Two posts ago we showed you the digit sound system for remembering numbers. This week we provide two computer programs to help you create mnemonics.
A famous finance professor once told us that good diversification meant holding everything in the world. Fine, but in what proportion? Suppose you could invest in every country in the world. How much would you invest in each? In a market-capitalization weighted index, you'd invest in each country in proportion to the market value of...
Via the support of Springer, probability and statistics societies are launching a specialised wiki called StatProb. It operates as a wiki in that authors can submit short articles on any topic, with further co-authors joining in later to improve those articles, but with the contents guaranteed via the filter of an...
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?...
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....
READ TEXT FILES, RUN MODELS The Decision Science News R video tutorials continue with number 2. (If you missed that last one, you will want to watch R Video Tutorial Number 1 first.) The Goldstein pedometer dataset can be downloaded from http://www.dangoldstein.com/flash/Rtutorial2/pedometer.csv Topics covered this week include: Tricking R into starting in your working directory Reading in...