The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directiv...

Maximizing data information requires careful selection, termed design, of the points at which data are observed. Experimental design is reviewed here for broad classes of data collection and analysis problems, including: fractioning techniques based on orthogonal arrays, Latin hypercube designs and their variants for computer experimentation, efficient design for data mining and machine learnin...

An image is never noise free. Visual inspection of a part from its image is therefore affected by image errors. Understanding how image errors affect measurement precision is therefore critical for accurate inspection. In this paper, we lay out a statistical framework that allows to explicitly handle image errors and characterize their impact on measurement precision. A hierarchical model is al...

Economic theory provides a great deal of information about demand models. Specifically, theory can dictate many relationships that expenditure and price elasticities should fulfill. Unfortunately, analysts cannot be certain whether these relationships will hold exactly. Many analysts perform hypothesis tests to determine if the theory is correct. If the theory is accepted then the relationships...

Seeding influential social network members is crucial for the success of a viral marketing campaign and product diffusion. In line with the assumption that connections between customers in social networks are binary (either present or absent), previous research has generally recommended seeding network members who are well-connected. However, the importance of connections between customers vari...

Amethodology is developed to add runs to existing supersaturated designs. The technique uses information from the analysis of the initial experiment to choose the best possible follow-up runs. After analysis of the initial data, factors are classified into one of three groups: primary, secondary, and potential. Runs are added to maximize a Bayesian D-optimality criterion to increase the informa...

Rothman and Thomas' intervention research (IR) paradigm provides an alternative, developmental research method that is appropriate for practice research, especially at the early stages. It is more flexible than conventional experimental designs, capitalizes on the availability of small samples, accommodates the dynamism and variation in practice conditions and diverse populations, and explicitl...

This research provides an optimal design of structural parameters for ring-die granulators used in the cool briquetting process. Experimental research on the briquetting rate of pellets was carried out for three kinds of crop straws with different granularities, moisture ratios, and lengthdiameter ratios of the die hole. Results showed that: when the swoop angle β was 45 and the diameter ratio ...

This paper examines the collaborative activities of radiology practitioners, designers and fieldworker/researchers in a work practice oriented multiparty design intervention organised in connection to an experimental teleradiology project. Through an example of image comparison in radiologists' image interpretation the participants can be seen to co-construct shared understandings of radiology ...