Betsy Knowles, Economics, one of six UWL faculty members selected for the 2016 Eagle Teaching Excellence Award.

Eagle Teaching Excellence Award winners announced.

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Symposium on Operations and Economics of Competitive Sports Teams

Monday, April 11, 2016

UWL Graff Main Hall Auditorium

Featuring: Oliver Luck, NCAA Executive Vice President Regulatory Affairs

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Simple Rules

Some simple rules to follow for data visualizations.

What Not To Do

A great example of how not to design and deliver a presentation. In this commercial Microsoft demonstrates why they suck, or at the very least why their Ad Agency sucks.

Reasoning in Economics

Here is a discussion about behavioral econ, psych, and inductive versus deductive reasoning. It is wonderful throughout.

Dan Ariely and Qualtrics

An interesting interview with Dan Ariely in part about his use of surveys. Particularly interesting for students in Behavioral Econ and BUS 230. From the interview:

WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR MARKET RESEARCHERS?


What people do is not what they say. In general, most of our findings suggest that we should not think very highly of focus groups.


I suspect that many market research companies use focus groups because they want a statement to put in a PowerPoint presentation for a client. But the problem is that what people say doesn’t always reflect what they think or, even more important, the reasons for their actions.


SO, THE QUESTION IS, WHAT SHOULD YOU ASK?


You can ask people what they have done, or what they think they will do in the future. They can answer those questions. But, the moment you get into reasons, into why, interpreting their answers as correct becomes much more tricky.


It is also important to ask about categories that are ones which people can accurately quantify. The more concrete your response scale is, the more likely people are to answer your questions in an informative way.


HOW WOULD YOU RECOMMEND RESEARCHERS USE SCALES?


Take the question, “How often have you done X?”


If you create a scale from “very rarely” to “very frequently”, that’s not as useful as offering, “2 times last week” or “3 times last week”.


The more concrete you get, the more people feel inclined to answer accurately and honestly.


ANY MORE ADVICE ON HOW TO USE SCALES?


Often people use a 5-point response scale, but we find most people have an aversion to the extremes. This means that when we use a 5-point scale, effectively we are using a 3-point scale. That makes our sensitivity of our measurement less useful.


I would encourage researchers to think whether people will have that extreme aversion, and if that is the case, to have more levels. A continuous scale with just 2 anchors in the extremes in such cases is ideal.

Statistics

Statistical Zombies and other misleading statements often made. Good quick read.

World Statistics Day

In case you missed it, yesterday - 20/10/2010 - was World Statistics Day.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: BP Edition.

BP is busted lying with charts.

Order Bias

A great example of order bias in survey questions.

Wisconsin=Beer

The Beer Belly of America.

The clustering was so apparent that we wanted to check how it compared to the "official" data on this activity. So we gathered 2007 Census Country Business Pattern on the number of establishments listed in NACIS code 722410 (Drinking places (alcoholic beverages)) and divided by Census estimates for state population totals for 2009 and found remarkable correspondence with our data.

On average there are 1.52 bars for every 10,000 people in the U.S. but the states that make up the beer belly of America are highly skewed from this average.

Good Advice

Useful Posts

Here are a few posts that BUS 230 students should find useful over the coming weeks.

Nancy Duarte on "Creating Waves" in presentations.

Seth Godin on making graphs that work.

Garr Reynolds on the art of the "Focal Point" and the art of "Less" in presentation design.

And two on the value of data visualization. Here and here.

Working in Groups

Some advice from the Harvard Business Publisher on working in groups. This is probably good reading for anyone in BUS 230.

The best approach is to go to the source — speak with your colleague directly. This conversation should take place in an informal, private setting and you should always follow good feedback rules. Don't accuse or blame your colleague. Use concrete examples to explain what you are seeing and its impact on you.

Richard Hackman, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard Business School and author of Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances says, "We tend to attribute what's going wrong to an individual and specifically to something dispositional about them." This is dangerous because you are then attacking a person — not their behavior. Most importantly, to establish a common ground with your colleague, discuss the issue in context of mutual goals. "You want to ask 'What can we do to achieve our goals?' not 'You screwed up again,'" Hackman says.

Autism, Vaccination and Ethical Research

This appears to be another blow for those that think there is a causal link between the two. This is sure to be a classic example of alleged unethical behavior.

THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.

However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

Visualizing Store Openings

A dynamic map, plotting the openings of Target and another of Walmart openings. Both chains clearly have very different geographic strategies.

Visualizing the Election

CNN and other news outlets would have you believe this is still a divided country with red states and blue states.

But a better visualization would shade the areas based not upon who won the state, but by the degree to which they won the state. And the states themselves shouldn't be represented as a function of their geographic size, but rather the size of their population. Here we have just such a picture, and its clear, we are all purple now. More can be found here.

Visualization

Lisa points to an excellent visualization from the New York Times. However, it could have been improved. Eager Eyes has some suggestions.

Problem Definition

I stumbled upon this quote from Bertrand Russell:

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

Bertrand Russell
British author, mathematician, & philosopher (1872 - 1970)

It's why we spend so much time on Problem Definition in BUS 230.

Reading Research

The New York Times has a great Health related section this week.  In particular they have this graphic, which details how to read (skeptically) medical research.  Its good advice for reading all kinds of research.