Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
October 25, 2007
ScienceBloggers Walk Down Memory Lane
This is the geek equivalent of "when I was your age I used to walk to six miles school barefoot -- in the snow -- uphill both ways!"
Daylight Savings Time worse than previously thought
I don't know about that. I've always thought it was pretty bad...
Brain…
October 24, 2007
The way subliminal advertising is portrayed in movies and hyped in some media outlets, briefly and imperceptibly flashing a brand name during a TV show can turn people into mindless cyborgs who can't resist the urge to shop at a particular store or drink a certain brand of beer. Overhyped as these…
October 23, 2007
When Jim was about 13 months old, I happened to be enrolled in a graduate level developmental psychology class. Our big term paper assignment involved observing two children at different developmental stages. I decided it would be cool to do a "longitudinal study" of Jim's language development…
October 22, 2007
Encephalon 34 is ready to go at Distributed Neuron
N Skills Every Scientist Should Have
Help Chad come up with a list of the most important skills for scientists
Some tips for putting together a Behavioral Science grant proposal
The relationship between money and happiness
Key conclusions:…
October 22, 2007
As promised, Greta and I have given our first matching gift to the Donors Choose challenge. We donated $103 as our 10 percent match for the $1,039 that had already been donated. We decided to donate to the two most popular proposals: Psych for Seniors and Calculate the Joy of Helping At Risk…
October 19, 2007
With hundreds of seemingly worthy charities out there, how do we decide which ones to donate to? Even if we eliminate charities that aren't effective, there are still too many choices, and too little money, to donate to all of them. In the Donors Choose campaign, bloggers are going to impressive…
October 19, 2007
Here's an interesting article about the wisdom of crowds. It starts by discussing the surprising accuracy of Wikipedia.
The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is (and the reason that living organisms are as sophisticated as they are), is not due to the average quality of the edits (or mutations…
October 18, 2007
60 percent of Neuroscience conference authors only present one paper in five years
Book Review - On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society
Is it possible that most soldiers only rarely use their weapons, even in pitched battle?
Why There Aren't Right-Handed…
October 18, 2007
According to a report in the New York Times, frequently-used words evolve more slowly than rarely used ones:
Some words evolve rapidly, with a result that there are many different word forms, what linguists call cognates, for meanings across languages. "Bird," for example, takes many disparate…
October 17, 2007
John Mashey made a comment over at Deltoid that was so incisive, Tim Lambert decided to turn it into a post of its own. In the comment/post, Mashey outlines several steps scientists can take to pressure reporters to do a better job reporting science. Indeed, the list is a little daunting. Among…
October 16, 2007
Does religion increase "virtuous" behavior? So far the research on the topic has been inconclusive. A big problem with most studies is that they tend to be correlational. For example, religious people are more likely to say they are willing to help others. But are they willing to help others…
October 16, 2007
Proust Was A Neuroscientist
Fellow ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer's long-awaited book Proust Was a Neuroscientist is now shipping. Any chance you'll send a copy CogDaily's way, Jonah?
Should scientists communicate more like hackers do?
Aaron Rowe suggests that scientists could profit by emulating…
October 16, 2007
You don't have to go far to hear someone say something bad about gossip. People even gossip about gossip. One good thing about gossip: it may have had some role in the origin of human speech, as John Tierney reminds us:
Language, according to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, evolved because gossip…
October 15, 2007
Stores make customer testing for their products too easy
The result: Customers overestimate their ability and buy fancier stuff than they need
Audiophiles and the limitations of human hearing
Can we *really* hear the difference $7,000 speaker cables make? What about $100 cables?
Radiohead lets…
October 15, 2007
The idea of a human falling in love with a creation made of steel and silicon seems rather far-fetched today -- even the most "realistic" robots seem more creepy than endearing. But people already do form attachments to their robots. People treat Roombas like pets, and soldiers form strong bonds…
October 12, 2007
When I was a kid, I participated in all sorts of fund raisers for charity. It wasn't hard to get people to donate -- all I had to do was go door to door and ask for donations. One year I raised over $1,500 for a local children's hospital. Who can resist a face like this?
Typically at least half…
October 12, 2007
More revisions on the BPR3 icon
The BPR3 icon is in nearly-final form. Make comments over at the BPR3 site.
That lap dancing study
I'll resist puns with this one, but Kate has a nice write-up
Cheap trainers still protect feet
Translation into American English: Expensive running shoes aren't…
October 12, 2007
Seed has upped the ante in the Donors Choose Blogger's challenge. Now if you donate to any of the challenges, you can have the chance to win any of an astonishing array of prizes! They're not only matching your gift up to a total of $15,000, they're also personally rewarding you for contributing.…
October 11, 2007
Yesterday, in our post on perfect pitch (usually called absolute pitch in research reports), we offered a quick test to see if we could identify the portion of our readers with absolute pitch. At first, things were looking good for the absolute pitch crowd. Readers listened to this note:
A…
October 10, 2007
There are lots of people who, with training, can identify musical notes when they know the starting point -- when they hear a song starting with "C," they can name the rest of the notes in the song. But much rarer is the ability to identify musical notes without any context. This is what people…
October 10, 2007
Encephalon, Thirty-Third Edition
Laboratory Website and Video Awards
The Scientist is holding a contest for the best lab web site. Nominate your favorite!
Scientific literacy
I think Cognitive Daily stands as an excellent example of what Kate is talking about here: People really are interested…
October 9, 2007
The five best and worst sites, Part IV
I was relieved to see we weren't one of the "worst" sites...
Vote for the Winner of the 2007 Blogging Scholarship
I'm not picking any favorites, other than to note that fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley Batts is in the running.
Hammers and Distributed Memory…
October 9, 2007
If kids are going to be prepared for the careers of tomorrow, learning mathematics is essential. Math forms a critical foundation for work in high-tech and research careers. Even in our work on Cognitive Daily, Greta and I have found that our math knowledge has been stretched to the absolute limit…
October 8, 2007
Weather impacts outlook on life
Want to show that most college students have a negative attitude about their life's goals? Ask them while it's raining.
For Schools, Lottery Payoffs Fall Short
North Carolina recently started an "education lottery." The New York Times assesses its success.…
October 8, 2007
A couple weeks ago, a CogDaily commenter wondered if some of the science achievement differences between men and women might be related to the fact that boys play more video games than girls:
There are many more boys playing video games than girls. Could the mental sweat caused by video games…
October 6, 2007
Last week we wondered how thorough news reporters were being when they conducted "person on the street" interviews with questions from the U.S. citizenship test. We decided to administer the test a bit more systematically (but still not scientifically). Over 680 people responded to our study,…
October 5, 2007
I'm not quite finished analyzing the data from last week's Casual Friday's study and I've got some personal business to attend to this afternoon, so I'm going to have to postpone my writeup of the results until tomorrow. Sorry!
One item of interest from today's results: Some commenters this morning…
October 5, 2007
I'm not going to lecture you; I'm just going to show you two graphs:
I think you know what to do.
October 4, 2007
Rocket-Powered 21-Foot-Long X-Wing Model Actually Flies
I would have killed for one of these in 1977!
New anesthesia method blocks pain without numbness or paralysis
This painkiller targets just pain detectors, and leaves other sensory nerves intact
Do Infants Have an Innate Spider Detection…
October 4, 2007
Here's a fascinating video featuring split-brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga. The patient had his corpus callosum severed as a treatment for severe epilepsy. The treatment terminated nearly all communication between his brain's right and left hemispheres.
Since language is primarily processed in…