Advertising has changed a bit since the early 1960s

Today the New York Times / International Herald Tribune ran a piece on teaching social media marketing in business schools entitled Business Schools Respond to Demand for Use of Social Media. The courses of your Decision Science News editor, and other Marketing academics such as friend of the site Andrew Stephen, were discussed. What to do when such a story hits the media other than to put it back into social media? Hence this post.

Excerpt:

To meet this demand for education in social media strategy, several top business schools are incorporating courses on social networks into their M.B.A. curriculums. These include Harvard Business School; London Business School; Insead, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France; and the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, known as H.E.C., in Paris.

M.B.A. curriculums are geared toward students with business intelligence, knowledge of communication trends and a flair for innovation. Social network courses aim to build on their existing skills to teach an understanding of social media, of how to build marketing strategies within social networks and of how to track their effectiveness.

Why the picture of TV’s Mad Men?

“It’s about testing things, and not about ‘Mad Men’-style intuition,” Professor Goldstein said, referring to the popular U.S. television series about whiskey-soaked advertising executives in 1960s New York.

Those who want to teach themselves Internet Marketing at home may find the syllabus useful.

This week, Decision Science News brings you a summer school and a few spring workshops. The summer school is the one at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, brought to you by Gerd Gigerenzer and Nobel laureate Smith and will feature a lecture by Ariel Rubenstein. Now, those are three people who know a thing or two about bounded rationality!

Foundations for an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory
05 – 12 July, 2010
Berlin, Germany

Directed by: Gerd Gigerenzer & Vernon Smith
Evening Lecture: Ariel Rubinstein
Location: Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
Deadline to apply: March 20th, 2010

It is our pleasure to announce the Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality 2010 – Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory, which will take place from July 5th to 12th, 2010 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The objective of the Summer Institute is to provide a platform for interdisciplinary research, bringing together young scholars from psychology, economics, biology, philosophy, and neuroscience. It wants to push for a common understanding of the way Homo Sapiens forms decisions, challenging the reigning assumptions in the individual disciplines. This year, the evening lecture will be given by Ariel Rubinstein.

Talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world are invited to apply by March 20th, 2010. We will provide all participants with accommodation and stipends to cover part of their travel expenses. Details on the Summer Institute and the application process are available at http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/SummerInstitute .

Please pass on this information to potential candidates from your own department or institute.

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INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON CLINICAL REASONING

When: Saturday 17 April to Sunday 18 April 2010
Where: London, UK
Keynote speakers: Professor Valerie Reyna (Cornell University) and Professor Willem Kuyken (University of Exeter)
Sponsor: European Association for Decision Making (EADM)
Website: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/medicine/research/hscr/seminars/iwcr/

The 5th International Workshop on Clinical Reasoning provides a forum for researchers who investigate the mental processes of clinicians making diagnostic and treatment decisions.

We welcome contributions that present empirical evidence, theoretical accounts as well as planned research. These are examples of topics that would be of interest: research into various modes of clinical reasoning (e.g. intuitive, analytical, heuristic, causal), the circumstances when the different modes may not be appropriate and lead to error, the types of knowledge involved, how the features of the task may influence reasoning, individual differences in reasoning, strategies for improving reasoning, methodologies for the study of clinical reasoning.

For the first time, the workshop will aim to bring together researchers of medical diagnostic reasoning and of psychodiagnostic reasoning (‘case formulation’), and thus provide the opportunity for cross-fertilisation between two domains that do not often interact.

Scientific Committee
York Hagmayer, University of Göttingen
Olga Kostopoulou, King’s College London
Cilia Witteman, Radboud University Nijmegen

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ASSISTING DECISION MAKERS: A WORKSHOP MEETING

When people find it difficult to make decisions, they may benefit from assistance given to them by other people. Those providing assistance may be experts in a particular domain (e.g., medicine, law, finance) or in the way that decisions should be made (decision support). There are four types of help that people may receive. First, they may be given information in some form that makes it easy for them to use. For example, this information may relate to risks associated with different choices. Second, they may receive advice from other people about an appropriate course of action or about some uncertain quantity, such as the risks or expected returns associated with different courses of action. Third, they may share their decision making process with the person assisting them. Fourth, they may have their decision made for them.

