Good Decisions Cannot Be Made From Bad Surveys

Why good leaders make bad decisions.

Decision making lies at the heart of our personal and professional lives. Yet the daunting reality is that enormously important decisions made by intelligent, responsible people with the best information and intentions are nevertheless hopelessly flawed at times. In part, that's due to the way our brains work. Modern neuroscience teaches us that two hard-wired processes in the brain--pattern re...

When a good fit can be bad.

How should we select among computational models of cognition? Although it is commonplace to measure how well each model fits the data, this is insufficient. Good fits can be misleading because they can result from properties of the model that have nothing to do with it being a close approximation to the cognitive process of interest (e.g. overfitting). Selection methods are introduced that fact...

Why Even Good Defenses May be Bad

Is cAMP good or bad? Depends on where it's made.

Endothelium of the vascular system forms a semipermeable barrier between blood and the interstitial space that serves to control and restrict the luminal to abluminal movement of water, plasma proteins, and other solutes.1 During inflammation, mediators such as thrombin, histamine, and platelet activating factor (PAF) induce vascular leakage defined as an increased endothelial permeability to p...

Good Abundances from Bad Spectra :

Stellar spectra derived from multiple-object bre-fed spectroscopic radial-velocity surveys, of the type feasible with, among other examples, AUTOFIB, 2dF, HY-DRA, NESSIE, and the Sloan survey, diier signiicantly from those traditionally used for determination of stellar abundances. The spectra tend to be of moderate resolution (around 1 A) and signal-to-noise ratio (around 10-20 per resolution ...