Two posts ago we showed you the digit sound system for remembering numbers. This week we provide two Python programs (and one R program) to help you create mnemonics.

w2num.py – converts every word in the English language to a number
find.py – takes a longish number and gives you words that when put together translate into that number using the digit-sound system.

If you are not a programmer, or if you are lazy, you can get to the chase and just download the relevant outupt files here

wordNum.txt – every word in English translated into a number using the digit-sound system
numWords.txt – All the English words that translate into a given number

However, you have a long number that you want to make a mnemonic for, you’re better off using find.py or find.R below to find mnemonics. These handy programs break up long numbers into shorter ones which do have mnemonics.

NOTES:
These programs use phonetics (not spelling) to make the mnemonics. Read the small print on Jap Murre’s site to see why “letter” is 514 and not 5114 and why “ing” is 27. Thanks to Daniel Reeves for convincing discussions on the merits of using a purely phonetic system.

As usual, we’re open for suggestions on how to improve these programs … they’re both kind of slapdash jobs.

##w2num.py##
Prerequisites: You need to save a couple of wordlists locally. In particular
1) You need to save a copy of http://bit.ly/xz8YIC
as cmudict-0.4.scm. This is a mapping from words in English to phonemes.
2) You need to save a copy of http://scrapmaker.com/data/wordlists/twelve-dicts/2of12inf.txt
as wordlist.txt. This is a list of reasonably common English words (b/c some of the words in cmudict are too rare to be useful).
3) Put cmudict-0.4.scm and wordlist.txt in the same directory as
w2num.py and then do
python w2num.py > wordNum.txt
to generate the number corresponding to every English word. (If in the future these URLs break, just search around for copies of cmudict-0.4.scm and 2of12inf.txt …there are many copies of these dictionaries around.)

##find.py##
This is the program you use when you have a longish number and you want to find words that encode it. It uses recursive ™ technology to break up numbers a few different ways to increase your chances of finding a mnemonic you like.
Prerequisite: You must have created wordNum.txt (by running python w2num.py > wordNum.txt) in the previous step and saved it to the same directory as this program before running.
To turn a number like 8675309 into words do
python find.py 8675309

Lastly, for kicks I wrote a slightly dumber version of find.py in R. It lacks the cool “rec3″ method of finding mnemonics but it gets the job done.

##find.R##
Same as find.py
Prerequisite: same as find.py
To turn a number like 8675309 into words change the variable mstr to ’8675309′ and run the program.

AWKWARD FUTURE SELF INTERACTIONS

Decision Science News readers know about Hal Hershfield and Dan Goldstein‘s experiments in which they exposed people to interactive virtual-reality movies of their future selves to see how it would impact their saving behavior (pictured above). The idea was sent up in three Saturday Night Live fake commercials for Lincoln Financial (hat tip: Jake for alerting us). The SNL interactions with the future self were a lot more awkward than ours, but maybe that’s a good thing for changing behavior.

Links (mildly disturbing):

• http://www.hulu.com/watch/287086/saturday-night-live-lincoln-financial-i
• http://www.hulu.com/watch/287087/saturday-night-live-lincoln-financial-ii
• http://www.hulu.com/watch/287094/saturday-night-live-lincoln-financial-iii

After seeing that, you may want to check out a selection of more wholesome media concerning our research.

Hershfield, H. E., Goldstein, D. G., Sharpe, W. F., Fox, J., Yeykelis, L., Carstensen, L. L., & Bailenson, J. N. (2011). Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48, S23-S37.

Wall Street Journal Article Meet ‘Future You.’ Like What You See?

New York Times Article Some novel ideas for improving retirement income

Allianz report featuring the research Behavioral Finance and the Post-Retirement Crisis

DSN received the following announcement, which should be of interest to agent-based modelers out there. The first tournament led to a Science paper, not a bad outcome.

We would like to invite you, the members of your research group, and your colleagues to participate in The Second Social Learning Strategies Tournament, which we hope will interest you. The tournament, which has a total of 25,000 euro available as prize money, is now open for entries.

