Publications by dan
R gets some -E-S-P-E-C-T
NEW YORK TIMES STORY ON THE APPEAL OF R (click to view movie) It is no secret that Decision Science News is crazy about the R language for statistical computing. Find out why R is so great in this New York Times article. Then start to teach yourself R with our short series of video tutorials. Decision Science News R Video Tutorial Number 1 Deci...
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Sorry, you said you want a stats revolution?
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 wh...
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Your flight is moving …
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...
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Score with scoring rules
INCENTIVES TO STATE PROBABILITIES OF BELIEF TRUTHFULLY We have all been there. You are running an experiment in which you would like participants to tell you what they believe. In particular, you’d like them to tell you what they believe to be the probability that an event will occur. Normally, you would ask them. But come on, this is 2009. Ar...
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Get at least 12 observations before making a confidence interval?
GET CONFIDENT ABOUT YOUR INTERVALS Decision Science News is happy with its purchase of Statistical Rules of Thumb by Gerald van Belle many years ago. It’s full of examples in which math can surprise. The first example in the book is titled “use at least 12 observations in constructing a confidence interval”. When people first hear this th...
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Tipping heuristics
INCREDIBLY SIMPLE CALCULATIONS MADE SIMPLE Yes, we all know how to calculate 15% or 20% exactly, but it’s fun to use tipping heuristics and even more fun to make crowded graphs of how they compare to each other. (Sorry for the junky chart. Open for suggestions, in the words of Tom Waits.) Here are a few tipping heuristics compared to a 15% bas...
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You won, but how much was luck and how much was skill?
THE ABILITY OF WINNERS TO WIN AGAIN Even people who aren’t avid baseball fans (your DSN editor included) can get something out of this one. When two baseball teams play each other on two consecutive days, what is the probability that the winner of the first game will be the winner of the second game? [If you like fun, write down your predicti...
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Tuesday’s child is full of probability puzzles
COUNTERINTUITIVE PROBLEM, INTUITIVE REPRESENTATION Blog posts about counterintuitive probability problems generate lots of opinions with a high probability. Andrew Gelman and readers have been having a lot of fun with the following probability problem: I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys? ...
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Baseball, basketball, and (not) getting better as time marches on
PROS ARE NOT GETTING BETTER AT FREE THROWS Rick Larrick recently told Decision Science News that baseball players have been getting better over the years in a couple ways. First, home runs and strikeouts have increased. The careless or clueless reader might note that this is curious, for from the batter’s perspective home runs are a good thing...
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Maps without map packages
LATITUDE + LONGITUDE + OVERPLOTTING FIX = MAPS Decision Science News is always learning stuff from colleague, physicist, mathlete, and all-around computer whiz Jake Hofman. Today, it was a quick and clean way to make nice maps in R without using any map packages: just plot the latitude and longitude of your data points (e.g. web site visitors) a...
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