One question we get asked a lot is whether it's worth it to pre-pay for the tank of gas when renting a car. At first, blush it seems like something you should never do. In the best case, you pay market rate for gas, and in the worst case, you ... [Read more...]

We take on a reader question of whether the stadium / home team matters for making a field goal. We pulled up the data on every field goal since 2002 (over 10,000) of them and plotted the probability of scoring as a function of the stadium in which the field goal was kicked. ... [Read more...]

We looked at NFL punts before on Decision Science News. That's old news. Field goals are the new hotness, and Super Bowl Sunday is coming up, so let's look at a kicker's chances. We've taken the same data set and looked at a kicker's chances of getting the ball through ... [Read more...]

The site reddit told us about data on every single NFL (U.S. National Football League) play since 2002. We read it in and did an analysis of punting. The results are beautiful. The post Every NFL punt since 2002 appeared first on Decision Science News. [Read more...]

Microsoft Research NYC [ http://research.microsoft.com/newyork/ ] seeks outstanding applicants for 2-year postdoctoral researcher positions. We welcome applicants with a strong academic record in one of the following areas: * Computational social science: http://research.microsoft.com/cssnyc * Online experimental social science: http://research.microsoft.com/oess_nyc * Algorithmic economics ... [Read more...]

Microsoft Research NYC seeks outstanding applicants with strong quantitative and programming skills for a postdoctoral researcher position in the area of online experimental social science. Deadline for Full Consideration: January 11, 2013 The post Microsoft Research NYC seeks quants and programmers for a postdoc in online social science appeared first on Decision ... [Read more...]

Last week we posted a nice theory about daylight savings time, in particular, that its dates were chosen to reduce variance in the time of sunrise. It looked plausible from the graph. We were talking to our Microsoft Research colleague Jake Hofman who suggested "why don't you just find the ... [Read more...]

Last spring we looked at the state of the housing bubble in the US. The question of readers' minds then was "where is it going next"? It's been more than a year, so let's have a look, above. The post The housing bubble: Where are we? appeared first on Decision ... [Read more...]

Last week it was announced that Facebook is rotating its ads after a certain time of exposure. Sid Suri, Preston McAfee, and Dan Goldstein's research may have been the source of this idea. In 2011 and 2012 the trio published a couple papers putting for and improving the idea. The post Time-based ... [Read more...]

MENTALLY MULTIPLY NUMBERS BY THEMSELVES Assume you know your multiplication tables up to 10x10. Here's how to compute the squares of numbers from 11 to 100. [Read more...]

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. [Read more...]

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 ... [Read more...]

It is not uncommon to have two computers at work, four at home and a server out on the wild, wild internet (that's what we have, anyway ... wait, we forgot one in London). How to keep all these files in sync? Here are our file synchronization tips. [Read more...]

Benford's law is an amazing thing. If you know the probability distribution that classes of "natural" numbers should have, you can detect where people might be faking data: phony tax returns, bogus scientific studies, etc. [Read more...]

When estimating the cost of a bunch of purchases, a useful heuristic is rounding to the nearest dollar. (In fact, on US income tax returns, one is allowed to omit the cents). If prices were uniformly distributed, the following two heuristics would be equally accurate: * Rounding each item up or ... [Read more...]

Decision Science News is no stranger to misleading infographics in free New York newspapers. We could stop reading them entirely, but we find that playing "spot the infographic flaw" makes time fly on the subway. Recently we saw the above graphic in a paper called Metro. Can you spot the ... [Read more...]

This week the reader is directed to Messy Matters to read up on research conducted by Sharad Goel, Duncan Watts and Dan Goldstein in which they hunted for traces of "viral" diffusion on Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, and beyond. The results run counter to mainstream intuition. [Read more...]

Best graph ever. LARGEST EVER DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 328 and 327 SPOTTED IN NEW YORK CITY [Read more...]

The housing bubble by city. Miami sailed high and fell far. Detroit rose modestly and but dropped more than it went up. Dallas held steady. DC is enjoying a bit of renewed growth, but are in and New York yet to fall? [Read more...]

RESULTS OF THE GREAT AREA PLOT QUIZ If you are the type of reader who remembers things from last week, you may remember the great area plot quiz we had running. This week, we are excited to announce that the results are in. The plot above shows answers to the ... [Read more...]