This workshop will focus on these approaches to assisting decision makers and on factors relevant to choosing which should be used in different situations. It is supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and it will be held at University College London on 15 and 16 April. Invited speakers include J Frank Yates (Michigan), Ilan Yaniv (Jerusalem), and Eric Stone (Wake Forest).

If you wish to present a poster of relevant work at the meeting, please send its title and a 150-word abstract to Matt Twyman (m.twyman@ucl.ac.uk) before 5pm on March 12th 2010. There may also be a few slots available for spoken presentations. Please let Matt know if you would be interested in filling one.

Attendance at the meeting incurs no cost but you need to register by sending an email to Matt Twyman (m.twyman@ucl.ac.uk) by 12 March 2010. He will confirm your registration and provide you with further details.

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We invite submissions to the following forthcoming conference:

Behavioural Finance Working Group Conference:

Topic: Fairness, Trust and Emotions in Finance.
Date: 1-2 July 2010
Venue: Behavioural Finance Working Group, Cass Business School, London, UK
Keynote Speaker: Robert Olsen, Institute of Behavioral Finance

Organisers: Richard Fairchild (School of Management, University of
Bath), Gulnur Muradoglu (Cass Business School) and Daniel Zizzo
(University of East Anglia).

Special Issue: Presenters have the option to have their papers
considered for a special issue of the International Journal of
Behavioural Accounting and Finance.

The deadline for submissions is May 21st 2010

The detailed Call for Papers is as follows:

Overview: Traditionally, financial economists have based their analysis
of financial contracting on the assumption that agents are fully
rational, emotionless, self-interested maximizers of expected utility
(the homo economicus assumption). Behavioural economists are
increasingly recognizing that financial decision makers may be subject
to psychological biases, and the effects of emotions (the homo sapiens
view). An interesting area of research examines the implications of
assuming that agents are not completely self-interested, but that they
also consider the impact of their actions on the payoffs of others. In
this meeting, we will consider the effects of fairness, trust, empathy,
fellow-feeling, and emotional reactions on financial contracting,
incentives and performance.

We seek contributions from areas which include while not being limited
to the following issues:

-decision-making at the corporate level (for example, the effect of
emotions, trust, and empathy on the FDI decision and on capital
budgeting),

-decision making at the start-up level (the effect of fairness, trust
and empathy on venture capitalist/entrepreneurial financial
contracting, incentives and performance),

-decision making at the investor level (investors’ trust in corporate
managers).

We invite you to submit extended abstracts, papers-in-progress or full
papers by the deadline of May 21st 2010.

The organisers will come back with a decision within three weeks after
this deadline.To submit a paper for consideration please email a PDF
version of the paper to [1]Behavioural-Finance@city.ac.uk

Papers chosen for submission will, at the author’s request, be
considered for publication for a Special Issue of the International
Journal of Behavioural Accounting and Finance

Kind regards,
Gulnur Muradoglu
Cass Business School

Decision Science News knows that when faculty from London Business School travel abroad, they are frequently asked “how are things at the London School of Economics?” When the London Business School faculty members say politely that they are at LBS and not LSE, the askers suddenly look sympathetic, as if they’d inquired about a recently deceased pet.

It can be seen as a sensible reaction. The asker has heard of the London School of Economics, had a “false alarm” in thinking they recognized London Business School, and upon realizing that they have not heard of LBS, made the speedy inference it must not be very good. Perhaps this occurs through a variant of the recognition heuristic.

Decision Science News would like to point out that there is no need to feel sorry for London Business School faculty, who generally prefer being at a school of business over a school of economics, and further delight in the knowledge that London Business School was just rated the best MBA Programme in the world by the Financial Times.

Don’t believe their ranking? Well, one could consider the UK Government’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), according to which London Business School is the highest-scoring university in the UK for business, meaning it is higher ranked in business than Cambridge, Oxford, and yes, the London School of Economics with which it is so often confused.

Still unconvinced? Take a perspective from the USA, whose Forbes Magazine ranks LBS as the best MBA program outside the USA.

Need more data? See how the Economist credits LBS’s recent success: “What appears to be happening is that, as the job market for MBAs remains tough, more students are turning to schools with a worldwide reputation”.

