I wanted to supplement yesterday’s post on Super Freakonomics with another interesting book I’m reading, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. The book uses neuroscience discoveries to illuminate how the human mind makes decisions as well as how decisions can be improved.

Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional . . . But as scientists break open the mind’s black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they’re discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason.

The book uses examples of airline pilots, football quarterbacks, military intelligence, gamblers, fire fighters, television executives, serial killers, and others to show how recent scientific research points to decisions being made through a complex argument that occurs at a chemical level within our brains, sometimes within our control and sometimes not. The book is extremely readable avoiding excessive medical and technical terms. Lehrer takes us through how people actually make decisions in a variety of situations.

The book discusses what is a relatively new field, one where we do not have a complete unified theory of all the processes that take place. Irrationality in decision making has always interested me. This book does a great job explaining where this irrationality comes from as well as presenting how decision making can be improved.

If you’re going to take only one idea away from this book, take this one: Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making and the kind of thought process it requires. . . . The best way to make sure that you are using your brain properly is to study your brain at work, to listen to the argument inside your head.

If there is any criticism of the book it is the lack of a comprehensive summary or integration of the many contradictory findings that are in the literature.

I’m about halfway through an excellent new book from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. The book is fantastic.

From the Introduction:

Many of life’s decisions are hard. . . . For one, the stakes are high. There’s also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don’t get much practice making them.

What I love about this book, and the earlier book, Freakonomics, is that statistics are used to show the disparity between what appears to be true and what we believe to be true. The theme of both books is:

People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences.

The book is written in an extremely approachable manner. The stories are entertaining and thought provoking.

I was lucky enough to hear Stephen Dubner speak at a conference about 2 years ago. In the speech, he told a riveting story about capuchin monkeys. It is a story I love to retell. I was excited to see that this has been included in the new book. It is worth the price of the whole book.

The story revolves around a researcher who asks the question: “What would happen if I could teach a bunch of monkeys to use money?” The monkeys were taught to exchange a one-inch silver disc with a hole in the middle for treats (jello, apples, and later grapes). Whenever the “coin” was exchanged, the monkey would get a treat. The monkeys learned this trick.

Next, the monkeys learned to “buy” their preferred treat when presented with multiple options. Different monkeys showed preferences for different treats.

Price shocks were then introduced. All of a sudden, the coins starting “buying” more or less treats than previously, two cubes of jello instead of three. When their favorite treat became more expensive, the monkeys reduced the amount they purchased. They increased the amount they bought when the prices fell. Monkeys respond to discounts – it’s amazing.

Image Credit: NaturalLight

The experiment was changed to test irrational behavior. Two gambling experiments were set up, both resulting in the monkeys getting the same amount of grapes. In one situation, the monkey would see one grape, but based on a coin flip could get a second grape. In the other situation, the monkey would see two grapes, but based on a coin flip could lose one of the grapes.

The monkeys demonstrated “loss aversion”. They preferred the opportunity to win an extra grape versus the risk of losing a grape. Rational behavior would show no preference. The monkeys acted like people.

One day, a monkey went into the testing room and instead of exchanging the coins for treats, he grabbed all the coins and threw them into the communal cage and then ran out of the testing chamber after the coins – perhaps, the first monkey bank robbery!!

The researchers couldn’t get the coins back from the monkeys as the monkeys had learned they had value. The researchers needed to bribe the monkeys to get the coins back, exchanging treats for the coins. Aha, the monkeys learned that crime pays!!

One of the monkeys gave his stolen coin to a female monkey instead of exchanging the coin for food.

After a few seconds of grooming – bam! – the two capuchins were having sex.

What Chen [the researcher] had seen wasn’t altruism at all, but rather the first instance of monkey prostitution in the recorded history of science.

And then, just to prove how thoroughly the monkeys had assimilated the concept of money, as soon as the sex was over . . . the capuchin who’d received the coin promptly brought it over to Chen to purchase some grapes.

The book is filled with these kind of stories. It is a fantastic read. As someone who works to help people make better decisions based on quantitative data, it is phenomenal insight into how people think and make decisions. I couldn’t recommend this book more.

A new web service, VisualSport, came to my attention today. It looks like the service is still under development, but below is the comparison between two football (soccer) players.

From the About page:

Welcome to VisualSport, the revolution in living sport. VisualSport has been created to help people to enrich their sport experience: it will start using interactive sharable visualizations. What you are now using is just a simple demo of what VisualSport will really be in upcoming monthes [sic]

Typos aside (I do not think the person who wrote their About page is a native English speaker), I think the visualization shows a lot of promise. I do think it serves as an example of poor measure labeling. I had trouble figuring out what the site’s purpose was.

