News
dmunger | September 28, 2007You've seen this illusion before, right?
The "grid" defining the light gray squares on the left side of this figure seems to get lighter where the lines intersect. The graph on the right shows that the actual reflectance (or brightness when depicted on a computer screen) of the figure does not change along the path marked by the blue line. But perceived brightness (indicated in red on the graph) does change.
But what's really interesting about this graph is that the thing doing the perceiving isn't a human. It's an artificial neural network. Auntie Em has the details:
The brain in question…
dmunger | September 27, 2007A New York Times article makes the claim that men are now happier than women:
Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.
Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work -- and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don't enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.
John Grohol read the article and became…
dmunger | September 25, 2007The robots in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds may have been terrifying, but they also had a feature notably lacking in a lot of today's robots: the inherent stability of a tripod. But film realizations of the tripod robots have always suggested they moved in a sort of inefficient shuffle: if you were a tripod creature, how would you walk? Three-legged locomotion doesn't make sense.
But researchers at Virginia Tech have begun development on a robot that looks like a tripod but has a simple and elegant gait. Check out this short movie clip showing how it works:
Clever, no? An article in New…
illconsidered | September 24, 2007I would like to introduce to Scienceblogs a feature from the old Illconsidered site, the weekly "A week of GW News" posts. These posts are an accumulation of all the important global warming related news, science and blog content posted online in the preceeding week. I will post it at the beginning of each week, hopefully Sunday or Monday.
This weekly post is a monumental feat but I wish to strongly emphasize that it is not a feat of mine! I do a very small amount of html massaging to get it into the blogging software but the lion's share of the credit for this service goes to H. E. Taylor…
dmunger | September 24, 2007Pain is an extremely difficult subject to study, because individuals experience pain differently -- some people have a much greater tolerance for pain than others, and some people just seem to complain more. Doctors typically handle the problem with assessing pain by asking patients to rate the pain they are feeling on a scale of 1 to 10. This gets around some of the issues of measuring pain because the individual's subjective experience is accounted for by the rating scale.
But the 1 to 10 scale might also be problematic. People might exaggerate their pain just to get access to stronger…
dmunger | September 21, 2007I play a pick-up game of soccer for two hours once a week. This game is notorious for causing injuries: one time I twisted my foot and was out of commission for a year. The game has resulted in multiple surgeries for some of the players involved. So why do we play? Mostly because it's a lot of fun.
Now a new study led by Peter Klustrup offers us a new reason to play: Apparently if we don't kill ourselves during the game, we actually get more exercise than spending an equivalent amount of time jogging:
Each period of exercise lasted about one hour and took place three times a week. After 12…
sb admin | September 20, 2007Ok, so this is not my first blog post ever, but it is my first post as a member of Science Blogs. Unlike Groucho Marx, who did not wish to join any club which would accept him as a member, I am very excited to be here and very flattered by that invitation.
So some breif introductory messages...
To fellow Sciblings, I would like to say hello and I look forward to getting to know you as people and writers. I am already a fan of Tim Lambert at Deltoid, William Connolley at Stoat and Chris Mooney of The Intersection and I have come across many excellent articles from others here, so I am eager…
dmunger | September 20, 2007Synesthesia is a fascinating phenomenon: It almost seems impossible that some people can see colors associated with sounds, emotions, or letters and numbers. Yet many do -- as many as one percent of people experience some synesthesia.
V.S. Ramachandran and others have suggested that synesthesia is less of a disorder than an exaggeration of some aspects of the perceptual system. At CogDaily, we've even informally found that some colors are more frequently associated with particular emotions among our readers.
Now a new study has found some patterns in the perceptions of synesthetes:…
dmunger | September 19, 2007The headline on Science Daily reads "One-third Of Spam Is 'Health'-related," but the real news comes from the highly readable PLoS Medicine source article, "Will Spam Overwhelm Our Defenses? Evaluating Offerings for Drugs and Natural Health Products."
Peter Gernburd and Alejandro R. Jadad analyzed the spam in three different email accounts last November and came up with some startling results. Of the over 4,100 spam messages received, over 1,300 were "health"-related. Most of us, I assume, simply move these messages to our spam folders, and most of it goes there automatically. But Gernburd…
dmunger | September 17, 2007David Amodio and his colleagues have taken a lot of heat across the internet for their recent brief report on brain and behavior correlation with political views (see here for one of the more strident pundit reactions). The Neurocritic was able to track down Amodio himself and get his responses to some more serious criticism:
People have complained that there were more liberals the conservatives in the sample. True, in an absolute sense. But this is typical in political psychology: Americans are more conservative on average, and so more extreme conservatives usually rate themselves as…
dmunger | September 14, 2007Do you ever watch the TV show Survivorman? The show's host, Les Stroud, is voluntarily "stranded" in a wide array of dangerous situations in the wild, without even a film crew, and videotapes himself figuring out how to build a shelter, find food, and get out alive.
