News
dmunger | November 8, 2006Barry Schwartz has an interesting op-ed in yesterday's New York Times, where he claims that basic psychology leads us to choose bland representatives in government instead of fiery leaders.
Schwartz argues that how we choose leaders depends on the framing of the question. If we focus on the positives of a candidate, we're more likely to choose a more interesting, dynamic leader:
What that means is that if you want to win an election, you need to find candidates like [bland] Parent A, who give us no reason to say no, rather than Parent B, who present a complex set of features, some attractive…
dmunger | November 6, 2006If I get a phone call from a solicitor asking me to support my local fire department or the search for the cure for cancer, I refuse to give. If a live person shows up at my door asking me to donate to a worthy cause, I nearly always give something. Am I behaving irrationally? Surely seeking donations via the telephone is more efficient than traipsing door-to-door. Shouldn't I support the charities that are most efficient?
Tim Harford of Slate argues that such behavior on my part demonstrates that my charitable giving isn't truly altruistic. Indeed, the most altruistic donor would realize…
dmunger | November 3, 2006Although alcohol consumption plays a role in about 31 percent of homicides, only 1.4 percent of TV news reports on murders mention alcohol. Only 12.8 percent of TV news stories on traffic accidents mention alcohol, while 34 percent of accidents involve drunk drivers. I've often wondered why people who've consumed many drinks still drive at high speeds, where at best they're likely to get caught for drunk driving, and perhaps this is part of the reason.
An Ohio State press release describes the study, conducted by Michael Slater, Marilee Long, and Valerie Ford:
They used statistics from the…
dmunger | November 2, 2006When you're out of work, or you're so poor that you don't have enough money for basic necessities of life, one of the most devastating effects isn't so much physical discomfort, it's mental anguish. If you're not getting enough to eat, or don't have a place to sleep, you can still survive for weeks, even years, but the mental strain of poverty can eat away at the remaining shreds of dignity.
That's why identifying the particular traits that lead to or alleviate the debilitating mental problems stemming from poverty is so important. BPS Research Digest discusses a recent study led by Johnny…
dmunger | October 30, 2006Yesterday I spent a delightful several hours having lunch with Chris Mooney (of Seed, Scienceblogs, and war on science fame) and attending his talk in Durham, NC. I also got to meet fellow ScienceBloggers Abel Pharmboy and Coturnix.
At lunch, the conversation centered on a favorite topic here at ScienceBlogs, Science Journalism. Chris made what I felt was a very cogent point which explains the Greg Easterbrook phenomenon: from the perspective of the top magazines, good science journalism is journalism that makes a controversial point. Easterbrook provides controversy, so he keeps getting…
dmunger | October 26, 2006The New York Times has an article on the most recent stereotype threat research: Women perform worse on math tests when they are first told that men are better at math. When they are told that men and women are equal, they perform equally. Unfortunately, the report in Science on which the article is based is locked behind a paywall. Fortunately, you can find some of Heine's research materials, including the essays used to remind women of stereotype threat here.
Also, Cognitive Daily has reported on similar research:
Learning about stereotypes reduces their threat
The negative impact of…
dmunger | October 25, 2006The Social Science Statistics blog (new to me, but it's been around for a while) has a good writeup of a 2002 study by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch which systematically examines the effectiveness of deadlines in preventing procrastination:
They randomized participants into three categories: three evenly-spaced deadlines every 7 days; an end-deadline after 21 days; or a self-imposed schedule of deadlines within a three week period.
Which one would you select if you could? Maybe the end-deadline because it gives you the most flexibility in arranging the work (similar to a final exam or…
dmunger | October 23, 2006Winners of mid-sized lottery prizes are happier than losers -- or those winning small prizes -- even over the long term.
Chris Chatham reviews a review of the research on Theory of Mind, the science of understanding how people understand the minds of others.
Tom Keane argues that bridges should not be made suicide proof, as this will only shift the problem elsewhere while ruining the beauty of bridges.
John Grohol argues that bridges should have suicide barriers, because they can save lives.
For more great posts, visit Encephalon 9, a roundup of the best neuroscience posts over the last two…
dmunger | October 22, 2006If the human eye was a digital camera, how many megapixels would it have?
Clarkvision does the calculations.
The answer: 576 megapixels.
Impressive job -- I wish I had thought to do that. Note that their calculations require a bit of fudging: the fovea actually covers just a tiny bit of the visual field; the eye must move from point to point in order to assemble an image this detailed. A digital camera records all the pixels at the same time. For the photographically inclined, the article also goes on to make several other camera/eye calculations.
