Todd Suomela's Library tagged measurement →  View Popular, Search in Google

Though more advanced in execution, today’s electronic nudges and tweaks are identical in purpose: use what you can control to affect what you can’t. The simple elegance of this concept flips on its head Chomsky’s suggestion that behavior modification treats people as if they were no more intelligent than animals. What distinguishes our intellect from animals’ is not that we can go against our environment—most of us can’t, not in the long run—but rather that we can purposefully alter our environment to shape our behavior in ways we choose.

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"If you skim Sunlight’s findings, and bring to them a sporting quotient of party prejudice, you might conclude that Republicans are, say, “idiots” and Democrats are, oh, “showoffs.” To use the pre-K-level idiom preferred by the biased twerp in each of us.

If, however, you listen to a sampler of speeches by various congresspeople at a range of oration grade levels, you might find something completely different."

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"The aim of this book is to help the reader to better understand how to use economic statistics in general and OECD statistics in particular. It introduces the main concepts used by statisticians and economists to measure economic phenomena and provides tables and charts with relevant data. Moreover, the book describes how the production of international statistics is organised, who are the main data producers, what are the main databases available over the Internet and how can the quality of statistics be assessed."

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"The nonprofit, nonpartisan State of the USA is preparing - in concert with the National Academy of Sciences - to support a Key National Indicator System by publishing a free website to provide every American with a single place to track progress across a range of national concerns, as determined by independent polling and research as well as expert and public input."

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"Out of the carnage of the Great Depression and World War II rose the idea of gross domestic product, or GDP: the ultimate measure of a country's overall welfare, a window into an economy's soul, the statistic to end all statistics. Its use spread rapidly, becoming the defining indicator of the last century. But in today's globalized world, it's increasingly apparent that this Nobel-winning metric is too narrow for these troubled economic times. "

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"Public and policy discussions of higher education over the course of the twentieth century have focused on one issue in particular: access. "

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"Recent years have seen increasing encouragement by research institutions and funding bodies for scientists to actively engage with the public, who ultimately finance their work. Animal behaviour as a discipline possesses several features, including its inherent accessibility and appeal to the public, that may help it occupy a particularly successful niche within these developments. It has also established a repertoire of quantitative behavioural methodologies that can be used to document the public's responses to engagement initiatives. This kind of assessment is becoming increasingly important considering the enormous effort now being put into public engagement projects, whose effects are more often assumed than demonstrated. Here we report our first attempts to quantify relevant aspects of the behaviour of a sample of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who pass through the ‘Living Links to Human Evolution Research Centre’ in Edinburgh Zoo. This University research centre actively encourages the public to view ongoing primate research and associated science engagement activities. Focal follows of visitors and scan sampling showed substantial ‘dwell times’ in the Centre by common zoo standards and the addition of new engagement elements in a second year was accompanied by significantly increased overall dwell times, tripling for the most committed two thirds of visitors. Larger groups of visitors were found to spend more time in the Centre than smaller ones. Viewing live, active science was the most effective activity, shown to be enhanced by novel presentations of carefully constructed explanatory materials. The findings emphasise the importance and potential of zoos as public engagement centres for the biological sciences."

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"AAC&U develops and advances assessment practices that deepen, integrate, and demonstrate student learning, through advocacy of learning-centered assessment policies, support for campus work to develop meaningful assessment approaches, and experimentation with common e-portfolio frameworks. Through its ground-breaking national initiative, VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education), AAC&U has worked with faculty and assessment expert teams across the country to develop a set of 15 rubrics through which institutions can evaluate cross-cutting capacities students develop across courses and programs. More than 2000 institutions are currently using VALUE rubrics as part of their assessment plans. AAC&U "

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Donner: Quantified Mind is a web application that allows users to track the variation in their cognitive functions under different conditions, using cognitive tests that are based on long-standing principles from psychology, but adapted to be repeatable, short, engaging, automatic and adaptive.

The goal is to make cognitive optimization an exact science instead of relying on subjective feelings, which can be deceiving or so subtle that they are hard to interpret. Quantified Mind allows fun and easy self-experimentation and data analysis that can lead to actionable conclusions.

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But possibly no longer. Next week, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is meeting in Geneva, and one of the items on its agenda is the abolition of the leap second. If the assembled delegates vote in favour, then the next leap second (which will be added one second before midnight on June 30th, causing clocks set to UTC to display 23:59:59 for two seconds instead of one) will be one of the last—and the answer to the question “what time is it?” will have ceased to have anything to do with the revolutions of the heavens.

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"Would people choose what they think would maximize their subjective well-being (SWB)? We present survey respondents with hypothetical scenarios and elicit both choice and predicted SWB rankings of two alternatives. While choice and predicted SWB rankings usually coincide in our data, we find systematic reversals. We identify factors - such as predicted sense of purpose, control over one’s life, family happiness, and social status - that help explain hypothetical choice controlling for predicted SWB. We explore how our findings vary by SWB measure and by scenario. Our results have implications regarding the use of SWB survey questions as a proxy for utility. "

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"In the midst of a steep recession, when it’s all too easy to fixate on dramatic, cyclical events, there’s real danger of losing sight of deeper trends. Strictly cyclical thinking risks discounting or even ignoring powerful forces of long-term change. To provide a clear, comprehensive, and sustained view of the deep dynamics changing our world, Deloitte's Center for the Edge has developed a Shift Index consisting of three indices and 25 metrics designed to make longer-term performance trends more relevant and actionable."

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"Gullibility is the principal cause of bubbles. Investors and the general public get snared by a “beautiful illusion” and throw caution to the wind. Attempts to identify and control bubbles are complicated by the fact that the authorities who might naturally be expected to take action have often (especially in recent years) been among the most gullible, and were cheerleaders for the exuberant behavior. Hence what is needed is an objective measure of gullibility."

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