One thing I find particularly interesting about the show is that Stroud generally doesn't seek food first -- he builds a shelter. Frequently he doesn't eat at all for the first few days. Then, when he finally manages to find something to eat, it's something most westerners would consider repulsive: ants, scorpions, rodents, even…
dmunger | September 13, 2007When people are in car crashes and other fearful situations, they tend to report that time "slows down," or that things "move in slow-motion." I remember a similar experience when I got hit by a car as a child. But can this phenomenon be measured? Here's a video of an experiment that purports to do that:
What do you think?
dmunger | September 12, 2007Clive Thompson's latest column in Wired has an interesting thesis: Only geeks are smart enough to give away their money in ways that will truly help others. He points to the research of psychologist Paul Slovic to make his case:
We'll usually race to help a single stranger in dire straits, while ignoring huge numbers of people in precisely the same plight. We'll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the US for lifesaving surgery, but we don't offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur.
You could argue that we're simply…
dmunger | September 11, 2007The BPR3 icon contest is now complete -- here are the entries:
One of these icons will be chosen for any blogger to use to show when a post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, and not just a link to a press release or media commentary. We'll be using it on all our research posts once the icon is finalized.
All the blog posts using the icon from across the blogosphere will be collected at BPR3.org, so readers will have one place to go to find the most serious, informed blogging on the net. Soon you'll be able to vote for your favorite icon. We'll let…
dmunger | September 10, 2007There were so many fascinating news stories from around the web this weekend that I couldn't pick just one to tell you about this morning. Here's a sampler:
Study finds humans better at social skills than apes. Why is this news? Because the humans in question were just two and a half years old. The toddlers were picked because they were at about the same cognitive level as the apes they were being compared with. Yet the humans did better at social tasks such as learning by imitation. The researchers argue this pokes a hole in the idea that there's such a thing as "general intelligence."…
dmunger | September 7, 2007How would you like to win a subscription to Seed, the journal Nature, and a boatload of other prizes? If you've got Photoshop and a good idea, you could earn those prizes, plus the admiration of the academic blogosphere, with just a few minutes of effort.
As you may know, BPR3 is trying to create a universal icon that everyone can use on their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, and not just a link to a press release or media commentary. We'd like the icon to be something special and memorable, which is why we're opening up…
dmunger | September 6, 2007A month ago, Eric Schwitzgebel wrote a post critical of meta-analysis, suggesting that studies finding null results don't tend to get published, thus skewing meta-analysis results. I objected to some of his reasoning, my most important point being that the largest studies are going to get published, so most of the data collected actually does appear in the literature.
Now Schwitzgebel's got a new post about meta-analysis, again taking a critical stance. First, he discusses experimenter bias:
An experimenter who expects an effect of a certain sort is more likely to find such an effect than…
dmunger | September 5, 2007Speed dating is one of the hottest trends in the match-up business: You go to a non-threatening restaurant or bar, then spend five minutes or so face-to-face with each of up to 30 members of your preferred gender. Everyone has a card or some other method by which they indicate whether they'd like to meet again; only when both people in a pair express interest are they given contact information. The trend is so prevalent that I've seen at least two movies recently featuring speed dating ("Hitch" was one of them; I can't remember the other one).
But do you actually learn enough about the person…
dmunger | September 4, 2007A report on ABC news suggests that using fMRI brain imaging to detect lies is as simple as comparing two "pictures" of brain activity:
How do you tell which is the truthteller? It's easy, the article claims:
Who needs Pinocchio's nose to find a lie? The FMRI scan on the right detects a brain processing a false statement; the less colorful brain on the left corresponds to someone in the middle of a truthful statement.
According to the article,
When someone lies, the brain first stops itself from telling the truth, then generates the deception. When the brain is working hard at lying, more…
dmunger | August 31, 2007Today is Blog Day, which means we're supposed to suggest five new blogs so our readers can expand their horizons. I think I'm going to end up linking to more than five blogs. Here goes:
The Anterior Commisure discusses the science surrounding sex and mating, in both humans and other organisms. Really fascinating stuff. I just discovered this blog a couple weeks ago, and I'm loving it.
Issues in the Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science has a very descriptive title. It offers in-depth philosophical musings informed by science.
Music Matters is an excellent blog about music and cognition…