So don’t cry for London Business School faculty, rest of world, congratulate them!

photo credit: http://www.forbes.com/

People who have suffered heart attacks can improve their chances by taking aspirin and other medicines. There is a great deal of research on this, yet, we still don’t see 100% of hospitals prescribing these drugs, and the rate of prescription varies from region to region. In general, the US government has noticed “surprisingly modest behavioral response of health care providers and health care systems to information concerning treatments or procedures judged to be superior”.

How can we get the health practitioners to make decisions in line with evidence?

Techniques such as setting defaults have had profound effects in business and organ donation. Why not in medicine?

The goods new for you, decision-science-researching reader, is that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) are looking to give away $15 million dollars to fund two projects on the effectiveness of nudges on health care practices. The executive summary and parts of the background section make for some interesting reading. Sorry about all the abbrevs.

Executive Summary

This NIH Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), supported by funds provided to the NIH and AHRQ under the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (“Recovery Act” or “ARRA”), Public Law 111-5, invites applications proposing clinical trials using the principles of behavioral economics to enhance the uptake of the results of comparative effectiveness research (CER) among health care providers in their practice. For this FOA, applicants must propose controlled trials that randomize units (whether individuals or clusters such as practices, hospitals, or larger units) to conditions, resulting in a randomized clinical trial (RCT) or cluster randomized trial (CRT). Research to foster the uptake of CER is seen to be necessary given the surprisingly modest behavioral response of health care providers and health care systems to information concerning treatments or procedures judged to be superior in CER trials. An additional possible benefit is that some behavioral economic interventions to promote the uptake of CER (e.g., those that rely on manipulating a provider’s default options) could be more cost effective than conventional approaches including some pay for performance schemes (P4P). For the purposes of this FOA, the definition of comparative effectiveness research will adhere to that adopted by the Federal Coordinating Council given at http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/programs/cer/cerannualrpt.pdf. Behavioral economics refers to the interdisciplinary efforts involving cognitive and social psychologists, decision scientists, and other social scientists together with economists to model economic decision-making and consequent actions. The approach is inclusive, since at its heart it tries to take into account what is known about how people actually make decisions rather than relying on the assumption that economic agents are fundamentally rational in the sense of expected utility theory (see, e.g., Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) work on Prospect Theory and Kahneman’s (2003) Nobel lecture). It is hoped that this line of research will lead to significantly greater consideration of CER by health care providers and therefore enhance the quality of the nation’s health.

From the Background section:

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) holds significant promise to improve health care quality and potentially lower costs. It appears that knowledge of which procedures and treatments are comparatively effective may not be sufficient to change critical provider practices and crucial patient behaviors. For example, although the prescription of aspirin, beta blockers, and ACE inhibitors/ARBs after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) has been shown to be extremely effective in clinical trials, strongly endorsed by professional societies such as the American College of Cardiology, and used as a quality indicator by government organizations including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), rates of prescription for these drugs in hospitals following AMI show substantial regional and institutional variation and are still below 100% according to the 2008 AHRQ National Healthcare Quality Report (NHRQ). Even when comparatively effective treatments are prescribed, adherence to treatment can be disappointingly low. For example, approximately 50 percent of all AMI patients stop taking prescribed statins within two years of their event as late as the beginning of this decade (Jackevicius et al., 2002). Among asthmatics, only 32% took their preventive asthma medicine daily. Similar adherence problems exist among diabetics, resulting in poor health outcomes. Fewer than 60% of all adults age 40 and over with diagnosed diabetes have their blood sugar, cholesterol, or blood pressure under optimal control. Only 40.1% receive all three recommended services for diabetes, including an HbA1c measurement, a dilated eye examination, and a foot examination. (2008 AHRQ National Healthcare Quality Report)

It is generally presumed that both providers and patients respond to incentives and disincentives to change their behaviors, but to date, efforts to incentivize the uptake of CER have had only modest success. This funding opportunity seeks applications that will investigate whether the principles of behavioral economics could enhance the uptake of the results CER among health care providers and thus improve the health of patient populations. …

