September 29, 2006
Category: Casual Fridays
We are nearly finished grading the 109 entries for the Blogger SAT Challenge. Chad Orzel has designed a way for our readers to view and rate the essays themselves, but it's not quite ready yet. We're going to take the...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:37 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Research
Occasionally you read a journal article so well-titled, you have to steal it for your blog post title. "Smells Like Clean Spirit" is a report by Rob Holland, Merel Hendricks, and Henk Aarts, in which they use smells to unconsciously...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 8:40 AM • 5 Comments •
September 27, 2006
Category: Research
Thousands of police departments use face composite software to help create a picture of crime suspects. You've probably seen one of the systems in use on TV: witnesses build a picture of the suspect by choosing each individual facial...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:37 AM • 5 Comments •
September 26, 2006
Category: News
I'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...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:23 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: News
My 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,...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 6:36 AM • 4 Comments •
September 22, 2006
Category: Casual Fridays
Musical complexity is bafflingly difficult to define. Is it just a lot of notes? Would a 100-note trill (the same two notes alternating over and over again) be more complex than 50 completely random notes? Most people would probably say...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 11:22 AM • 11 Comments •
September 21, 2006
Category: Casual Fridays
The data-collection phase of the SAT Challenge is complete. By any measure, this was the most successful Casual Friday ever. We maxed out the generous 500 responses I allotted for the challenge, the most ever responses to a Casual Friday...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 6:45 AM • 26 Comments •
September 20, 2006
Category: News
Encephalon, 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!...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:23 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Research
In 2001, Mark Orr and Stellan Ohlsson found that experts preferred more complex bluegrass music compared to non-experts, but there was no difference in preferences with jazz music. The model they were using to describe music preferences did not appear...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:23 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: News
Simon Owens has posted the results of his survey of diversity in the blogosphere at his site Bloggasm. Here are the results for the blogosphere as a whole: Male: 69% Female: 31% *** White/Caucasian/European: 73% Black/African: 9% Asian: 10% Middle...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 6:34 AM • 0 Comments •