Virtual kindergarten readiness programming for preschool-aged children: Feasibility, social validity, and preliminary impacts
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10409289.2021.1919041 We conducted the current study examining the feasibility, social validity, and preliminary impacts of a virtual summer learning program. Ninety-one preschoolers and their caregivers participated in a 4-week program involving one weekly teacher-caregiver meeting, two weekly Watch Together home learning activities, two weekly Play Together home learning activities, one...
The missing piece of the modern data stack
https://benn.substack.com/p/metrics-layer To see the problem, consider the journey that data follows to reach that dashboard. After being written into a warehouse (e.g., Snowflake) by an ingestion tool (e.g., Fivetran), data is updated by a transformation tool (e.g., dbt) several times, passing through a couple types of aggregations along the way:...
Predicting social tipping and norm change in controlled experiments
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/16/e2014893118.abstract The ability to predict when societies will replace one social norm for another can have significant implications for welfare, especially when norms are detrimental. A popular theory poses that the pressure to conform to social norms creates tipping thresholds which, once passed, propel societies toward an alternative state. Predicting...
Confidence intervals for policy evaluation in adaptive experiments
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e2014602118 https://github.com/gsbDBI/adaptive-confidence-intervals/ Adaptive experimental designs can dramatically improve efficiency in randomized trials. But with adaptively collected data, common estimators based on sample means and inverse propensity-weighted means can be biased or heavy-tailed. This poses statistical challenges, in particular when the experimenter would like to test hypotheses about parameters that were...
Casey’s Guide to Finding Product/Market Fit
https://caseyaccidental.com/caseys-guide-to-finding-product-market-fit/ The Quantitative Approach to Product/Market Fit So, for most businesses, instead of measuring satisfaction, measuring retention is the best signal of product/market fit. Measuring retention is pretty easy. Perform a cohort analysis, graph the curve over time and see if there is a flattening of the retention curve. As...
The 80/20 rule in data (and why it doesn't have to be that way)
https://blog.aula.education/the-80-20-rule-in-data-and-why-it-doesnt-have-to-be-that-way-7659f8456d8f, Kelly Burdine In just 3 months, my mighty data team of one was able to: Stand up a data warehouse in Snowflake with separate databases for raw data and production data including the automation of branch schemas for testing Create 50+ separate ingestion pipelines using Stitch and Fivetran Implement...
An experimental test of fundraising appeals targeting donor and recipient benefits
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01095-8 We partnered with Alaska’s Pick.Click.Give. programme to implement a statewide natural field experiment with 540,000 Alaskans designed to examine two of the main motivations for charitable giving: concerns for the benefits to self (impure altruism or ‘warm glow’) or concerns for the benefits to others (pure altruism). Our empirical...
Mass-scale emotionality reveals human behaviour and marketplace success
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01098-5 Online reviews promise to provide people with immediate access to the wisdom of the crowds. Yet, half of all reviews on Amazon and Yelp provide the most positive rating possible, despite human behaviour being substantially more varied in nature. We term the challenge of discerning success within this sea...
People systematically overlook subtractive changes
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y Improving objects, ideas or situations—whether a designer seeks to advance technology, a writer seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour—requires a mental search for possible changes1,2,3. We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea...
Brain activity foreshadows stock price dynamics
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/41/14/3266 Many try but fail to consistently forecast changes in stock prices. New evidence, however, suggests that anticipatory affective brain activity may not only predict individual choice, but also may forecast aggregate choice. Assuming that stock prices index collective choice, we tested whether brain activity sampled during the assessment of...
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a collection of excerpts from interesting research, blogs, events, etc...