In the context of this FOA, behavioral economics refers to the interdisciplinary efforts involving cognitive and social psychologists, decision scientists, and other social scientists together with economists to model economic decision-making and consequent actions. The approach is inclusive, since at its heart it tries to take into account what is known about how people actually make decisions rather than relying on the assumption that economic agents are fundamentally rational in the sense of expected utility. As a field, behavioral economics seeks to understand how human social, cognitive, and emotional factors affect economic decisions. It considers the values assigned to all aspects of a choice, including, but not limited to monetary factors. In addition, behavioral economics acknowledges the important role that a specific context (or frame) may have on decisions, and takes into account people’s apparently irrational preferences (e.g., losses count more than gains, an object that is owned is more valuable than the same object that is not owned). For a recent review of behavioral economics from an economic perspective, Dellavigna (2009) is useful; from a psychological standpoint, Kahneman and Tversky (2000) and Kahneman (2003) provide useful data and historical context. There is growing evidence that such approaches may hold more promise than approaches based on either conventional theories of behavior change or neoclassical economics. The application of approaches from behavioral economics to the healthcare field could be valuable in the development of incentives or disincentives to motivate sustainable changes in provider and patient behavior.

It should be noted that the use of conventional economic incentives to affect provider behavior, including the uptake of CER, has been the subject of considerable research. Perhaps most germane to the topic of this FOA is the literature on “pay for performance”, also known as P4P. The logic of P4P is clear: rather than paying physicians or other health care providers (just) for the specific, billable, services they provide (which naturally incentivizes the ordering of more tests and procedures), they should be paid based on patient outcomes or on their achievement of other objective milestones that should be directly related to patient outcomes. In a classical economic context, it would be a puzzle if physicians and other treatment providers did not align their practice with the procedures or guidelines for practice that are incentivized. Strikingly, however, the evidence for the effectiveness of P4P schemes are often quite modest (reviewed by, e.g., Petersen et al., 2006). Although there are explanations in part for some of these incentive failures (e.g., the principal-agent problem), it seems clear that the incentive system could be improved. Further, many behavioral economists would argue that key improvements could be made not only in the design and delivery of incentives but also in the construction of the decision environment for the health care provider.

To date, implementation of behavioral economic approaches to change decision-making and behavior has focused primarily on economic topics such as behavioral finance (but see, e.g., Volpp et al., 2009 for a recent trial involving smoking cessation). The underlying ideas would seem to have much broader applicability. Behavioral economic interventions are generally of two basic types: one can restructure the choice environment, or manipulate the individual’s perceived incentives. One notable example of the former was Choi, Laibson, and Madrian’s (2004) intervention to increase retirement savings participation. By changing the default action to “contribute” they relied on behavioral inertia to maintain that level of participation. This is an example of altering behavior by manipulating the “choice architecture” that confronts individuals in daily life (see also Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). By structuring choice architectures to subvert individuals’ entrenched biases to stick with the status quo and discount future benefits, a well-developed system of so-called asymmetric paternalism (Loewenstein, Brennan, and Volpp, 2007) could provide interesting opportunities to induce change in provider behavior with respect to selecting a comparatively effective treatment while preserving a clinician’s freedom to choose an alternative treatment when the CER-recommended treatment is counter-indicated. One relevant example of the use of a default option approach that has been successfully implemented (albeit not in the context of CER per se) can be seen in places where statute or policy allows generic equivalents to be substituted for brand name drugs by pharmacists unless a physician specifically notes (or checks off a box denoting that) the prescription is to be “dispensed as written” (DAW). Here, the “transaction cost” of over-riding the default is almost zero, but the effect on generic dispensing rates can be quite large. In particular, generic drug utilization rates varied from 37 percent to 83 percent among Medicare Part D plans (Levinson, 2007), and it would appear that some of this variation is attributable to systemic factors that could be manipulated.

In addition to these more passive, environmental manipulations, behavioral economists have explored the manipulation of incentives to alter behavior. There has been particular interest in the use of deposit contracts, lotteries, and other monetary contingencies to effect health-related behavior change (e.g., Volpp et al. 2008). (Also note that some self-imposed commitment devices can be at least modestly effective at nearly zero external cost, e.g., Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002). The effect of these devices is generally to allow individuals to overcome their own behavioral inertia, or to make continued compliance with recommended courses of action more attractive. Some of these techniques are similar in spirit to P4P, but the design of the incentives can be very different, and reflects what is known by psychologists about people’s preferences, and how those preferences can be manipulated. Like P4P, however, there can be concerns about the efficiency of providing incentives to reward behavior that would occur in any event, and questions concerning the overall cost effectiveness of monetary incentives. Trials supported by this funding opportunity will, of course, have the option to directly compare rates of uptake in incentivized and non-incentivized conditions, potentially leading to estimates of the marginal cost of the incentive.

