How Academics Can Help People Make Better Decisions Concerning Global Poverty

On judgment and judgmentalism: how counselling can make people better.

Counsellors, like other members of the caring professions, are required to practise within an ethical framework, at least in so far as they seek professional accreditation. As such, the counsellor is called upon to exercise her moral agency. In most professional contexts this requirement is, in itself, unproblematic. It has been suggested, however, that counselling practice does present a probl...

The recurrent clubfoot: can gait analysis help us make better preoperative decisions?

UNLABELLED Gait patterns in children with recurrent clubfoot are often associated with more or less subtle factors contributing to the patterns, such as tibial torsion that might not be detected by visual observation and therefore not considered in a treatment plan. We therefore used gait analysis to elucidate the contributions to recurrent clubfoot deformity and to determine whether gait analy...

How can mariculture better help feed humanity?

Citation: Olsen Y (2015) How can mariculture better help feed humanity? Front. Mar. Sci. 2:46. The primary production of the marine and the terrestrial domains are similar, ∼49 and 56 Gt C year −1 , respectively (Field et al., 1998), and the marine primary production must likely be more readily available for grazing animals because it is primarily in the form of unicellular phytoplankton. We ha...

RACTICE Make Better Decisions

Helping people make better decisions using optimal gamification

Game elements like points and levels are a popular tool to nudge and engage students and customers. Yet, no theory can tell us which incentive structures work and how to design them. Here we connect the practice of gamification to the theory of reward shaping in reinforcement learning. We leverage this connection to develop a method for designing effective incentive structures and delineating w...