News
dmunger | June 14, 2006Yesterday's Can you hear this post attracted plenty of interest -- apparently nearly all of our readers can hear the ringtone that's supposedly only audible by kids. But two of our commenters noted that the sound published by the New York Times wasn't actually 17 kHz, the range studies have shown kids are sensitive to; it was closer to 15 kHz. So much for trusting the New York Times.
To correct their (and our) error, we convinced our friend Dan Boye, a physicist and professional opera singer, to create a more accurate audio stimulus. The sound file he created has two tones: the first is at 17…
dmunger | June 14, 2006An emailer pointed me to a great description of research on the Aymara language, a language where the metaphoric representation of time is reversed compared to all known languages, claim the researchers. When an Aymara speaker wishes to indicate something in the past, she points ahead of herself, whereas something in the future is gestured by flicking the hand over the shoulder.
Equally fascinating is the article's discussion of how the researchers concluded that the metaphor for time is actually reversed:
There are also in English ambiguous expressions like "Wednesday's meeting was moved…
dmunger | June 13, 2006A new study adds fuel to the notion that older people misremember how happy they were when they were young. What's more, young people mistakenly figure they won't be as happy when they're older.
"People often believe that happiness is a matter of circumstance, that if something good happens, they will experience long-lasting happiness, or if something bad happens, they will experience long-term misery," says lead author Peter Ubel. "But instead, people's happiness results more from their underlying emotional resources -- resources that appear to grow with age. People get better at managing…
dmunger | June 13, 2006I'm blatantly stealing this idea from several other web sites, but clearly this is a topic that's crying for a poll. As Retrospectacle and others have already reported, kids are downloading ringtones that are apparently inaudible to adults, just so they can IM each other in class without the teacher knowing. The New York Times has published the sound itself, and you can listen to it here.
The question: can you hear it? Let us know in the poll!
Update June 14 2:11 p.m.: As two of the commenters below note, this isn't actually a 17 kHz tone as the New York Times claims. To rectify this we've…
dmunger | June 10, 2006Science Magazine is reporting on a new sensor which should help robots achieve a humanlike sense of touch. It's a thin film that can be applied to nearly any surface. When the film touches something, it causes the material to light up. A camera can then record the lighting changes and use them to give highly accurate "touch" feedback.
The idea is to use such an interface for minimally invasive surgery: a small probe could feel inside the human body and determine, for example, whether a tumor is cancerous. But how do you get a camera in there to see what the sensor is feeling?
"There's…
dmunger | June 9, 2006Remember the movie Rain Man, where Dustin Hoffman's character, stricken with autism, was amazingly talented with numbers, able to easily count cards and win a fortune at blackjack?
Researchers have found a way to temporarily duplicate that facility in ordinary individuals. By placing a strong magnet over a particular region of the brain, they in effect simulated one of the symptoms of autism: the ability to put objects into groups. This facilitated brute-force counting, temporarily allowing participants to display amazing counting ability:
The researchers think that by temporally inhibiting…
dmunger | June 8, 2006This one's been linked from all over the net: A Sixth Sense for a Wired World.
The idea is that by implanting a magnet in your fingertip, you're endowed with a "sixth sense," which enables you to detect magnetic fields. Useful for determining if a wire has electric current running through it, or if a hard drive is spinning.
The magnet works by moving very slightly, or with a noticeable oscillation, in response to EM fields. This stimulates the somatosensory receptors in the fingertip, the same nerves that are responsible for perceiving pressure, temperature and pain. Huffman and other…
dmunger | June 8, 2006The Wall Street Journal has an article -- unfortunately behind their subscription paywall -- about how scientific journals appear to be attempting to game the impact factor system which claims to offer an unbiased rating of a journal's influence. The article describes John B. West's experience in publishing a paper:
After he submitted a paper on the design of the human lung to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, an editor emailed him that the paper was basically fine. There was just one thing: Dr. West should cite more studies that had appeared in the respiratory…
dmunger | June 8, 2006The always-excellent Chris Chatham has a thoughtful analysis of the computational model of critical periods of development. This is the idea that there are certain periods during which we are primed to learn particular things. It can explain how we learn language, or learn to walk, or why mathematicians nearly all seem to be child prodigies.
The next phase in the study of critical periods, Chatham argues, is uncovering the mechanism by which they operate. How, exactly, do children learn language at such an astonishing rate, while teaching them to hold a knife and fork properly seems an…
dmunger | June 7, 2006The BBC has a very simple test to determine how happy you are.