More information at:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-OD-10-001.html

And please, if you get $7,500,000, please consider yourself nudged to donating 10% to Decision Science News.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nirbhao/2573135240/

Richard Thaler writes

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is sponsoring a contest to come up with ideas for improvements in choice architecture, or “nudges”, that can improve health, broadly defined. You can find a description of it on our nudging blog or at http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/designingforbetterhealth

This initiative might be interesting to JDMers at two levels. First, it is a contest to come up with ideas of the sort that JDMers are good at so feel free to enter. Second, the idea of using a contest to generate solutions to societal problems is of interest in and of itself. The prizes for the winners are nominal, $5000, (unlike the X prize, for example), but the Foundation has funds to pour significant resources behind winning ideas. So the idea is that you can get lots of clever people to think about an important problem by dangling a modest bit of fame and fortune and you might come up with something that could change the world. Cool huh?

Read about it on the Nudge blog
Read about it on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation site
Read about it at the Changemakers site

They have some nice tips on designing nudges in the articles How To Nudge and Nudge Your Customers Toward Better Choices.

Those interested in Political Psychology should read Andrew Gelman’s blog postings, and also consider attending this:

Stanford University is very pleased to announce that it will host the 2009 Summer Institute in Political Psychology, continuing an annual tradition that was started by Margaret Hermann at Ohio State University in 1991 and moved to Stanford in 2005.

The Summer Institute will offer 3 weeks of training in political psychology for up to 60 participants, including graduate students, faculty, professionals, and advanced undergraduates. The activities will include lectures by world-class faculty, discussion groups, research/interest group meetings, group projects, and an array of social activities.

Political psychology is an exciting and thriving sub-disciplinary specialty that explores the origins of political behavior and the causes of political events, with a special focus on the psychological mechanisms at work. The principal contributors to the field include political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and other researchers who cross bridges between disciplines in efforts to enrich their scholarship.

For detailed information and to apply, visit this website:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/sipp

For the best chance to be admitted, submit your application as soon as possible.

Columbia University’s Eric Johnson and Elke Weber have created Teachers4Turnout, a Web site / classroom activity to encourage voting among students. Check it out at http://www.teachers4turnout.org. Here’s how they describe it:

The upcoming election is important to us, but even more important to our students. Decisions made by those officials who will be elected November 4th will affect the future of the country that our students will inherit. Our goal is to increase student participation in the electoral process. Studies show that we can increase voting substantially with a simple question: Merely asking students if they will be voting increases turnout, by getting their commitment to vote.

After you sign up, you will find a suggested script that is designed to encourage voting. This should take less than 5 minutes of class time. We will also send you no more than two reminder emails and ask you, after election day, how things went. That’s all.

Please help spread the word by forwarding this message to colleagues who also teach voter-age populations. With your help, we can make Teachers4Turnout a national success, and help our students vote.

Those interested in the latest behavioral research on increasing voter turnout might wish to read Nudging turnout: Mere measurement and implementation planning of intentions to vote by the international team of Dan Goldstein (London), Kosuke Imai (Princeton), Anja Göritz (Würzburg), and the Peter Gollwitzer (NYU).

For this week, Decision Science News has created a vi and vim video tutorial. (The tutorial is best viewed in your browser’s full-screen mode, try pressing F11 in Windows). Vim is a free and open source editor. DSN highly recommends vim.

This tutorial is for absolute beginners and probably should not even be looked at by people who already know vi or vim.

After finishing the tutorial, try this …

ADDITIONAL EXERCISE:
Find 4 ways to delete the last sentence typed (“End of the line”).

ANSWERS
(Try each of these, typing “u” after each to undo the deletion so that you can try the others.)

