62. Sharon Dunwoody, BA'69, PhD'78 (02:16)

Date:
2014
Main contributors:
Dunwoody, Sharon
Summary:
Sharon Dunwoody is the Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She retired in 2013 after more than 30 years of teaching science journalism and science communication. In her research, Dunwoody focuses on the construction of media science messages and on how people use those messages for various cognitive and behavioral purposes. She is author of numerous journal articles; has co-edited two volumes, Communicating Uncertainty and Scientists and Journalists; and is author of Reconstructing Science for Public Consumption. Her research career has garnered many awards, including the Paul J. Deutschmann Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The first woman to receive the award, she was nominated by professors emeriti David H. Weaver and G. Cleve Wilhoit, who lauded her ability to collaborate with noted scholars as well as strike out in new directions of her own. Dunwoody is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research and the Society for Risk Analysis. She has served twice as head of the section on General Interest in Science and Technology of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is former president of both the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Dunwoody has served as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Brazil, as a visiting journalism fellow at Deakin University in Australia and as Donnier Guest Professor at Stockholm University. A former award-winning science reporter for The Light in San Antonio, Texas, Dunwoody earned a master’s degree in mass communication from Temple University in 1975 in the years between her two IU degrees.

63. Simple Heuristics for a Complex World (1:43:32)

Date:
2014-03-27
Main contributors:
Gerd Gigerenzer
Summary:
Whom to marry? How to invest? Whom to trust? Complex problems require complex solutions – so we might think. And if the solution doesn’t work, we make it more complex. That recipe is perfect for a world of known risks, but not for an uncertain world, as the failure of the complex forecasting methods leading to the 2008 financial crisis illustrates. In order to reduce estimation error, good inferences under uncertainty counter-intuitively require ignoring part of the available information,. Less can be more. Yet although we face high degrees of uncertainty on a daily basis, most of economics and cognitive science deals exclusively with lotteries and similar situations in which all risks are perfectly known or can be easily estimated. In this talk, I invite you to explore the land of uncertainty, where mathematical probability is of limited value and people rely instead on simple heuristics, that is, on rules of thumb. We meet Homo heuristicus, who has been disparaged by many psychologists as irrational for ignoring information—unlike the more diligent Homo economicus. In an uncertain world, however, simple heuristics can be a smart tool and lead to even better decisions than with what are considered rational strategies. The study of heuristics has three goals. The first is descriptive: to analyze the heuristics in the “adaptive toolbox” of an individual or an institution. The second goal is normative: to identify the ecological rationality of a given heuristic, that is, the structures of environments in which it succeeds and fails. The third goal is engineering: to design intuitive heuristics such as fast-and-frugal trees that help physicians make better decisions.

69. The Failure of Altmetrics (58:56)

Date:
2014-11-12
Main contributors:
Sugimoto, Cassidy
Summary:
In this talk, Cassidy Sugimoto argues that altmetrics have failed to deliver on their promise. She discusses criticisms of altmetrics (including those dealing with validity and reliability issues), but argues that the largest failure of altmetrics has been the focus on a single genre‰ÛÓthat is, the journal article‰ÛÓand setting altmetrics up as an alternative to citations. Sugimoto introduces the notion of outcomes-based evaluation and demonstrates that altmetrics cannot be equated with outcomes in this model. She urges the community to rethink ways in which we can build metrics that can capture larger societal impact. She discusses four axes of potential impact: production, dissemination, engagement, assessment. In each of these, she reviews various examples of current initiatives and challenges the audience to conceive of possible metrics to capture the desired outcome in each scenario.