News
dmunger | January 25, 2007At the ScienceBlogging conference last weekend, speaker Hunt Willard brought up an interesting dilemma, discussed by ScienceBlogger Suzanne Franks (aka Zuska):
At some point, Willard said, cloning will be so straightforward we'll be able to clone a Neanderthal. He asked, "Can you really believe no one will want to do it? Just to see?" And then...what do we do when the "experiment" is over? With research dogs - we euthanize them at the end of experiments. With chimpanzees - at the end of experiments they are sent off to sanctuaries where they are well taken care of for life (and Willard said…
dmunger | January 24, 2007The New York Times has an article filled with some interesting anecdotes about the prevalence of magical thinking. Everyone, it seems, even college grads hoping to be admitted into graduate school, has a few superstitions.
Let's face it: magic is fun. At the University of Chicago, there was a superstition that stepping on the brass college seal embedded in the floor of Hutchinson Commons would cause students to take longer than four years to graduate. When I graduated, diploma in hand, I had a friend take my photo standing on the plaque. When I processed the picture, the bottom half was…
dmunger | January 23, 2007As laws against driving with cell phones continue to go on the books around the world, Britain has upped the ante:
Drivers caught using a hand-held mobile or who do not have control of their vehicle while using a hands-free kit will be hit with a fine of 60 pounds.
They will also get three penalty points on their licence.
"Research shows that talking on a mobile phone while driving affects your concentration and ability to react to dangerous situations," said Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander.
The headline of the story implies that the biggest news is the bigger fine, but to me, the…
dmunger | January 19, 2007Charles Murray (of The Bell Curve fame) has written a series of articles for the Wall Street Journal on intelligence (available free here). One frustrating aspect of the articles is that Murray doesn't cite his sources. Consider this statement:
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance…
dmunger | January 18, 2007Over at Developing Intelligence, Chris Chatham has a fascinating discussion of infantile amnesia, which he tantalizingly terms a "myth." Chris cites research demonstrating that infants can and do remember things, even stories read to them in the womb:
3-day-old infants were capable of distinguishing a particular passage (from Dr. Seuss's "Cat in the Hat") that had been read to them twice daily for the last 6 weeks of gestation from similar passages (matched for word count, length, and prosody). What's more, these infants preferred the familiar passage even if spoken by someone other than…
dmunger | January 17, 2007At 15, our son Jim is taller than average for his age. Indeed, he's as tall as me, as this photo illustrates. Our daughter Nora is below average height, 4' 11" at 13 years old, but still squarely in the normal range. But what happens when a child is well below normal -- when, say, a boy's growth puts him on track to be less than five feet tall as an adult?
Some studies have suggested that shorter men are likely to earn less and be at greater risk for psychological problems. As a recent L.A. Times article suggests, conventional wisdom has it that short women are treated condescendingly, and…
dmunger | January 16, 2007I noticed from last week's mega comment thread and also from the referrer log that many of CogDaily's visitors read the blog via Google Reader. Wondering what all the fuss was about, I tried it out over the weekend. It certainly seems to be a serviceable reader, very similar in appearance and function to Bloglines. However, when I gave it the full workout for the "In other news" segment this morning, it crashed my browser, so it's back to Bloglines for me.
This all got me to wondering: How do CogDaily readers access the site? I use three different methods to track visits to Cognitive Daily (…
dmunger | January 16, 2007Bora Zivcovic has just accomplished the impossible. He has not only sorted through hundreds of pearls to find those that dazzled most brilliantly, he's also tamed legions of wild rats, herded a flock of irascible cats and squirrels, and done it in just three weeks, all without mixing a single metaphor. That's right, Bora has created an anthology of the 50 best science blog posts from 2006. It's called The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs from 2006, and Greta and I are exceedingly proud that one of our posts (actually written in 2005) has been selected for inclusion.
The book…
dmunger | January 12, 2007Thank you to the dozens of readers who took me up on my offer yesterday to give a personal response to every comment or question. As of this writing, I've got two comments left to respond to, and at that point I'm going to declare the offer expired (no complaints--you had your chance! And I've got to analyze this week's Casual Friday results at some point). This post is now actually the most active post on the entire ScienceBlogs network, so thanks again for all your great questions!
If you haven't had a chance to read through the questions, I'd encourage you to do so -- there are plenty of…
dmunger | January 11, 2007Over the past year, CogDaily has had about 400,000 unique visits. During that same time, we've received 3,075 comments. Wow! We're humbled by those numbers. Yet simple division reveals that fewer than 1 in 100 visits actually results in a comment. There must be hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of visitors to this site who've never commented on a single post.
Today I'd like to change that, with a simple offer: Write a comment, and I will respond, thoughtfully. You can ask me any question, comment on any topic, and I'll write you a personalized response, in complete sentences. No question is…
dmunger | January 10, 2007For some reason I can't resist watching Steve Jobs' Apple keynote speeches. I watched six years ago when he introduced the iPod, and I watched again last night when he introduced his latest "revolutionary" product. People were amazed when the iPod was introduced -- but a little shocked by the price. I didn't buy an iPod then, but I finally did break down and buy a $99 shuffle when it was released a year or two back.