1) Move into the sentence with the movement keys and type “das” (delete a sentence).
2) Type dollar sign “$” to go to the end of the line and then “4db” to delete backwards 4 words, since there are 4 words in the last sentence.
3) Go to the end of the sentence as above, then hit “d(” to delete the sentence to the left.
3) Move to the beginning of the sentence with “(” then type “d)” to delete the sentence to the right.

BONUS: HOW TO EXIT AND SAVE FROM VI / VIM
From edit mode “:w filename.txt” will save your file. To quit vim, type :q. To quit without saving type :q!

We have received many questions about why one would want to learn vim in this day and age. A good answer is here.

For reference, the text of the tutorial follows:

Welcome to the Decision Science News vi and vim video tutorial.

To begin the first thing we will do is type “i”. This puts us in insert mode, which means the mode in VIM in which you can enter text. So type something, such as:

“I would like three eggs over easy.

Oh, and some coffee, too.”

Now that you have entered this text, you can move around a bit with the arrow keys and do some crude editing. For example, I can backspace over words and type them again, and the delete key also works.

However, this is generally *not* the way you edit text in VIM. Generally, you switch to “edit mode”. Do this by hitting ESCAPE or Control-OpenBracket Ctrl-[. I will do that now. Notice how the word “INSERT” has disappeared from the bottom of my screen. Now I’m in edit mode. If I hit “i” I’ll go back to insert mode, and ESCAPE takes me to edit mode: i ESC i ESC i ESC

The thing that really confuses people about edit mode is that you can’t just enter text in it. You can only enter special vim commands. We’ll go over some of the most common vim in this tutorial.

First, movement commands. To move down in edit mode, hit “j”. Notice how “j” looks like a down arrow. To move up, hit “k”, it makes sense that up would be right next to down. Since j and k are home keys, you can move up and down quickly.

To move left, hit “h”, which makes sense because it’s to the left of the up and down keys.

To move right, hit “l”. l, h, j, k. That is space by space movement.

Now, let’s give ourselves some more text to work with. Move up to your first line of text and hit “yy”. The “yy” command yanks a line of text, kind of like copying it. Now press “p”. “p” is like “paste” and you’ll see that it pastes the copied line, so we now have our first line twice.

To do a command many times in vi/vim, just type a number and then that command. For example, type 5p and you’ll see that it pastes 5 times.

Similarly, if we type “99p” it will paste 99 times. Try it “99p” I’ve just put 99 lines there. Yikes, how to undo it? Two ways. First type “u” and you’ll undo the last action. If you type “u” the 99 lines are gone. Another way would be to use the delete lines command, which is “dd”. I’ll type “99p” to paste back in the 99 lines, and now what I’ll do is type “99dd” and I just executed the “dd” command (delete line) 99 times. “dd” again is delete line.

How do you join lines? Simple, you use capital J. Up at the top, I can use captial J to put all these sentences into one line: J J J J J. Now you have this long line. I’ll do yy to yank this long line and I’ll hit “p” to paste it. Now we have some text to edit.

We’ve looked at moving left and right character by character, but there is a better way. If we type “w” we skip to the next word or punctuation mark (w w w w) and if we type “b” we move to the previous one: b b b w w w b b b. To jump to the next sentence we hit Close-paren ) Notice how close-paren ) looks like a right arrow. Similarly, Open-paren ( looks like a left arrow and jumps to the previous sentence.

To go to the beginning of the current line, type 0. To go to the end type dollar sign $: 0 $ 0 $ 0 $

Now lets delete some words. Hit “5b” to move back 5 words. Now to delete one word to the right type “dw”. To delete a word to the left you would type “db” (remember that b refers to the word to the left). To delete a sentence, move into the sentence and type “das”. Sentence is gone! Another way to delete a sentence, say the sentence to the left is to type d open-paren “d(” deleted the sentence to the left. I’m going to move back a sentence now to show that if you want to delete a sentence to the right use d close-paren: “d)”

To delete just one character, simply type x. You can use the delete key.

Ok, so we’ve done a bunch of stuff in edit mode, but you probably want to get back to actually typing something. How do you return to insert mode?

There are a few ways. We’ve already talked about i, this will let me insert before the cursor. So we see here the cursor is on the l in “like”, if I type “i” and start typing, I’m inserting before the cursor. I hit ESC to go back to command mode. If I hit “a”, I can start typing after the cursor. And I’ll hit ESC again to go back to command mode.

