General / Site news
dmunger | February 4, 2008We've heard from a few teachers who use Cognitive Daily in class, and we know several class web sites link to CogDaily. So we were wondering: if you're a teacher, instructor, or professor, how do you use Cognitive Daily in your class? As a suggested supplemental reading? A required assignment?
Or maybe you've consciously chosen not to use CogDaily in class. We'd also appreciate it if you'd let us know why you don't use it. Maybe there's something else we could do to make it more usable for your class. We're open to suggestions.
Even if you feel like you're just repeating someone else's…
dmunger | January 30, 2008Today is my birthday, so instead of offering a post for you, I thought I'd ask for a small gift. I'd like to revamp my personal web browsing system so that it's more efficient. I already keep up with psychology blogs via RSS, but I'd like to start browsing other things -- news, entertainment, and so on -- the same way.
So here's what I want for my birthday: I'd like you to suggest what should go in my RSS reader.
I'd like my whole list to be browsable in 30 minutes or so, so I need a *limited* list of suggestions for good RSS feeds to subscribe to. The whole list should have perhaps 100-200…
dmunger | January 28, 2008The number of psychology / neuroscience blogs on scienceblogs.com will soon decrease by one. However, the number of bloggers will stay the same. How is that possible?
The hilarious Omni Brain and thought-provoking Restrospectacle are each closing down shop. But they're re-emerging as a new blog that combines the efforts of Steve and Shelley. They haven't yet come up with a name for their project, so head on over to their blogs and offer suggestions. If they choose a name picked by a commenter, they're offering a generous prize. I'm closing comments here so all their suggestions are in the…
dmunger | January 25, 2008Three great new bloggers have joined the ScienceBlogs team:
Kate Seip has joined Jake at Pure Pedantry. You may remember her excellent blog Anterior Commissure.
Sometime CogDaily commenter DrugMonkey is also now in the house, with coblogger PhysioProf.
Let's welcome these fabulous new additions to ScienceBlogs! I also met up with one more great blogger who'll soon be joining ScienceBlogs at the Science Blogging Conference last weekend, but that news will have to wait for the official announcement.
dmunger | January 23, 2008Less than a week after its official launch, ResearchBlogging.org now has 78 active, registered users. We're already bigger than ScienceBlogs.com! Of course, many of our users are ScienceBloggers -- these projects can definitely work together. We can also get much bigger. Over 200 bloggers have used our icon, and we need to get them signed up for the new aggregation site. There's the potential to enroll literally hundreds more bloggers from all parts of the research community -- not just scientists.
All in all the launch has gone amazingly smoothly. As far as I know, the site never went down,…
dmunger | January 21, 2008I'm pleased to announce a new site that allows bloggers to not only show when they're blogging about peer-reviewed research, but also to share that work with readers and bloggers around the world.
ResearchBlogging.org doesn't just enable you to mark posts with our icon, it also collects those posts in one central location. Readers can then visit just one site to find all the posts on a topic, or browse through all of the blogosphere's most thoughtful posts on peer-reviewed research.
Here's how it works:
Bloggers -- often experts in their field -- find exciting new peer-reviewed research they'…
dmunger | January 10, 2008A 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 led to the confusion.
However, Quinn and Watt do cite a 1997 article which claims to find the bias I describe in the post from yesterday and the day before.
I haven't been able to get my hands on the article, but here's the reference:
Vos, P. G., van Assen, M., & Fraiiek, M. (1997) Perceived…
dmunger | December 11, 2007Scienceblogs 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 feed (in English).
The logical next question: What language should ScienceBlogs tackle next? You can share your preference with the ScienceBlogs overlords here.
dmunger | December 5, 2007A 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 whether you knew of any [credible] blogs or highly active websites that are dedicated to the field of Dev Psych (don't worry, I will still read Cog Daily!). I'm currently finishing up my BA in Psychology at UC Santa Barbara and plan to go the route of developmental clinical psychology, come grad-school. I…
dmunger | December 3, 2007Pediatrics Grand Rounds is up at Hope for Pandora, complete with its first-ever Cognitive Daily selection.
Encephalon is up at A Blog Around the Clock, featuring all manner of brainy goodness, including a CogDaily post as well.
dmunger | November 24, 2007That's right, you can now get the full text of every Cognitive Daily post via RSS. There's just one catch: You must buy a $399 Amazon Kindle and pay 99 cents (per month, I assume) to subscribe to Cognitive Daily.