The tournament is a competition designed to establish the most effective means to learn in a complex, variable environment.

In recent years, there has been a lot of interest (spanning several research fields, but especially economics, anthropology, and biology) in the problem of how best to acquire valuable information from others. The first Social Learning Strategies Tournament, inspired by Robert Axelrod’s famous Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments on the evolution of cooperation, attracted over 100 entries from all around the world, and a paper detailing the results was published in the journal Science in 2010*. The high level of interest convinced us that it would be worthwhile to organise a second tournament in which some of the restricting assumptions of the first could be relaxed, so as to explore a broader range of questions.We have received funding for this from the European Research Council, and a committee of world-leading scientists have helped us to design the tournament game, including Sam Bowles (Santa Fe Institute), Rob Boyd (UCLA), Marc Feldman (Stanford), Magnus Enquist (Stockholm), Kimmo Erikkson (Stockholm) and Richard McElreath (UC Davis).

Entrants will be required to submit behavioural strategies detailing how to respond to the problem of resource gain in a complex, variable environment through combinations of individual and social learning.

Three extensions to the first tournament game will (i) explore the effects of learners being able to select from whom to learn, (ii) allow agents to refine existing behavior cumulatively, and (iii) place the action in a spatially structured population with multiple demes. A total of 25,000 euro prize money is available, divided into three 5,000 euro prizes for the best strategy under any single extension, and a 10,000 euro prize for the best strategy under all three extensions.

The competition is now open for entries, with a closing date of

February 28 2012. More information can be found at:

http://lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk/tournament2/

We would like to encourage you, the members of your laboratories, and your colleagues and collaborators, to participate in this competition.Please do forward this message to anyone you think might be interested. We would also be grateful if you would print out and post the attached flier on your notice boards, and forward it to anyone you think might be interested.

We hope that this tournament will increase understanding of, and stimulate research on, the evolution of learning, as Axelrod’s tournament did for the evolution of cooperation.

*Rendell et al. (2010) Why copy others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament. Science 328: 208-213

Image credit: Goldstein, D. G. (2009). Heuristics. In P. Hedström & P. Bearman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. (pp. 140-164). New York: Oxford University Press. [Download]

Health has a major impact on both individuals and nations. Health problems
can impact a person’s emotional, financial and social state; they can also
affect a nation’s financial and social standing. Indeed, countries across
the globe are currently battling the increasing costs of health care
delivery, while others are trying to modernize their systems. Furthermore,
most nations face similar health related challenges such as reducing
unhealthy behaviors (poor diet and smoking), increasing healthy behaviors
(exercising), assisting disadvantaged population gain better access to
health services, and improving adherence to medical treatment.

According to the Surgeon General’s Office the leading causes of mortality in
the U.S. have substantial behavioral components. It is no wonder, therefore,
that both psychologists and economists have been among the pioneers in
studying components associated with health behaviors and have provided a
range of successful behaviorally based prevention and treatment options.
Yet, the sheer extent of these problems calls for a more interdisciplinary
approach. In recent years a growing number of researchers have turned to
behavioral and experimental economics in the hopes of providing additional
insights to facilitate positive health behavior changes.

The aim of this special issue is to bring together the latest research in
behavioral and experimental economics on health related issues, stimulate
cross disciplinary exchange of ideas (theories, methods and practices)
between health economists and psychologists, and provide an opportunity to
simulate novel and creative ways to tackle some of the most important health
challenges we currently face. This special issue will be of interest not
only to a diverse range of researchers but to health professionals,
practitioners and policy makers alike.

With this call for papers, we hope to attract manuscripts that are
outstanding empirical and/or theoretical exemplars of research on any health
related topic from a behavioral and/or experimental economic perspective. We
anticipate studies will focus on a range of topics, including, but not
limited to: Smoking, Dietary choices, Adherence to treatment, Decision
making, Risk taking behavior, Choice architecture, Information asymmetry and
use of monetary incentives to alter behavior. We expect papers to reflect a
variety of methodologies but to highlight implications of the research for
practitioners and policy makers.

