A remarkable point of view: Egon Brunswick's Lens Model

Vienna during the dawn of the 20th century was a remarkable place.

The list of residents - and their ideas - shaping the century is exhaustive.

The most knows: Freud and Hitler.

The known to the many: Edward Bernays, Peter Drucker, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Goedel, Artur Schnitzler, Robert Musil,... to mention a few important to me.

The Psychologist Egon Brunswick is a true maverik. Although only a small inner circle is aware of his work, he did some remarkable thinking.

Representative Design

Is a true theory how to to capture reality into your experimental setting

Ecological Validity is a theory how a subject's intepretation relates to real world

Vicarious Function is a true idea how this interpretation goes.

Probabilistic Functionalism is a scientific revolution, that could relieve us from the analytic trap: get rid of simplistic models.

Brunswick Lens Model has shown to predict better than experts the lens model was trained on. Thats a fascinating way: augmented intellect.


I will deepen my Brunswickan knowledge and share it on this blog
Read about current Brunswickian Research on http://www.albany.edu/cpr/brunswik/newsletters/2009news.pdf

How to search for a lost object

The joke goes, that a drunk searches for lost keys right under the street lightning, because there its easier. But how would a mathematican do it?


John Pina Craven found a lost nuclear bomb  in deep sea.
The method he applied was Bayesian search theory.
In 1866 a US B52 bomber exploded over Spain:

The aircraft and hydrogen bombs fell to earth near the fishing village of Palomares. [...] Three of the weapons were located on land within 24 hours of the accident—two had exploded on impact, spreading contaminated material while a third was found relatively intact in a riverbed. The fourth weapon could not be found despite an intensive search of the area—the only part that was recovered was the parachute tail plate, leading searchers to postulate that the weapon's parachute had deployed, and that the wind had carried it out to sea.

The search for the fourth bomb was carried out by means of a novel mathematical method, Bayesian search theory, led by Dr. John Craven. This method assigns probabilities to individual map grid squares, then updates these as the search progresses. Initial probability input is required for the grid squares, and these probabilities made use of the fact that a local fisherman, Francisco Simó Orts, popularly known since then as "Paco el de la bomba" ("Bomb Frankie"), witnessed the bomb entering the water at a certain location. Orts was contacted by the U.S. Air Force to assist in the search operation.

The method applied in one of the four areas identified as probable target [i]

Scoring, you doing it wrong

Business Schools all over the world seem to teach scoring methodologies.[i] Douglas W. Hubbard[ii] and L. Anthony Cox[iii] have shown that there are fundamental flaws in their application, thus they are valued by the authors as counterproductive. “All of them, without exception, are borderline or worthless. In practices, they may make many decisions far worse than they would have been using merely unaided judgments.”[iv] First I will present the case study of a seminar I attended where their arguments are applied and proven right, second (in a later article) I will present the case of a consumer test, where I propose that the design of scoring led not to “borderline or worthless” results.

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[i] This is anecdotal evidence: I encountered the practice frequently when attending seminars, trainings and workshops in the field

[ii] Hubbard 2009,  http://books.google.at/books?id=e0IoQJcn1-YC

[iii] Cox 2008,  http://www.risksociety.org.nz/file-uploads/risk%20matrix.pdf

[iv] Hubbard 2009, http://books.google.at/books?id=e0IoQJcn1-YC