Handedness and ability at maths: evidence from Ireland

There is a great deal of interest both popularly and amongst scholars about whether cognitive ability is predicted by handedness. The literature contains many findings which cannot be simply summarized and there are many many myths. Evidence for Ireland has been non-existent, as far as I am aware, until now with the release of the Growing Up in Ireland data.
So what can we say? Below I plot the density of attainment at a maths test that the 8 year olds in GUI sat.
Sadly, if you are a ciotóg, you can see the distribution is shifted to the left - but not by much. The good news is that when you look at the distribution of reading ability, there is no difference at all.
In numerical terms, left-handers are about 8% of a standard deviation lower. By comparison girls are about 11.5% of one standard deviation lower.

Where do good ideas come from? - RSA Animate and Steven Johnson

Another gem from RSA Animate - Steven Johnson (science writer) on where good ideas come from.

Doing Surveys Online

Various ways of doing surveys online were discussed earlier this year on this blog. MMIC, Survey Gizmo and Lime Survey were all mentioned. MMIC™ (Multimode Interviewing Capability) is a comprehensive information system developed by the RAND Corporation. Survey Gizmo is similar to its competitor Survey Monkey, a package which people are most likely to be familar with. What makes Lime Survey different is that it is open-source, in other words completely free.

Recently, myself and Peter have been doing further research into different possibilities for doing surveys online. In particular, we wanted a package that would allow us to present feedback at the end of the survey, in a dashboard-type format, based on the answers provided by the survey repondent. We played around with various options, including:
(i) http://www.instantsurvey.com
(ii) http://www.vovici.com
(iii) http://www.mineful.com
(iv) http://www.keysurvey.com
(v) http://www.premiersurvey.com
(vi) http://www.zoomerang.com
(vii) http://www.unipark.info

However, our search came to an end when we found Qualtrics. As well as allowing a sophisticated feedback mechanism, Qualtrics has really useful "display option", "skip option" and randomisation features that can be used in the survey design. In the current survey-project that we have developed, we use the "display option" to ensure that a certain question only gets displayed if the respondent answers "Yes" to a previous (corresponding) question. In their own words, Qualtrics describe themselves as "easy enough for an intern and sophisticated enough for a Ph.D."

Draft Programme for November 23rd Session

Economics, Psychology and Neuroscience Third Annual One Day Session: UCD Research Building

10.00am - 10.30am

Martin Ryan (UCD)  "The Role of Economic Psychology and Non-Cognitive Skill in Students' Lecture Attendance and Academic Achievement"

10.30am - 11am

Liam Delaney (UCD)  "Automatic Enrollment and the Irish Pension System"

11am - 11.20am: Coffee

11.30am - 12pm

Cormac O'Dea (IFS and UCL). "Cognitive Ability and Retirement Savings"

12pm - 12.30pm

Marie Briguglio (University of Malta). "Voluntary Pro-Environmental Behaviour".

1230pm - 1pm

Michael Daly(TCD) "How income relates to life satisfaction and daily emotional experience: Evidence from the American Life Panel"

LUNCH

2pm - 2.30pm

Mick O'Connell (UCD) "Variation in 'Returns to Education' and academic performance by country in OECD's PISA science scores"

2.30pm to 3pm 

Robert Metcalfe (Oxford) "Behavioural Economics TBA"

3pm - 3.30pm

Peter Lunn (ESRI) "What Can I Get For It? A theoretical and empirical re-analysis of the endowment effect."

3.30pm - 4pm Coffee

4pm - 5.30pm: Keynote Speaker. 

David Laibson (Harvard) "Natural Expectations and Economic Behavior"

Long Weekend Links

1. TED Interview from a few months back with Julian Assange, explaining the philosophy behind Wikileaks. There has been a lot of discussion about the implication of the development of volunteer-driven mass collaborative enterprises for standard economics. But it is arguable that the development of wikileaks is a more profound development than previous collaborative exercises. This is a global information resource driven by volunteers and donations, with some of the providers taking enormous risks to make information available.

2. On the theme of global developments driven by non-standard preferences, this TED talk from the founder of kiva.org is well worth watching (warning: contains a lot of emotional pleas that may be unsuitable for an older and more cynical audience).

3. DG Sanco Conference on "Behavioural Economics. So What: Should PolicyMakers Care". This will be livestreamed is worth tuning in to.

"At European level, behavioural economics is implicitly starting to be incorporated in policymaking and this has led to some cases of debiasing through law. The cooling-off period, found in much of EU consumer acquis, and the health claims proposal are two significant examples. In addition, an in-depth review of the behavioural literature provided evidence for the inclusion of a ban on pre-checked boxes in the recent proposal for a Consumer Rights Directive. Finally, the useful contribution of behavioural economics has explicitly been recognised by DG Competition as part of the solution in a recent Microsoft case, when designing the browser ballot box. Similarly, Regulatory bodies across of the world (e.g., US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), UK Office for Fair Trading, OECD, Australian Productivity Commission) have already started to take behavioural economics into serious consideration and have already carried out behavioural studies to inform some of their regulatory policies."

4. Programme for AEA 2011 is available on this link

5. Meier and Springer - Discounting and Defaulting: Evidence from Choice Experiments Matched to Administrative Credit Data

6. Brigitte Madrian NBER summary of savings and investment behaviour