Finding health statistics: making a difficult task easier

Making sense of health statistics.

a Hardnig Center for Risk Literacy, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany. Correspondence to Gerd Gigerenzer (e-mail: [email protected]). Many physicians, patients, health journalists and politicians do not understand health statistics. Yet we make little effort to educate our children in statistical thinking or our medical students in und...

Is Statistics Too Difficult? Is Statistics Too Difficult?

By means of several historical examples, it is shown that it does not appear to be easy to build bridges between rigorous mathematics and reasonable data{analytic procedures for scientiic measurements. After mentioning of both some positive and some negative aspects of statistics, a formal framework for statistics is presented which contains the concept formation, derivation of results, and int...

Making Life Easier for Firefighters

Being a firefighter is a tough job, especially when tight city budgets do not allow enough firefighters to be on duty when a fire starts. This is formalized in the Firefighter problem, which aims to save as many vertices of a graph as possible from a fire that starts in a vertex and spreads through the graph. In every time step, a single additional firefighter may be placed on a vertex, and the...

Dummy Elimination: Making Termination Easier

Making Even Swaps Even Easier

This paper introduces an approach to support different phases of the Even Swaps process by Preference Programming, which is a framework for modeling incomplete information within multiattribute value theory. In the approach, the Even Swaps process is carried out as usual, but in parallel the preferences of the decision maker are modeled with a Preference Programming model, which is also updated...