abstracts for papers/posters/symposia is April 10, 2009. Visit the conference web site at: http://discof.unitn.it/spudm22/

• Eric Johnson, Columbia University, New York, USA
• Alan Sanfey, University of Arizona, Arizona, USA
• Tilmann Betsch, Erfurt University, Germany

The conference will also include a panel discussion on “Automatic and controlled judgment and decision-making” chaired by Cornelia Betstch (Erfurt University, Erfurt, Germany) featuring the invited speakers as well as Ellen Peters (Decision Research, Eugene, USA) and Andreas Gloeckner (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany) as invited panelists.

See you in Rovereto!

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 R engine on your computer and outputs the results of the computation directly into your Word doc or Excel spreadsheet. It even works for plots, as shown below:

The 2 minute video walk-through is informative. Since most DSN readers are academics, they might be happy to know that there is a free one-year academic license.

If you are interested in learning R, don’t miss the excellent:

• Decision Science News R Video Tutorial 1 or
• R Video Tutorial 2

ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH CONFERENCE, PITTSBURGH, PA, OCT 22-25 2009

Decision Science News will return to the city of its birth for this year’s Association for Consumer Research (ACR) conference. Will you?

What:The Association for Consumer Research Annual North American Conference
When: October 22 – 25, 2009
Where: Westin Convention Center Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Submission Deadline: Monday, March 23, 2009 by 5:00 pm (EST)
Call for papers: http://acrwebsite.org/ACR_Call_09_Final_01_15.pdf
Co-chairs: Margaret C. Campbell, University of Colorado; Jeff Inman, University of Pittsburgh; Rik Pieters, Tilburg University

Conference Announcement and Call for Submissions 
(original here) 

The 2009 North American Conference of the Association for Consumer Research will be held at the Westin Hotel in Pittsburgh, PA from Thursday, October 22 through Sunday, October 25, 2009.

The theme of ACR 2009 is “A World of Knowledge At the Point of Confluence.” Consumer researchers from around the world will meet in the City at the Point, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers flow together to form the Ohio River. International consumer researchers will gather in Pittsburgh to share the ideas and data that converge to create knowledge.

The conference format will follow that of past years. A pre-conference Doctoral Symposium will be held Thursday (co-chaired by Stacy Wood and Dave Wooten). Thursday evening will feature an opening reception for ACR 2009. The conference program on Friday and Saturday will include Competitive Paper sessions, Special sessions, Roundtable discussions, Working Paper sessions, and the Film Festival. A Gala Reception will be held Saturday evening at the Senator Heinz History Center, just two blocks from the Westin.

ACR 2009 will provide a confluence of consumer researchers for scholarly presentations, discussions, networking and collaborations.

Format and Program Structure

The conference will open with a reception on Thursday evening (after the Doctoral Symposium). Sessions will be held on Friday and Saturday.

There are five types of submission for ACR 2009.

1) Competitive Papers represent the completed original work of their authors. The ACR conference co-chairs assign papers to sessions that reflect similar scholarly interests.

2) Special Sessions provide opportunities for focused attention on emerging areas of research. Successful sessions drill deeply into a specific issue using similar theoretical or methodological bases, or they promote a confluence of paradigms, methodologies, or research orientations.

3) Films at the Film Festival sessions provide video insight into consumer topics.

4) Working Papers present preliminary findings from the early stages of a research project. Authors distribute their papers, display posters of their research, and are available to discuss and answer questions during the assigned Working Paper session.

5) Roundtables encourage intensive participant discussion of emerging consumer research topics.

Submission and Decision Deadlines

All submissions (for competitive papers, special sessions, working papers, roundtables, and films) must be received by Monday, March 23, 2009 by 5:00 pm Pittsburgh time (EST). In order to maintain accessibility, please note that each ACR participant may present only twice in Special and/or Competitive paper sessions during the conference. When uploading a submission, authors will need to specify the paper presenter.

Notification of acceptance will be made by Friday, July 24, 2009. Final acceptances will be conditional upon receipt of revised documents and copyright release.

General Submission Requirements and Procedures

All submission activity (submissions, reviews and notifications) for ACR 2009 will be electronic, through the conference website at http://www.acrweb.org/acr/.

When you first enter the conference website you will need to sign up:

– Click on the “Sign up” tab at the top right of the page.