I don't know if this subscription will allow you to view images, and I'm pretty certain video, polls, and other interactive features won't be available, but for some people this might be a very attractive way to get Cognitive Daily. You can also get the amazing ScienceBlogs Select feed, which includes the best CogDaily posts as well as the best from dozens of other ScienceBlogs for $…
dmunger | November 15, 2007Earlier this week we asked readers which CogDaily posts we should submit to the Open Laboratory anthology. We didn't get many suggestions, and commenter Keely had a guess as to why:
Perhaps what would be more helpful is to post links to the articles YOU were thinking about, and we could sort of vote on which of those we liked best. Your question as it stands now is a little broad. This is perhaps why you've had relatively few responses.
Okay, we'll do it. Here are our top posts from the past year (we couldn't use Keely's nomination since that was originally posted in 2006). You can vote for…
dmunger | November 15, 2007Have you been following the progress over at BPR3? Here's an update:
With the release of the Research Blogging icon, dozens of blogs and hundreds of posts are already showing the world when they are discussing peer-reviewed research. But the next step will be far more dramatic: a site which consolidates all those posts in one place.
For now, you can do a Technorati search to find out who's using the icon. I love Technorati, but its results aren't always consistent, and it can take several clicks to locate the specific post you're interested in. BPR3's new system will display the opening of…
dmunger | November 12, 2007Bora Zivkovic is finishing up his nominations for Open Laboratory 2007, a collection of the best Science Blogging in 2007. I'd like to nominate a couple Cognitive Daily posts (this post made it into the 2006 collection), but I thought it might be good to get our readers' input on the posts they liked the most.
Since these posts are supposed to go into a book, posts with interactive demos, polls, and so on, aren't necessarily ideal (though we could write up the poll results for the purposes of a book chapter).
So, what CogDaily post was your favorite this year? Let us know in the comments. Or…
dmunger | November 6, 2007Well, we didn't quite reach our goal of raising $6,000 for Donors Choose. However, we were able to raise over $2,000 for students in underfunded schools. Greta and I matched ten percent of the donations, contributing $203 in addition to the funds you donated.
Five of the projects we chose are now fully funded: Roller Coaster Physics, Leaping Into Math and Science, What do you see?--A Spatial Visualization Study, Where Did the Playground Go?, Psych for Seniors Part I, and Math Manipulatives To Teach Students Concepts With. There are still a couple projects that are partially funded -- and just…
dmunger | October 30, 2007Updated 5:35 p.m. EDT on 10/30/07: Psych for Seniors Part I is now fully funded, with over $400 in donations today! Let's get Part II funded!
There are just two days left in our DonorsChoose Challenge to raise money for kids to learn science. Have you been putting off your donation? You still have an opportunity to make a difference.
The Psych for Seniors proposal appears to be the most popular among our readers, and with just another $816, the second part of that proposal will be fully funded. We can help students in school with a 40 percent poverty rate get the textbooks they need to offer…
dmunger | October 29, 2007We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news article or press release.
Within a month, these blog posts will also be aggregated at BPR3.org, so everyone can go to one place to locate the most serious, thoughtful analysis and commentary on the web.
If you're a blogger, we encourage you to start using the icons now. If you're a blog reader, look for these icons to find the posts that bloggers have thought…
dmunger | October 22, 2007As 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 Students Part 1.
Now for the bad news: Our challenge has collected just $1,142 of our $6,000 goal. Based on our readership statistics, that makes CogDaily readers the least generous of all the ScienceBlogs participating in the challenge. We're the second most popular blog in the challenge, but we're in…
dmunger | October 12, 2007Seed 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. Here are some of the prizes you can win:
1 fresh, new iPod nano
21 "Seed Hearts Threadless" tee shirts (design here)
21 ScienceBlogs mugs
21 subscriptions to Seed magazine
9 copies of "The Best American Science Writing 2007"
So what are you waiting for? While last week's two graphs post did cause a…
dmunger | October 5, 2007I'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 wanted to know what percentage of our readers are Americans. Here's the breakdown based on this study (however I think it's quite possible that non-Americans weren't as interested in this study as usual):
So 78 percent of our readers are U.S. Citizens living in the U.S., and just 12 percent are…