Month: April 2015
The anchoring bias: The powerful pull of first impressions
In an early experiment by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, participants were asked to compute the product of a series of numbers in 5 secs. But in one group the series was ascending, 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 whereas in the other it was descending: ...
Do standing and treadmill desks benefit workers or improve productivity?
A systematic review was recently published in the journal Preventive Medicine. The authors looked at 23 studies involving a standing or treadmill walking intervention compared to regular seated desk work. Included studies examined a wide range of physiological (resting heart rate, blood pressure, total fasting cholesterol, fasting glucose, weight loss, etc) and psychological (work performance, mood states, ...
Pearson vs Spearman: Which should I use to test correlations?
The most commonly used method of assessing correlation is the Pearson Product Moment Correlation, more commonly (and easily) called Pearson’s r. It tests the degree to which two variables are linearly dependent on each other (i.e, correlated). Pearson’s r can take on a value from -1 to +1. An r = 0 means the two variables ...
Oral cancer screening
Today I was walking along a major street in Toronto and noticed a billboard advertising for a free oral cancer screening. In the ad they also point to estimates by the Canadian Cancer Society that about 4300 Canadians were diagnosed with oral cancer in 2014. So should one be advised to take the dentist up ...
What Apple’s ResearchKit means for research
This past Monday, amid the excitement surrounding the introduction of Apple’s new watch and an impossibly thin and light new MacBook computer, what got me most excited was the introduction of something called ResearchKit. The blandness of the name obscures the immense possibilities it makes possible. ResearchKit is Apple’s new software framework for developing health research ...
Information Intelligence 