– Provide your information (name, email address, etc.) (Note: this does NOT register you for the conference; details for conference registration will be sent out in July 2009).

– To submit the information, click on the “Log in” button and then choose “Submitting Author” as your role. You will need your email ID and the password that you created for your user profile.

– Click on the “Submit paper/proposal” button.

All submissions to the 2009 ACR Conference website require the following information:

• Submission Type: Competitive Paper, Special Session, Roundtable, Working Paper, Film Festival

• Title of Submission

• Primary Contact Information: name, affiliation, mailing address, phone number and email address for the author who is the primary contact

• Content Area Codes and Methodological Area Codes (These are critical for assigning reviewers – please pick codes that provide the best match to your work).

• Word 2003 or Rich Text Format file to upload (Don’t use Word 2007)

• Names of Other Co-authors/Participants and their affiliations, and whether they are presenting author(s)

Note: All authors need to ensure that their names appear in the same way in all submissions. This is because the database will consider J. Jeffrey Inman, John Jeffrey Inman, and Jeff Inman as three different authors.

Time limit. Please note that the website will time you out after 60 minutes. Therefore, in order to avoid losing information, it is best to copy and paste your information into submission fields rather than composing it online.

Acknowledgement of receipt. The primary contact person will automatically receive an email acknowledgement of receipt of the submission. If you do not receive an acknowledgement, please check your spam folder. If you do not receive an acknowledgement within 48 hours after submission, please send an email inquiry about the status of your submission to: ACR2009@katz.pitt.edu

AUTOMATIC INDIVIDUAL RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS

The New York Times has an interesting article called Savings Accounts for All: Simple but not Easy, which talks of the Obama administration’s plans to set up an automatic IRAs (Individual Retirement Accounts) for workers in the USA.

This is clearly policy in the behavioral economics / Nudge tradition, which is no surprise as Nudge author Cass Sunstein will be named head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the present administration. The article even mentions research on the effects of autoenrollment, though it would have been nice had the NYT named the academics who carried out the research. Since the article does not, Decision Science News will give some citation love here:

• Brigitte C Madrian & Dennis F Shea. (2001). The Power of Suggestion: Inertia in 401 (k) Participation and Savings Behavior. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(4), 1149-1187.
• Richard H. Thaler & Shlomo Benartzi (2004) Save More Tomorrow Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Saving. Journal of Political Economy, 112 (1, pt. 2), S164-S187.

SIDENOTE
On a sidenote, the article mentions that in the proposed plan “There would be a standardized default investment, probably some kind of mutual fund with a mix of stocks and bonds that gets more conservative over time.” Since many outside of Finance do not know this, Decision Science News would like to direct its readers’ attention to the fact that there is not universal agreement among academics that portfolios should get more conservative with age. Some think one ought to pick the right asset allocation and stick with it throughout life. See this clearly-written article for a review.

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Photo credit: Amazon.com

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 they don’t pay attention to the “more than the ball” bit. They assume you mean that the bat costs a buck.

But Decision Science News would like to pause and say a few words in defense of not listening to exactly what is said. What if we took instructions literally? If we did, when we got emails from British Airways saying “Your British Airways flight is moving to Heathrow Terminal 3” as their subject, we would actually believe that our recently booked British Airways flight (to Geneva) was moving to Heathrow Terminal 3. And we’d be wrong.

If we then went on to read that the change only affects flights to Barcelona, Nice, and three other cities where we are NOT going, we would be completely perplexed, thinking “How can my flight be moving and not moving at once? It’s impossible!” We’d panic. We’d call BA. But we don’t do any of that. We just shake our heads and think “Worst … subject line … ever”.

As Decision Science News reflects and tries to find cases in which it pays to be perfectly literal, it can’t. Even when dealing with computers, even when reading the output of statistical routines, one needs regularly to think “Ok, SAS (or R or STATA or SPSS) you say that, but we both know you don’t mean that.”

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 News: So who are you guys and what is your scientific background?

REvolution: Well, at this point our team has grown and we have about 30 employees with diverse backgrounds, from bioinformatics to finance to core statistics and software engineering. However when we got started with REvolution, we were a group that had tremendous experience with high performance computing and building production software. Our first application with R was something called ParallelR , which enables users of R to seamlessly benefit from optimized performance by automatically running on multiple cores, servers, and clusters (we even have a cloud-based deployment). Our team today is a combination of employees and an extended community, from R community participants, to package developers, to researchers and related consultants.

