My kids and I made a cube out of paper and hot glue because it seemed like a very Saturday December 20th thing to do

They make planes so big nowadays

There will soon be proctoring center franchises in which people will take tests, do job interviews, and complete paid surveys without access to AI. They'll be strategically placed so that most people will live within a short distance of a proctoring center.

Returning from Bielefeld. Pretty sure, but not positive, it exists.

We need better ways to tell computers and humans apart Article: The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Back in Germany after many years and the express train is 18 minutes late. So this is how it ends.

The original post above is missing a question mark. At least you know it wasn't AI generated!

Want to be an intern at Microsoft Research in the Computational Social Science group in NYC (Jake Hofman, David Rothschild, Dan Goldstein) Follow this link and do your thing! Deadline approaching soonish! apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...

Happy Friday to all who celebrate

A classmate of my 11-year-old daughter said he'd give her a pack of Sour Patch Kids if she could get his pedometer to 67,000. Enter the reciprocating saw.

In 2020, my friend @jasndoc.bsky.social wrote a fictional dialog between R and STATA. In 2023 I said in a few years AI could make it into a stunning movie with spoken parts. It's here. sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_692d0b8c...

Tom Stoppard always made me think. This quote above all.

It's the holidays and our 11-year-old is making her little cousins play the prisoners' dilemma

electoral districts should be determined by an algorithm with proven guarantees and it is cruel not to let the theoretical computer scientists design it because they have been waiting their whole lives for an opportunity like this

There's a joke in Germany that Bielefeld doesn't exist. I have evidence that it may not be a joke after all.

I don't usually fly Delta but when I do I wonder if it's called that because the flight is the delta between you and your destination

The Delta airlines boarding song is Despacito, which literally means slowly and is not how you want people to board a plane

So cool to see a bunch of present and past Microsoft Research NYC researchers' work in this keynote address

Before #MSFT offered "Facilitator" in Teams meetings, @dggoldst.bsky.social et al. developed something similar. People preferred their #statusQuo, but #AI facilitation - made people more open to both human and #LLM facilitation. - didn't seem to impact decisions More via doi.org/10.48550/arX...

Every hotel lamp should have three switches. The switch locations should be determined by pretests conducted in dark rooms. Each switch should reverse the light's state, independent of the other two switch positions.

Every time I come to Denver I can't believe how much space they have. It's like they took a city and scaled up all the streets and distances 150%.

Every few years I feel compelled to post about the best hotel hack ever, because every time I post about it, it turns out to be new to lots of folks …

Update your syllabus and stay on the frontier - it will increase your students’ wages. Epic work by my colleagues @barbarabiasi.com and @profsongma.bsky.social #linkoftheday www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/...

People say I don't impart enough useful advice so I want to share with you three red flags: 1. 🚩 2. 🚩 3. 🚩

I've been working on this with amazing colleagues at Harvard Business School and Microsoft: d3.harvard.edu/d3-and-micro...

Makers of pumpkin spice dish soap: just because you can doesn't mean you should

It's been 14 years and I wonder if the person in Call Me Maybe ever called.

Despite its flaws, AI is amazing

Magentic Marketplace is an open-source simulation environment for studying how AI agents interact and transact in digital markets. Its modular design lets researchers experiment with different market setups, agent behaviors, and system dynamics at scale. msft.it/6014tMvva

AI agents are transforming digital marketplaces, mediating discovery and transactions between consumers and businesses. The new Magentic Marketplace provides an open-source, extensible simulation environment for studying different agentic market designs: msft.it/6014tyz9q

Today's HotFresh recommended paper is: Yang, A. X., & Teow, J. (2025). Framing affects postdecision preferences through self-preference inferences (and probably not dissonance). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(2), 574–595. doi.org/10.1037/xge0...

I have an electric toothbrush that pulses every 30 seconds to let you know when to switch to another quadrant of your mouth. Number of times I have stood there obeying it for 2 minutes: 0

Today's HotFresh recommended paper is: Maier, M., Harris, A. J. L., Kellen, D., & Singmann, H. (2025). Decision making under extinction risk. Cognitive Psychology, 159. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Today's HotFresh recommended paper is: Duckworth et al (2025). A national megastudy shows that email nudges to elementary school teachers boost student math achievement, particularly when personalized. PNAS, 122(13), e2418616122. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Quick update from Peru The Incas somehow shaped rocks to have flat faces and precise angles so they fit together with no gaps. The top of the wall was reconstructed later and has big gaps. Some things get worse as time goes on.

Today's HotFresh recommended paper is: Naborn, J., & Bogard, J. E. (2025). EXPRESS: The Pick-the-Winner-Picker Heuristic: Preference for Categorically Correct Forecasts. Journal of Marketing Research. doi.org/10.1177/0022...

Today's HotFresh recommended paper is: Szaszi, B., Goldstein, D. G., Soman, D., & Michie, S. (2025). Generalizability of choice architecture interventions. Nature Reviews Psychology, 4(8), 518–529. doi.org/10.1038/s441...

You should apply to do an internship with us! - Make sure you attach a research statement (we don't consider anybody with no statement for interviews) - The application site will probably go down for a day or two on Nov 17, and the link may change jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...

Everywhere I go, the countries look different, but the shopping malls look strikingly similar. This is Lima, Peru.

I was just on the escalator behind a woman in a light pink jacket who was online shopping for a light pink jacket

kids tend to mess up problems like "what's the chance you'll roll at least one 6 if you roll a die 3 times". in this program, the ball rolls right if you roll a 6, left otherwise--so bins 2, 3, 4 are one or more sixes. You can avoid dealing with them by taking 1 minus the no 6s probability (bin 1)

They just killed NHANES. Every US public health student learns about this study. It’s given us all sorts of important knowledge about the health of Americans and they just ended it.

By @rfoucart.bsky.social

What does it mean to say you figured something out by yourself? We benefit from inheriting thousands of years of advances in mathematical notation, tools, and methods. 5,000 years ago nobody on earth would be able to figure out problems that today's schoolchildren can "figure out by themselves."

when kids are trying to understand something they use ai in smarter ways than we give them credit for

According to economist Thomas Schelling, if 2 strangers had to meet in NYC without planning, many would choose the info booth at Grand Central at 12:00 PM on January 1. At 8:38 PM on October 9th it was just me and the info booth guy.

🚨 Postdoctoral Research Economist positions at Microsoft Research New England or New York City 🚨 www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... Open to PhDs in econ-related fields (e.g. quant marketing, econ-CS). Seeking those with high collaboration potential with the team: www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

Repeating this prediction (that Susan Athey will win the Nobel) until I'm right.

Peanut butter contains no peas, no nuts, and no butter