I took it and got the following assessment:
Satisfied
People who score in this range like their lives and feel that things are going well. Of course your life is not perfect, but you feel that things are mostly good. Furthermore, just because you are satisfied does not mean you are complacent. In fact, growth and challenge might be part of the reason you are satisfied. For most people in this high-scoring range, life is enjoyable, and the major domains of life are going well - work or school, family, friends, leisure, and personal…
dmunger | June 7, 2006Here's a video of a brain-computer interface that's entering clinical trials. Unlike the MRI interface we reported on last week, this one requires an electrode to be embedded in the user's brain. Still, it offers impressive functionality:
One thing I've always wondered about these crude brain-control interfaces: Wouldn't it be simpler and easier to just use voice control?
(via World of Psychology)
dmunger | June 6, 2006CNN reports on a study which finds that a disproportionate number of first-graders are overweight when they have authoritarian parents -- the most strict form of parenting.
Strict mothers were nearly five times more likely to raise tubby first-graders than mothers who treated their children with flexibility and respect while also setting clear rules.
But while the children of flexible rule-setting moms avoided obesity, the children of neglectful mothers and permissive mothers were twice as likely to get fat.
The article, while somewhat carefully worded, does lapse into the correlation/…
dmunger | June 6, 2006A new longitudinal study suggests that playing online role playing games can help kids prepare for the world of adult responsibility:
Young players who become members of a clan, guild or faction (terminology depends on the game) find they have responsibilities to attend to if they wish to receive any kind of reward, rank advancement or recognition. There are also penalties if they disobey rules or fail to meet commitments. A faction may require the player to participate in missions/quests or other tasks such as mining materials or guarding a prison. Successful missions/quests result in the…
dmunger | June 6, 2006The Eide Neurolearning Blog reports on research suggesting that it's more difficult for highly anxious people to recognize happy facial expressions.
The original research article, by Leah Somerville and colleagues, can be found here.
dmunger | June 5, 2006A new study on mice offers some evidence of the mechanism that causes us to be sleepy after we eat. The research was conducted by a team led by Denis Burdakov:
In their experiments, the researchers engineered mice to produce a fluorescent protein only in orexin neurons. Thus, the researchers could isolate the neurons in brain slices from the mice and perform precise biochemical and electrophysiological studies to explore how glucose acted on those neurons. In particular, the researchers performed experiments in which they exposed the neurons to the subtle changes in glucose levels known to…
dmunger | June 2, 2006The Washington Post reports on the decline of school recess periods:
For many kids today, the recess bell comes too late, for too little time, or even not at all. Pressure to raise test scores and adhere to state-mandated academic requirements is squeezing recess out of the school day. In many schools, it's just 10 or 15 minutes, if at all. In some cases, recess has become structured with organized games -- yes, recess is being taught.
Parents are now fighting back -- armed with evidence from psychologists:
Academics and psychologists who study childhood development are growing concerned…
dmunger | June 1, 2006Cog News has an article about new research on the incidence of face blindness.
"Until a few years ago, only 100 cases of prosopagnosia had been documented worldwide, but it now appears the condition is much less rare than had previously been assumed," says Nakayama, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Testing of 1,600 individuals found that 2 percent of the general public may have face-blindness and a German group has recently made a similar estimate. It's conceivable that millions of people may have symptoms consistent with prosopagnosia,…
dmunger | May 31, 2006Roy Behrens has created a fascinating site analyzing the relationship between Gestalt psychology, cubism, and camoflage used on ships in World War I.
In recent years, it has been verified that prominent French camoufleurs during World War I were consciously, willingly influenced by cubist methods ("In order to completely dissimulate things," wrote French artist Lucien Victor Guirand de Scevola, who commanded the first camouflage unit, "I used the same methods the cubists had used to simulate objects" (Kahn 1984, 19).) But the same cannot be said of Gestalt theory and cubism. As Heider…
dmunger | May 30, 2006According to an article in the New York Times, names of companies that are easier to pronounce lead to higher stock prices.
The researchers ... tested name complexity and the performance of real initial public offerings listed on the New York and American Stock Exchanges. A $1,000 investment in a group of stocks with easy names yielded $112 more in profit than the same investment in a group with difficult names. But the effect began to disappear over time.
The researchers argue that names that are "easier to process" are valued more by purchasers.
dmunger | May 30, 2006When he was a toddler, our son Jim was entranced by Barney the Dinosaur. He'd watch the program for an uninterrupted 30 minutes each day, giving exhausted parents a much-needed chance for a rest, while Jimmy learned important skills such as counting and letters. While the rest was welcome, our belief that the programming was educational might have been misguided. An article in BPS Psychology Digest has the details. Apparently two-year-olds just don't pay attention to instructions transmitted via the TV:
In an initial study by Georgene Troseth and colleagues, two-year-olds told face-to-face…