Decision Science News: how did you get started working with R professionally?

REvolution: Traditionally our customers came to us for parallel computing solutions based in languages like C, Fortran, or Java. More and more we started to see pull from our customers toward scripting languages, and R in particular. Some of our pharma partners particularly were compelled by the proposition of optimizing the performance of R, and many of our first references are related to those applications (gene expression, classification, etc. [case study])

Decision Science News: What’s so great about your R compared to the regular download?

REvolution: Well, we’re not competing with the “regular” download – we actively collaborate with the core team, and utilize the codebase. What we have done is on several fronts. First, we have added capability and functionality related to optimization and high performance. Second, we are adding specific support for the 64-bit Windows platforms (and other more obscure OS distributions). Third, we are actively working on an IDE, large data handling, and other interesting capabilities (stay tuned!).

In addition to these aspects, we have packaged REvolution R into a commercially supported distribution around which we also provide training and consulting services. It’s a fully supported product in the same spirit as, say, RedHat Linux.

Decision Science News: Is there any risk that getting ‘locked in’ to your distribution of R? What if your distribution goes away, will our code still run on vanilla R?

REvolution: We prefer to say “mandatory customer loyalty” than lock-in. (KIDDING!) Of course, “open source” is a big part of “commercial open source,” and users of REvolution R can run their codebase on vanilla R.

HOW TO MAKE MORE REALISTIC ESTIMATES OF FUTURE BEHAVIOR

The Journal of Consumer Research is getting awfully good at getting articles picked up in the New York Times. The JCR Web site has directed our attention to an article by Robin Tanner and Kurth Carlson that looks people’s forecasts of their own future exercise behavior.

The gist is that when people answer a question like “how often will you exercise next week?”, they reply as if the question were “under ideal circumstances, how often will you exercise next week?”

Of course, most weeks aren’t ideal weeks, so if you are interested in getting a more accurate forecast of your own behavior in the future, it helps to be reminded of this.

So, how to use behavioral science to help yourself? When asked to make a forecast 1) generate an answer under ideal conditions, then 2) generate your forecast. Though you’d think the ‘ideal conditions’ would skew your forecast upwards due to anchoring, it does not. In fact, it causes you to generate more realistic forecasts of your own behavior.

(This reminds me of when I was running a seminar series and the visiting speaker asked me how long it would take to get from Columbia to Penn Station after the talk. I gave him my estimate, which he naturally believed was biased — some decision researchers think that everybody else is biased — and that it wouldn’t give him enough time. He demanded proof. So, I pulled up the train timetables from the MTA website and, sure enough, my estimate not only factored in waiting time and travel time, but also a generous buffer for the late trains. Being a nerd, I’d timed the trip perhaps 30 times and recorded it in my Palm Pilot; I live to make accurate forecasts. I was very close to replying “Dude. Like you, I decision-making biases for a living. I think I can give you a calibrated estimate of a trip I take every day.” But I held my tongue. –Ed).

Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/66535891@N00/2701310395/

PASSWORD CHART

Most of us use the same password for many sites. And most of us have thought that it would be a good idea to use different passwords for different sites. But then many of us fear that if we do this, we are tempting fate to forget or lose some of those passwords.

So, many of us have thought about making a different password for each site by combining some part of the site’s name with our standard password. So, for example, if your standard password is mypass123:

Your Gmail password might be mypass123_gmail and
your eBay password might be mypass123_ebay and
your Facebook password might be mypass123_facebook
(or perhaps something a bit less obvious)

This beats using the same password everywhere, but it is kind of clunky.

Along comes password chart. You can give it your standard password and enter the site for which you wish to have a password created. Out pops a much longer and more secure password than you would generate on your own.

The best part is that if you ever forget your strong password, you can go back to password chart, pop in the base password and the site name, and you’ve recovered your secure password. Easy!

Though these are browser-based tools, they do not send your password over the internet. You can even save the code to your local machine and run it offline if you’re doubtful. The code is free and open to inspect.

Here’s another tool that does basically the same thing: http://blog.tetrack.com/2009/02/too-many-passwords/