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 […]
NEW PAPER, NEW PRODUCT FEATURE USING PERSPECTIVE PHRASES Click to enlarge As mentioned a few times in past posts, we’ve been doing research on how “perspective sentences,” for example “Israel is about the size of New Jersey in area and population” helps Americans comprehend measurements beyond simply saying “Israel has an area of 20,770 square […]
EXPERIENCE THE BINOMIAL AND NORMAL DISTRIBUTIONS The Random Walker is an inexpensive mini quincunx Every since taking Stephen M. Stigler’s class on the history of statistics at Chicago, we’ve been wanting to get our hands on a quincunx. A quincunx, also referred to as a Galton Board or bean machine (*) is one of these, […]
BAGEL SHOP IDEA I was sitting in a bagel shop on Saturday with my 9 year old daughter. We had brought along hexagonal graph paper and a six sided die. We decided that we would choose a hexagon in the middle of the page and then roll the die to determine a direction: 1 up […]
JDM IS TOO LEGIT TO CEASE IN ITS REPLICABILITY The R-Index blog was created by Ulrich Schimmack and aims to increase the replicability of published results in psychological science. Recently, the blog created rankings of 104 psychology journals in terms of replicability and published preliminary results. More detail can be found here. We were pleased […]
STREAK RESULTS FOR LIKELY (>50%) and HIGHLY LIKELY (>99%) Click to enlarge From research on the hot hand to the observation that people don’t create enough streaks when instructed to create pseudo random data, the decision science community is pretty interested in the perception of streaks. One day we got to wonder, how long would […]
AFTER KAHNEMAN IN 2002, THE SECOND “BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS” NOBEL GOES TO THALER The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2017 has been awarded to Behavioral Economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business “for his contributions to behavioural economics“. Dr. Thaler was born in 1945 and […]
GUEST POST BY SID SURI: MONTH LONG PRISONER’S DILEMMA Figure 1: All the games and random rematchings in one out of the twenty sessions we conducted. Each block of green/red shows a game where green represents cooperation and red represents defect. Curves between the games represent how players were randomly rematched. DSN readers, you are […]
SJDM LAUNCHES THE NEW IT’S YOUR CHOICE BLOG The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (JDM Society) has gone a long time without a web log. They have a journal, a newsletter, and a fine conference, but until recently no blog to call their own. That changes now with the launch of It’s Your Choice, […]
PUTTING 35 INCHES OF RAIN IN PERSPECTIVE We are always interested in putting numbers into perspective, so we were interested in this article in which they put the Hurricane Harvey’s rain into perspective. They’re predicting 30-40 inches of rain in a few days in Texas. They asked an expert to put that into perspective and […]
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