The name VisualSports suggests coverage of multiple sports, but I believe, so far, it is focused on football (soccer). From the home page: “High Quality Stats: Access to full football data archives about the Champions League and the Italian tournament and enhance your knowledge.” The link to the preview states: “Analyze with the ViSpo Compare the performances of two of the “Champions League” or “SerieA” players!”

As an American, football to me means tackle football played with a pigskin, actually a prolate spheroid, versus a round ball. I do not know what the Champions League or the Italian tournament is. So obviously, I’m outside of their intended audience.

That aside, when you look at the visualization, better labeling would enhance understanding, see below. I have trouble understanding what is measured here. I find the color coding effective and the display is great. I just don’t know what the measure graphed is.

Below is another example. I’m not familiar with the measures in the display: presence, offense, defense, correctness, and gameplay. It would be helpful to have links to definitions of these data. Moreover, I’m not sure what the measures on the radial graph represent. What are the units of these measures? What is behind the stars measures?

In the General Stats display, the measures do not include units. The reader must infer. Additionally, the scale, range, or actual value is not shown. You can see that the right player passes more than the left player, but there is no indication of order of magnitude. Since each of the measures is probably at a different scale, labeling of scale and units would be helpful.

I think the heatmap included is amazing.

A legend showing what the coloration represents would help. I’m amazed that this information exists – what part of the field various players touch the ball. Fantastic.

In general, I find this display really interesting, with a lot of promise, especially if the labeling is improved.

What do you think?

Nice visualization of semantic information. The charts above show the interactions of characters during major plot events. The horizontal axis is time and the vertical groupings indicate which characters are together at various times and events. The infographic was created by Randall Munroe from XKCD.

via Fast Company via Infosthetics

Have you ever wondered where the lowest or highest unemployment is, where cancer rates are the highest, or specific statistical information collected about your community?

I came across an interesting web site today: This We Know.

Our mission is to present the information the U.S. government collects about every community. By publishing this data in an easy to understand and consistent manner, we seek to empower citizens to act on what’s known.

In this first phase of development, we focused on a handful of nationwide data sets from six different agencies in the data.gov catalog. We picked data sets that each had a spatial component. All the data sets were converted to RDF and loaded into a RDF database that serves as the foundation for this website.

This website’s ambitious goal is to model all of the data in data.gov and make it accessible using Semantic Web Standards. The homepage allows you to search for geographic areas. When I entered the area around my home, most of the data available revolved around factory and pollutant data.

I’d love to hear your results.

As usual, an excellent infographic from GOOD Magazine.

Every country in the world approaches health care differently, but the end goal is the same: Keep citizens as healthy as possible at the lowest cost . . . This is a look at 12 countries around the world that examines how far the money they spend on health care goes toward affecting the health of their citizens.

This infographic is just teaming teeming with excellent information:

• Life expectancy in years
• Maternal mortality deaths (per 100K live births)
• Infant mortality deaths (per 1K live births)
• Noncommunicable-disease-related deaths (per 100K pop)
• Cardiovascular deaths (per 100K pop)
• Cost per capita of healthcare
• % of GNP spent on health care.

There is a lot that is good about this infographic. I don’t understand the scale on the right hand side of the figure that is 72 – 82. I think it has something to do with life expectancy, but I couldn’t tell.

I think it might be equally interesting to look at each of the pieces of data by country. A lot of data is presented clearly in this graphic.

The Book of Odds shows odds on everyday things.

For over three years we have been building what we believe is the missing dictionary, one filled not with words, but with numbers – the odds of everyday life. It contains hundreds of thousands of Odds Statements, from the odds of being the only one to survive a plane crash, to the odds of having a heart attack, to the odds of having ever eaten cold pizza for breakfast. Book of Odds not only allows you to search for those odds that concern or interest you the most, but also to understand probability by comparing the odds of unfamiliar events to others you have personally experienced. Book of Odds was built for you, and we hope you’ll enjoy it.

The odds can be viewed through a visual browser where nodes are dimensions of semantic statements and nodes are the actual statements. It is interesting.

Chart Porn is frequently the first place I see new visualizations. Here is a collection of 5 recent infographics that caught my attention.

2010 Ski Resort Guide

Master the Past: Time Machine Reference Page

Your Brain on God

AP Economic Stress Map

Instrumental Range

I saw this visualization at Cool Infographics back in the summer, and it has stuck in my mind.

The visualization first appeared on SignalTheorist.com.

Now here’s something interesting, I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it’s thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it’s cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!

I think this is an extremely effective visualization – clear and easy to understand.

Image Credit: rogilde

Great article over at Flowing Data listing 30 resources that will help you find data. The sources are broken into several categories:

• Universities
• News Sources
• Geographic Data
• Sports
• World
• Government and Politics
• General Sources
• API’s

Make sure to check out the comments for additional data sources suggested by readers.