About a year ago, we embarked on a quest to answer one of the most intriguing questions:

If you flip a fair coin and catch it in hand, what's the probability it lands on the same side it started?

Today, we are finally ready to share the results. Thanks to my friends, collaborators, and even strangers from the internet, we collected flippin 350,757 coin flips. We ran several "Coin Tossing Marathons" (e.g., https://youtu.be/3xNg51mv-fk?si=o2E3hKa-ReXodOmc) and spent countless hours flipping coins.

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What is cognitive variability, you ask? It’s the ups and downs in performance for a specific individual, across seconds, hours, or even days and months. These ups and downs can have many reasons, from strategy exploration to fatigue, from expertise to diurnal effects. We all experience it, yet rarely study it in as much detail it deserves!

#psychology #cognition #bigdata #education #preprint #intelligence

A few weeks ago, I wanted a light and efficient Kullback-Leibler divergence function for two multivariate normal distributions in #rstats  so I wrote up the process to get there: https://erikjanvankesteren.nl/blog/kldiv

It's more than 10 times as fast as the existing implementation I found and does not choke on high-dimensional (>250 dims) cases!

(there is a short speed comparison with #julialang  at the end!)