Archive for April, 2016

Averages Aren’t What They Used to Be and Never Were

Friday, April 29th, 2016

Todd Rose, director of the “Mind, Brain, and Education” program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has written a brilliant and important new book titled The End of Average. In it he argues that our notion of average, when applied to human beings, is terribly misguided. The belief that variation can be summarized using […]

Tools for Smart Thinking

Tuesday, April 19th, 2016

This blog entry was written by Nick Desbarats of Perceptual Edge. In recent decades, one of the most well-supported findings from research in various sub-disciplines of psychology, philosophy and economics is that we all commit elementary reasoning errors on an alarmingly regular basis. We attribute the actions of others to their fundamental personalities and values, […]

Critique to Learn

Monday, April 4th, 2016

We review published research studies for several reasons. One is to become familiar with the authors’ findings. Another is to provide useful feedback to the authors. I review infovis research papers for several other reasons as well. My primary reason is to learn, and this goal is always satisfied—I always learn something—but the insights are […]