Welcome to this new blogging area for the Adaptive Toolbox web community.

Today is the last official working day for all current members of the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. This, of course, will be celebrated in the afternoon with a somehow extended coffee and tea meeting at 4pm (and I have the pleasure to be the last person who prepares pots of coffee and tea for this meeting), and those of you who cannot participate will still be with us, since I cannot imagine anybody who did not like to attend those informal meetings (in particular when there was cake – and there was a lot of cake, right?). But the official life of ABC ends now, which means that we need to create a new, rather unofficial common area to extend existing or create new ideas or discussions about all the topics that have been investigated during the last 20 years here by a large number of outstanding researchers (like you, and yes, you, and you, too 😉 ) in Berlin or during the existence of ABC since it has been founded at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich in 1995.

A while ago, Gerd Gigerenzer, until today the head of our department, asked me to create a website which bundles all information about publications, people, institutions and more which is related to the work of the ABC research group (find it here: Adaptive Toolbox Library). This idea was inspired by the existence of the ACT-R website at Carnegie Mellon. And although Gerd may have liked it to be available earlier, I think it is now in the shape that it may become a useful tool, and that today would be a good day to go online (officially, since it is running a while now). It still needs to be improved, as there is much information missing, but to me it appears now to be in a state where it can start growing. But a repository for publications and more (like our great tutorial software for Decision Trees – check it out!) may not be enough.

Therefore, I created this blog. Use it for posting your most recent results, contributions to discussions, problems, but also general news about science & research or politics (if it is relevant for science). Note that this site will be moderated, just to filter nonsense or spam. My hope is that it will become an important communication hub for researchers, students and practitioners who are working on topics which are related to the Adaptive Toolbox approach as it is, e.g., outlined by Gerd Gigerenzer here. However, if it does not work this way, i.e. if it is not used as a communication tool by the Adaptive Toolbox web community, be sure that this blog will be removed. But my hope is that it will be used in the future after ABC.

Note that a blog is not an open access journal or an online book. Don’t hesitate to post your contribution even if it is not (yet) a fully developed research report or a complete rejoinder to all possible disagreements with your position. Use it as a possibility to stay in contact with friends and researchers who share, at least to some degree, an interest in topics related to the work of the Adaptive Toolbox approach community. And if your English isn’t perfect – no problem, neither is mine (which is obvious, I guess).

Therefore, create your individual account (click on ‘register’ on top), read some introduction to blogging (e.g. here) or to WordPress (the engine that powers this site) here, or just watch some youtubes videos that introduce into the “why” and “how” of WordPress. To be honest, I don’t doubt that you will be able to publish your first post without any additional help, just by opening your personal dashboard (if you are authenticated, at least) and using the features of the WordPress environment. If you need additional help, just drop me a note.

And now: Happy blogging!

September, 29, 2017
Uwe Czienskowski