Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
January 18, 2008
I'm at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference this weekend, and I wasn't planning on doing a Casual Friday this week. But Virginia Hughes gave me an idea for a really quick one. What state boasts the most-frequent buffet-style restaurant diners?
Click here to respond
This survey has a mere…
January 17, 2008
Take a look at this slideshow (QuickTime required). You'll first see a photo in perfect focus. Then 12 more pictures will flash by, each of them blurred using Photoshop. Finally, the original photo will appear again. Is it the same as before, or slightly blurrier or sharper?
I'll give the answer…
January 15, 2008
At least once or twice a week at dinnertime, our family has what we call a "harmony meal." Jim and Nora are good eaters with broad tastes, but they both (along with me and Greta) also have some foods they don't like. A harmony meal is a meal where everyone in the family likes every dish we serve.…
January 14, 2008
I was a little surprised by an offhand observation Thomas Schubert made in a recent research report. He claimed that while men will commonly make a fist to celebrate a goal in a soccer match or a home run in baseball, it's unusual for women to do so.
I'm sure I've seen both female athletes and fans…
January 11, 2008
Last week we asked our readers about New Years' resolutions. We said we wanted to know whether resolutions made on New Years' Day were any more effective than commitments made at other times of the year. We are interested in that question, but we didn't tell you about the question that interested…
January 10, 2008
There was a lot of buzz online a couple months back when an article entitled "Moniker Maladies" made what seemed to many to be a startling claim: Baseball players strike out more often when their names start with "K"; Students with the initials "C" and "D" get worse grades than others.
Actually,…
January 10, 2008
A reader pointed out to me that Schultze's 1978 study did not find a bias to hear a fast tempo as speeding up and slow tempo as slowing down. In fact, Schultze found that we were remarkably accurate at detecting tempo changes. So we do replicate Schultze! A misreading on my part of Quinn and Watt…
January 9, 2008
Yesterday's demonstration about perception of tempo simply didn't work. If we had successfully replicated Schultze's Vos et al.'s study, we would have seen a systematic bias in the results.
I'd like to give this one more shot (I promise this will be my last attempt!). There are a couple reasons why…
January 8, 2008
Listen to the following three short audio samples. Your job is to say whether the tempo (the rate at which the notes are played) is speeding up or slowing down. Even if it sounds like it's maintaining the same tempo, make your best guess as to whether it's speeding up or slowing down.
[Update:…
January 7, 2008
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis -- stated in its strongest form -- claims that language determines thoughts: if a language doesn't have a means of expressing a particular idea, then people speaking that language can't even conceive of that idea. This strong form has long since been rejected: There are…
January 4, 2008
This year Greta and I rang in the new year with a couple of good friends, some good wine, and not a lot of fuss or formality. We quietly noted when the clock struck midnight and went on with whatever we were talking about at the time.
Our son Jim marked the occasion much more seriously, with…
January 3, 2008
During my brief tenure as a high school teacher, one common suggestion I got from supportive colleagues was to "make your tests teaching tools." "That's often the only time you've really got your students' attention," they suggested, "so don't neglect the opportunity to teach them something."
What…
January 2, 2008
You might think humans are equally good at estimating distances no matter which direction they're looking. After all, we use the same visual tools to make those estimates -- binocular disparity (the different views we see from each eye), occlusion (whether one object is in front of or behind…
December 31, 2007
[Originally posted on November 7, 2005]
What does it mean to have a gut feeling that you remember something? You see someone you recognize in a coffee shop. Do you remember her from high school? Or maybe you saw her on television. Could she be the manager of your local bank? Perhaps you don't know…
December 28, 2007
Over at BPR3, a reader brought up an interesting question about the nature of peer-reviewed research, which I thought was relevant to our readers here as well. I'm reposting my entire response below.
The system of peer review, the bulwark of academic publishing, has served scholars for centuries.…
December 27, 2007
Earlier this week we discussed the relationship between life satisfaction and other measures of well-being, finding that for measures such as relative income, the happiest people weren't always the best-off. For relationships, however, the happiest individuals also seem to do better.
But these…
December 26, 2007
[Originally posted on February 20, 2006]
Here's a picture of our daughter Nora at about 3 months of age. She looks like she's fairly aware of the events going on around her (arguably more aware than she sometimes appears now, at age 12). However, as our knowledge of how infants begin to perceive…
December 24, 2007
Happiness is associated with a lot of good things in life. People who are happier tend to get better job ratings, make more money, be more likely to get married, and be more satisfied with their marriages than people who are less happy, even years after the original happiness assessment.
People…
December 20, 2007
Last year, a friend of Greta's died tragically young. He was a pillar of the community, and Greta was honored to learn that he wanted her to play the oboe at his memorial service, which would be attended by hundreds of people. Greta has performed in countless concerts, with audiences just as large…
December 19, 2007
Do smells have an impact on how we judge people? Certainly if someone smells bad, we may have a negative impression of the person. But what if the smell is so subtle we don't consciously notice it? Research results have been mixed, with some studies actually reporting that we like people more when…
December 17, 2007
This past weekend, I went to two different holiday parties. While many of the people at the parties were friends, I was also introduced to a couple dozen new people -- out of town guests of the hosts, friends of friends, or people from our small town that I somehow had never met. If I run into one…
December 14, 2007
A few weeks ago, I was excited to learn that a project I'm working on got written up on NPR's News Blog. However, I was less excited when I saw the way my own status was described:
Dave Munger, a science blogger and stay-at-home dad in Davidson, N.C., wanted to find a way to show people that some…
December 13, 2007
The human perceptual system is able to enforce a large array of illusions on our conscious experience. Most importantly, we hold the illusion of a complete and vivid picture of our surroundings, while in fact we selectively ignore nearly everything we see.
There's a good reason for this, of course…
December 11, 2007
Listen to this short recording:
It's a sequence that repeats every sixth beat. But when we're listening to music, we usually prefer to divide rhythm into two- or three-beat patterns (duple or triple rhythm). In this case, the sequence doesn't make it obvious which pattern is correct. A traditional…
December 11, 2007
Scienceblogs has launched the beta version of its German-language site. You can check it out at Scienceblogs.de.
The site looks great -- I've never regretted not learning German more! It also offers a feature I'd like to see here on the English version: A thumbnail view of the ScienceBlogs Select…
December 10, 2007
There's been a lot of discussion online lately about the relative importance of the position of an author name. Is it more impressive to be a first author on a report? If so, how much? John Lynch made a graph of Guillermo Gonzalez's publication record as a way of illustrating his argument that…
December 7, 2007
This week's Casual Fridays study is just a quick reading comprehension test. Is that all it is? I can't tell you. Why not just try it and find out for yourself?
Click here to participate
As usual, the survey is quite short, with just 8 questions. It should take only a minute or two to complete. You…
December 6, 2007
When we are trying to understand what someone is saying, we rely a lot on the movement of their face. We pay attention to how their faces move, and that informs our understanding of what is said. The classic example of this is the McGurk effect, where the same sound accompanied by different facial…
December 5, 2007
A reader asks:
I've been reading Cog Daily for about 4 months now and have always found that I am particularly fascinated with entries dealing with developmental psychology, such as the latest one regarding the logarithmic-like representation of numbers in young children. I was curious as to…
December 4, 2007
One of our readers emailed us asking if there has ever been research on whether kids' understanding of numbers -- especially large numbers -- differs from adults. Greta did a little poking around and found a fascinating study on second- and fourth-graders.
In the U.S. (and I suspect around the…