Tracy Allison Altman

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1. Know someone who effectively promotes evidence? Nominations are open for the 2016 John Maddox Prize for Standing up for Science, recognizing an individual who promotes sound science and evidence on a matter of public interest, facing difficulty or hostility in doing so. Researchers in any area of science or engineering, or those who work...
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1. Spending $ on brain training isn’t so smart. It seems impossible to listen to NPR without hearing from their sponsor, Lumosity, the brain-training company. The target demo is spot on: NPR will be the first to tell you its listeners are the “nation’s best and brightest”. And bright people don’t want to slow down....
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1. Open Innovation can up your game. Open Innovation → Better Evidence. Scientists with an agricultural company tell a fascinating story about open innovation success. Improving Analytics Capabilities Through Crowdsourcing (Sloan Review) describes a years-long effort to tap into expertise outside the organization. Over eight years, Syngenta used open-innovation platforms to develop a dozen data-analytics...
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presentation science
1. Free beer for a year for anyone who can work perfume, velvety voice, and ‘Q1 revenue goals were met’ into an appropriate C-Suite presentation. Prezi is a very nice tool enabling you to structure a visual story, without forcing a linear, slide-by-slide presentation format. The best part is you can center an entire talk...
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1. Bad logic → Bad arguments → Bad decisions The Book of Bad Arguments is a simple explanation of common logical flaws / barriers to successful, evidence-based decisions. This beautifully illustrated work by Ali Almossawi (@AliAlmossawi) should be on everyone’s bookshelf. Now available in several languages. 2. Home visits for children → Lifelong benefits →...
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1. Mistakes we make when sharing insights. We’ve all done this: Hurried to share valuable, new information and neglected to frame it meaningfully, thus slowing the impact and possibly alienating our audience. Michael Shrage describes a perfect example, taken from The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, a fantastic book about analytics innovation. The...
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Scrabble analytics - Evidence Soup DATA FOR DECIDING
1. Poor kids already have grit: Educational Controversy, 2016 edition. All too often, we run with a sophisticated, research-based idea, oversimplify it, and run it into the ground. 2016 seems to be the year for grit. Jean Rhodes, who heads up the Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring (@UMBmentoring) explains that grit is not a panacea for...
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photo of girls playing baseketball
1. Do we judge women’s decisions differently? Cognitive psychologist Therese Huston’s book is How Women Decide: What’s True, What’s Not, and What Strategies Spark the Best Choices. It may sound unscientific to suggest there’s a particular way that several billion people make decisions, but the author doesn’t seem nonchalant about drawing specific conclusions. The book...
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magical thinking forest
1. Magical thinking about ev-gen. Rachel E. Sherman, M.D., M.P.H., and Robert M. Califf, M.D. of the US FDA have described what is needed to develop an evidence generation system – and must be playing a really long game. “The result? Researchers will be able to distill the data into actionable evidence that can ultimately...
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flower black-eyed susan
Three Ways of Getting to Evidence-Based Policy. In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Bernadette Wright (@MeaningflEvdenc) does a nice job of describing three ideologies for gathering evidence to inform policy. Randomista: Views randomized experiments and quasi-experimental research designs as the only reliable evidence for choosing programs. Explainista: Believes useful evidence needs to provide trustworthy data...
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Museum musings.

Pondering the places where people interact with artificial intelligence: Collaboration on evidence-based decision-making, automation of data-driven processes, machine learning, things like that.

Recent Articles

muscle car by bing/create
20 June 2023
Stolen cars and AI ‘moral self-correction’
person in silhouette with orange background, pondering AI input for an evidence based decision
9 May 2023
Can you trust AI with your next decision? Part 3 in a series on fact-checking/citation
image generated by bing image creator bottle on apothecary shelf
25 April 2023
How is generative AI referencing sources? Part 2 in our series
15 March 2023
Can AI replace your CEO?
reference to Google's Bard AI and Microsoft's Bing AI compared to conflict at Sopranos Bada Bing
28 February 2023
What’s state-of-the-art when an AI cites sources of evidence? Part 1 in our series