So what about the iPhone? By all accounts, it's an amazing device, offering not only a telephone, but also email, messaging, a beautiful web browser, and of course, iPod…
dmunger | January 9, 2007Eric Schwitzgebel has just completed an exhaustive study of the behavior of ethicists. He had noticed that a large number of ethics books seemed to be missing from research libraries across the nation. Rather than leave that observation in anecdotal form, he began a systematic analysis of the data. His initial analysis showed that 1.25 ethics books were missing for every 1 book in non-ethics fields of philosophy. But that still didn't satisfy him. Perhaps ethics books are simply more popular, or perhaps the sample is biased because of the relative age of the ethics versus non-ethics books. So…
dmunger | January 8, 2007Jake Mandell, creator of the Tone Deafness Test we discussed on Cognitive Daily, has now posted the results of that study and two others on musical perception:
Effects of musical training:
Subjects who report more years of musical training do better on the musical tests than those who have less musical training. It is impossible to say whether this is a chicken or egg phenomenon: Are people able to improve their performance by studying for more years, or do people who last through several years of musical lessons have greater inherent ability to start with?
Effect of race:
Subjects who…
dmunger | January 5, 2007Greta and I will be at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference two weeks from now at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
An impressive list of bloggers and journalists will be attending, but there are still a few slots left, so if your weekend is still open, you might want to consider joining us. It's a great chance to meet up with dozens of talented scientists and educators from around the world, including ScienceBlogs' own Janet Stemwedel, "Abel Pharmboy", James Hrynyshyn, and Suzanne Franks, as well as journalists from The Lancet, Nature, and American Scientist. You…
dmunger | January 4, 2007Here's a fun little item, via Digg:
Squinting reduces the amount of peripheral light coming into the eye so that a greater percentage of light comes from the center of the visual field.
Important note: It's wrong to to say that "'squinting squishes the eyeball slightly to correct for a focus point that misses the mark.' Although the lens does change shape, this is a reflex muscle action that can accompany (but is not the result of) squinting."
In other news:
"Scans show how brains plot the future." Is this article overstating the evidence? You decide.
You knew this was probably true: Research…
dmunger | January 2, 2007Chris Chatham's Developing Intelligence, one of my favorite CogSci blogs, is now a member of ScienceBlogs! Chris has a sharp mind, and he's always willing to offer thorough, readable accounts of peer-reviewed research. Now you'll be able to get his insights alongside the other great resources for cognitive and neuroscience we have here at ScienceBlogs. You can see all posts on Brain and Behavior using the Brain and Behavior Channel, or visit the blogs individually via the handy listing in the column over at left. But you'll probably want to start with Chris's latest, a great post on fMRI…
dmunger | December 20, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger and SAT-Challenge co-investigator Chad Orzel has been awarded tenure at Union College. Why not head over there and offer him congratulations? Let's see if we can make his the biggest ScienceBlogs discussion thread ever!
Now get to work updating that bio, Chad!
In other news:
Fascinating fMRI study demonstrating that people who were closer to ground zero on 9/11 have different memories. More on "flashbulb memories" here. Key difference: physical proximity to the actual events.
How to keep memory and mental function working as you age.
The Neurocritic wonders if making…
dmunger | December 19, 2006ScienceBlogs is celebrating its first birthday with a wonderful portrait of the entire ScienceBlogs family. It's not quite a year yet (I think we were officially online on January 11, 2005), but if they're happy to celebrate early, so are we! Greta and I shouldn't be too hard to find in the picture -- but the artwork's a little misleading. Greta looks much better in person, and I look much worse!
It's been a fabulous year, and a wonderful group to work with. In addition to the bloggers, Katherine, Tim, Sarah, and the others who work tirelessly behind the scenes to bring you this site deserve…
dmunger | December 18, 2006The cover story in this month's Scientific American, written by mega-entrepreneur Bill Gates, discusses the future of robotics. In the article Gates describes one of robotics' thorniest problems. Having spent some time working with Lego Mindstorms, I can vouch that it's a tricky one: "how to simultaneously handle all the data coming in from multiple sensors and send the appropriate commands to the robot's motors, a challenge known as concurrency."
Psychologists know the problem by another name: attention. In humans, the problem of attention is so complex that we've barely made headway in…
dmunger | December 15, 2006Psychology Today has a trio of articles relating to crime and justice. The first article is possibly the most interesting. It offers some compelling data on the frequency of false confessions:
Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the number of false confessions nationwide, a review of one decade's worth of murder cases in a single Illinois county found 247 instances in which the defendants' self-incriminating statements were thrown out by the court or found by a jury to be insufficiently convincing for conviction.
The article suggests that low-IQ or drug-addicted suspects…