Now, let’s say I want to insert something on the line below the current line. If I just type “o” I can start inserting on the line below. Now I can type “Hi Dad” and hit ESC to go back to edit mode. To start typing on the line above, I type capital O and hit ESC to go back to command mode. If you have trouble remembering which is above and which is below, think of the Os as filled with helium. The big O will hold more helium and go above the lower case o.

To start inserting at the beginning of the line, type capital letter “I”. I’ll type “Start of line” and type ESC to go back to edit mode. To start inserting at the end of the line and type capital A (think A for “After” the line). I’ll type “End of the line” and then ESC to go to edit mode.

Ever find yourself frittering away the day responding to email after email? Ever think that if you’d just spent 8 hours working on that project, you’d be done and still have time to answer those emails in front of the TV later that night? Sure, we all have.

Why we simply don’t do the hard stuff first is a fascinating question in its own right. I mean, if we’re going to be happier at the end of the day having ignored the emails, why don’t we learn to ignore them? It’s too much to get into here, but see the psychological literature on intertemporal choice and the Don’t Delay blog if this interests you.

The good news is that the always-innovating Google is here to help with their experimental “Take a Break” feature in Gmail. When clicked, it prevents you from checking your email for 15 minutes, telling you do something more productive instead.

To use it, you’ll need to manually activate “Gmail Labs” inside Gmail. See the Gmail blog or if you’re impatient, try Settings -> Labs from Gmail. Right now, it’s only enabled in the US and UK.

Other tools to try if you can’t get down to work at work:

* Temptation Blocker: a Windows program to prevent you from using any other program (especially good to prevent you from opening your Email client or Web browser).
http://sourceforge.net/projects/temptblocker/

* Time Tracker: An extension to the FireFox browser that tracks how much time you waste on various sites.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1887

ANNOUNCEMENT
The 7th Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Psychology and Economics will
introduce graduate students and early career researchers from different disciplines to the
study of bounded and ecological rationality. This novel approach to human decision making
examines the simple processes and cognitive mechanisms that enable good decision
making in specific environments. This perspective has seen rapid theoretical development
over the last decade with psychologists and economists taking the lead in showing how the
study of bounded rationality can provide a greater understanding of the human mind and
adaptive decision making.

Classical theories of decision making are largely based on a vision of rationality that is
unrealistic. For example, “rational” humans are often imagined to be equipped with
unlimited knowledge, time, and information-processing power. In contrast, to understand
the way that people with limited resources actually make good decisions in everyday social
and economic tasks, bounded rationality (which should not be confused with optimization
under constraints or the heuristics and biases program) starts with a more psychologically
plausible perspective: Humans are able to make good decisions by using simple heuristic
processes that are adapted to particular task environments (i.e. ecological rationality).

AIM
The main objective of the Summer Institute is to introduce students from various fields to
the study of bounded rationality. This year our specific focus will be on ecological
rationality. The first goal will be to provide an overview of the main research areas in
which ecological rationality has been studied. This will include an introduction to the
specific research methods used through participation in experiments, observations, and
simulations. As well, participants and faculty will discuss several key findings from
economics and psychology. To insure active involvement of all participants, lectures will be
balanced with small group workshops. As a second goal, the Summer Institute will also
give participants the opportunity to present their own research in a poster session, in order
to facilitate feedback, discussion and future research development.

BOARD
The interdisciplinary Summer Institute is directed by Gerd Gigerenzer (Max-Planck-
Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany). This year’s keynote speaker will be
Nobel laureate Vernon Smith. Other faculty will include members of the organizing
institute, as well as several invited international speakers from a variety of disciplines.

APPLICATION
To ensure an excellent learning environment participation in the summer school is limited
to approximately 35 talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the
world. The summer institute provides stipends to all participants to cover part of their
expenses for travel and accommodation. Precise information on the stipends will be
announced to the applicants at a later point in time. Interested students should apply by
April 7, 2008 with a brief application letter, CV, and one short letter of recommendation,
preferably sent by email.

CONTACT
For more details on the Summer Institute and the application process, please visit our
website: www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/summerinstitute