A separate question: could a 576 megapixel…
dmunger | October 19, 2006The idea of a distinct "internet addiction" problem separate from, say, compulsive gambling or obsession with pornography isn't especially new. It's been studied since at least 1999, and we reported on one attempt to describe it in 2004.
Yet in the U.S., there has been no serious effort to quantify it until now. A new study of over 2,500 adults has found some dramatic results:
13.7 percent (more than one out of eight respondents) found it hard to stay away from the Internet for several days at a time
12.4 percent stayed online longer than intended very often or often
12.3 percent had seen a…
dmunger | October 18, 2006Apropos of our discussion yesterday of the pros and cons of open access publishing, I'd like to point you to a great resource: the Directory of Open Access Journals.
The Directory of Open Access Journals ... covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 2417 journals in the directory. Currently 709 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 118146 articles are included in the DOAJ service.
The psychology section lists 56 journals, though some of our favorite open access journals such as the…
dmunger | October 17, 2006Jake Young has written an excellent summary of a panel discussion he attended at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, as it presents a fascinating interplay of the forces at work in academic publishing. But if Jake's synopsis is too much for you, here's a quick summary of the issues involved:
The current "market-based" scholarly publishing system is primarily paid for by governments: Researchers and libraries get grants, and the grants pay for subscriptions to journals.
This system limits access: not everyone has access to libraries, and not all…
dmunger | October 16, 2006The BPS Research Digest is reporting on a new article by Satoshi Kanozawa, who claims that the poor economic conditions and short life expectancy in many developing countries can be explained by low IQ.
The economic historian Richard Wilkinson has argued that economic inequality leads to shorter life expectancy because being at the bottom of the social pile puts people under prolonged stress. But Kanazawa rejects this hypothesis. He argues his data show that once population IQ is taken into account, a country's average life expectancy is no longer related to economic development and…
dmunger | October 12, 2006Yahoo! reports on a new study sponsored by Apple to help sell 30-inch monitors:
The study, which evaluated Apple's 30-inch Apple Cinema Display, concluded that large screens can offer gains of up to 50 percent to 65 percent in productivity on a variety of specific office tasks and can earn back their extra costs in time savings over several years. The 30-in. display costs $1,999.
So if all you do all day is copy spreadsheet data from one window to another, a shiny new monitor could help you do your job a whole lot faster. On the other hand, if that's the entire substance of your job, you're…
dmunger | October 9, 2006
Greetings, prospective students and parents!
I'll be your tour guide today as we explore the mind-opening campus of Encephalon U, one of the most esteemed liberal arts colleges in the nation. As you know, Encephalon U's admission requirements are extremely strict, so I certainly hope you've already taken the SAT Test. Did you realize that some of the world's foremost research on the SAT has been conducted here on our own campus, by Professors Munger and Orzel. Of course, Munger and Orzel have differing opinions on the results. While Orzel believes they demonstrate that high school students…
dmunger | October 5, 2006From CNN: Apparently scientists have actually teleported a relatively large object.
The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.
"Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams, but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.
"Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer…
dmunger | October 5, 2006Chris Chatham on the relationship between psychology and neuroscience
Why healthy people call in sick for work
Excellent long analysis of Isabel Peretz's "The Nature of Music from a biological perspective"
For the attention-impaired: Excellent, shorter analysis of the above analysis
Hey, we've got something to say about Peretz, too!
More discussion on the nature of music
Related but different: Figure out how to quantify people's tastes and win a million bucks
Update: A bonus link, which offers some support for something my 14-year-old son has been saying for a long time:
The Daily Show just…
dmunger | September 26, 2006I've just learned about what so far look to be two great new blogs. In the order I heard about them:
Sound and Mind
Written by two cognitive musicologists, "Sound and Mind will primarily provide links to articles in journals and blogs on music and cognitive science, commentary on those articles, and a forum for discussion of these articles and other topics of interest amongst cognitive musicologists. Sound and Mind also features a podcast, in conjuncture with the Am Steg podcast, which will review books and articles and discuss issues of relevance to cognitive musicologists, as well as other…
dmunger | September 26, 2006My aunt Jeannie died of brain cancer when she was just in her 30s. Though her death was tragic, her illness did allow me to witness firsthand a most curious vision impairment. A few months after her cancer was diagnosed, she suffered a stroke in her right visual cortex. Since the visual cortex in some ways serves as a mirror image of the area we're looking at, this meant that she had a very large blind spot covering most of the left side of her field of vision.
This cortical blindness is different from other sorts of blindness, because the viewer doesn't perceive that something is "missing"…
dmunger | September 20, 2006Encephalon, the biweekly neuroscience carnival, will be hosted at Omnibrain this week. Send in links to your favorite neuroscience posts, pronto! Don't wait, or you'll forget, like I usually do!