Conventional wisdom says that voter participation in closely contested elections is higher because of the inherent competitiveness. The logic is that people feel that their vote could be decisive in a close election and hence more turn out to vote. But is that really true? Ron Shachar has crunched the numbers from three Presidential elections using some advanced statistical analysis and says that the answer is a bit more complicated than that.
First, did you even know such a thing existed? I know of all kinds of engineering, but this was new to me. Okay, so it is not really engineering. Here people tinker with the menu in a restaurant to help maximize profits. But it is quite interesting and you often get to see the results as a restaurant customer.
Here is a nice article on the subject. If you enjoy dining out, you may want to read this article.
The menu engineer mentioned (Gregg Rapp) can be found here.
Steven Strogatz is here to help you out. Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. Every Monday he writes a column in the NY Times to explain math in very straight forward terms. Many of us have math phobias and this is a great opportunity to learn from a great mathematician and teacher. He has used his talents in other areas with public radio appearances and DVD’s aimed at helping people understand math.
From PhD Comics (stands for Piled Higher and Deeper). I especially love the interviewer in the second panel.
Saw this first on Andrew Gelman's blog.
One of the painful experiences of my life occurred in early 1991 when I was a student at SUNY in Buffalo, New York. The Buffalo Bills were in their first Super Bowl playing the New York Giants and the game was down to the last seconds. Trailing 20-19 the Bills depended on their kicker Scott Norwood to kick a 47 yard field goal to win it all. I was one of those who was crushed when the kick sailed wide right by a yard. That was perhaps their best chance even though they went back to the Super Bowl (count ‘em) three more times and lost each one.
The question I have is would they have been more likely to win if that game was played today?
Let’s say, like me, you love movies like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Even if you don’t love them, you like them enough but find all the characters and their interactions confusing. If only there was a picture that explained all the connections, you say, it would be so much easier to follow the threads and really get into the spirit of the movies. In other words, could someone take all that data and help us visualize it? That’s exactly what the folks at xkcd.com have done.
It is known that one way to become more creative is to shift one’s perspective.The best selling author of The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown, is said to hang upside down with gravity boots to help shift his perspective for the creativity needed in his novels. Travel is another helpful method for shifting perspective. There is now some new research to show that distance can be helpful in making a person more creative. But the research has an important and interesting qualifier.
The marketing author and blogger Seth Godin has done something interesting. He has compiled the thoughts of many leading thinkers of the day in a book called What Matters Now. What is unique about that? Firstly, each person has contributed a mini-essay which is often well short of a page. So reading it is very easy. Secondly, there is diverse mix of people not just other marketers, so you hear an interesting variety of thoughts.
See if this sounds familiar. You and three other friends have gone to a nice restaurant for dinner. The waiter passes the menus around and you are eyeing the pork chops in some kind of fancy glazed sauce. The lamb chops sound nice too, but your preference is clearly for the pork chops. The waiter is going around the table taking orders. Your good friend who is ordering just before you goes for the pork chops. You hear that and decide to order the lamb chops because you don’t want to get the same thing your friend got. Sound familiar? Why does this happen? Why didn’t you choose your favorite dish? Do other people act this way? That’s what Dan Ariely and Jonathan Levav asked themselves. As researchers of consumer behavior, they are well qualified to search for the answer.
The unemployment rate (currently at 10.2%) is one of the most talked about statistics. It’s a number for the nation as a whole. But there are significant differences between various subgroups. The graphics department at the NY Times has created a neat visualization of the data. Take a look.
