March 30, 2007
Category: Casual Fridays
This week's Casual Friday study attempted to get to the bottom of the age-old thermostat battle. In every office, classroom, and home, it seems, no one can agree on the proper temperature to set the thermostat. While one person is...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:53 PM • 18 Comments •
March 29, 2007
Category: Research
Earlier today I posted a poll challenging Cognitive Daily readers to show me that they understand error bars -- those little I-shaped indicators of statistical power you sometimes see on graphs. I was quite confident that they wouldn't succeed. Why...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:24 PM • 33 Comments •
Category: General / Site news
Cognitive Daily gets a lot of complaints about graphs, mostly from readers who say the graphs are useless without error bars. My response is that error bars are confusing to most readers. But perhaps I'm wrong about that. Now I'm...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:22 PM • 15 Comments •
Category: News
Computers have become such an integral part of life that it's often tempting to believe that they work just like the human brain (or that the brain works just like a computer). However, those of us who've spent time programming...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 7:59 AM • 2 Comments •
March 28, 2007
Category: News
John Tierney wonders whether doctors should be prosecuted for prescribing too much pain medication. Tierney makes some good points. One "warning sign" that a patient may be abusing drugs is that they come back for a refill early because their...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 11:33 AM • 3 Comments •
March 27, 2007
Category: Research
When we see a familiar face, or even a photo of a favorite car or pet, we're often flooded with memories from our past. Sometimes just seeing a person or object that's similar to the ones in our memory will...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:38 PM • 15 Comments •
Category: News
This week's edition of Encephalon and an email from the Neurophilosopher has reminded me that I've been rather negligent of my blogroll lately. I believe a blogroll should represent the sites a blogger visits frequently; it's an invitation into that...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:12 AM • 2 Comments •
March 26, 2007
Category: News
A rat's brain has millions of neurons, each with up to 10,000 connections to other neurons. This "simple" animal's neural network is mind-bogglingly complex. Yet a Swiss laboratory has achieved remarkable success duplicating a vast region of a rat's brain...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:05 AM • 8 Comments •
March 23, 2007
Category: Casual Fridays
Last weekend Greta and I had a joint party celebrating our fortieth birthdays (my birthday was in January, Greta's is in May, so we split the difference). Naturally, the conversation turned to the changes that occur as we get older....
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:59 PM • 18 Comments •
Category: News
Greta has a jar of candy in her office, and she eats exactly one piece of candy per day (as well as offering it to her students whenever they visit). By contrast, if I have candy within 50 yards of...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:02 AM • 10 Comments •