Authors should submit a short proposal (maximum of 400 words) that outlines
the plan for a full manuscript* to Yaniv Hanoch, PhD *and* Eric Andrew
Finkelstein*, PhD, guest editors for the special issue, by *March 1, 2012*.
The proposal should outline the study question, methods and findings of the
proposed submission and note how the paper will align with the theme of the
special issue. *Submissions are due August 1, 2012.* Papers should be
prepared in full accord with the *Health Psychology* Instructions to Authors
and submitted through the Manuscript Submission
Portal.
All manuscripts will be peer reviewed. Some papers not included in a
specific special section may be accepted for publication in *Health
Psychology* as regular papers. Please indicate in the cover letter
accompanying your manuscript that you would like to have the paper
considered for the Special Series on Health Psychology meets Behavioral
Economics.

Society for Judgment and Decision Making Newsletter Editor Dan Goldstein reports that the March 2011 SJDM newsletter is ready for download.

http://www.sjdm.org/newsletters/11-mar.pdf

Enjoy!

This week, our former home, the Center for the Decision Sciences at Columbia University, has turned us on to this article about a fitness plan that charges you more if you work out less. Yes, it’s a business putting applied behavioral economics to work, not unlike Stickk.com or Beeminder.com (formerly known as Kibotzer.com and currently known as bmndr.com by those who like to abbrvt).

The plan works in conjunction with gyms. We have often heard people say, with great assurance, that gyms bet on people not making good use of their memberships, that they are businesses based on a human inability to commit. Sure, if you take “good use” to mean going every day, it’s clear that gyms could not handle the crowds that would result. However, we at DSN often doubt people who say things with great assurance without evidence. After all, people don’t make good use of their gym memberships may not renew their memberships, and that is bad for business.

SOFT CONTRACTS: AN IDEA THAT WILL NOT WORK IN THEORY BUT WILL WORK NONETHELESS
DSN once committed to patronize the gym 150 times a year. We did pretty well for the first half of the year and then were met by a long spell of illness and travel. After that, hitting the 150 number required more frequent workouts then we cared to commit to, so we gave up. It’s a problem when commitment contracts don’t make room for periods in which you cannot, should not, or do not want to honor your contract. Yes, we grouped “do not want” with the others. For instance, suppose we had been offered an all-expense-paid, two-month trip around the world that would leave no possibility for going to the gym. Taking the once-in-a-lifetime trip would be more important to us than going to the gym 150 times per year, so we would choose to lose the gym bet to take the trip. However, that’s not ideal. What’s ideal is to honor the gym bet when we are home and healthy and to suspend it otherwise. Since we can define these preferences a priori, it should be possible to define contracts that work within those rules. However, since it is impossible to think, a priori, of every possible thing that might make one want to suspend the bet, it seems reasonable to simply trust people to be honest about when they should be honoring the contract and when not. We realize this violates all the sacred principles of commitment contracts, experimental economics, law & order, and so on, but so what. History is filled with failed token economies and successful systems of soft guidelines.

OTHER DSN POSTS ON COMMITMENT DEVICES
Stop overeating with a turn of the wrist

Contracts to fight procrastination

Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality
Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory
21 – 28 June, 2011

Directed by Gerd Gigerenzer
Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

It is our pleasure to announce the Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality 2011 – Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory, which will take place from June 21st to 28th, 2011 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The objective of the Summer Institute is to provide a platform for genuinely interdisciplinary research, bringing together young scholars from psychology, economics, biology, and philosophy. Its focus will be on the concept of “social rationality” – how rational behavior can emerge from simple heuristics that interact with a social environment. The goal is a deeper understanding of the way Homo sapiens forms decisions in an uncertain social world. Sharing knowledge across disciplines may well challenge the reigning assumptions in each.

Talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world are invited to apply by March 18th, 2011. 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.

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/