October 31, 2007
Category: Attention • Perception • Research
Does this ever happen to you? You're preparing green beans to be cooked, putting the stems in the trash and the beans in a bowl. Suddenly you realize you've started putting the stems in the bowl. The dinner guests will...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:32 PM • 37 Comments
October 30, 2007
Category: General / Site news
Updated 5:35 p.m. EDT on 10/30/07: Psych for Seniors Part I is now fully funded, with over $400 in donations today! Let's get Part II funded! There are just two days left in our DonorsChoose Challenge to raise money for...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 7:30 AM • 0 Comments
October 29, 2007
Category: General / Site news
We're pleased to announce that BPR3's Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research icons are now ready to go! Anyone can use these icons to show when they're making a serious post about peer-reviewed research, rather than just linking to a news...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 8:56 AM • 10 Comments
October 26, 2007
Category: Fun and games
Here are a few neat optical illusions. 1. Multi-colored X? (via Grand Illusions) It appears that the X is two different colors, but it's actually made using just one shade of pink. (more below)...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:02 PM • 2 Comments
October 25, 2007
Category: Emotion • Music • Research
Take a look at these schematic faces: Just a few simple changes to the mouth and eyebrows can create faces depicting a wide array of emotions. Face 1, for example, is clearly quite happy, and face 12 is sad. Face...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:28 PM • 14 Comments
Category: In other news
ScienceBloggers Walk Down Memory Lane This is the geek equivalent of "when I was your age I used to walk to six miles school barefoot -- in the snow -- uphill both ways!" Daylight Savings Time worse than previously...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:21 PM • 0 Comments
October 24, 2007
Category: News
The way subliminal advertising is portrayed in movies and hyped in some media outlets, briefly and imperceptibly flashing a brand name during a TV show can turn people into mindless cyborgs who can't resist the urge to shop at a...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 1:54 PM • 12 Comments
October 23, 2007
Category: Development / Aging • Language • Research
When Jim was about 13 months old, I happened to be enrolled in a graduate level developmental psychology class. Our big term paper assignment involved observing two children at different developmental stages. I decided it would be cool to do...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:52 PM • 11 Comments
October 22, 2007
Category: In other news
Encephalon 34 is ready to go at Distributed Neuron N Skills Every Scientist Should Have Help Chad come up with a list of the most important skills for scientists Some tips for putting together a Behavioral Science grant proposal...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:25 PM • 0 Comments
Category: General / Site news
As promised, Greta and I have given our first matching gift to the Donors Choose challenge. We donated $103 as our 10 percent match for the $1,039 that had already been donated. We decided to donate to the two most...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 8:33 AM • 2 Comments
October 19, 2007
Category: Casual Fridays
With hundreds of seemingly worthy charities out there, how do we decide which ones to donate to? Even if we eliminate charities that aren't effective, there are still too many choices, and too little money, to donate to all of...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 5:07 PM • 4 Comments
Category: News
Here's an interesting article about the wisdom of crowds. It starts by discussing the surprising accuracy of Wikipedia. The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is (and the reason that living organisms are as sophisticated as they are),...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 10:09 AM • 22 Comments
October 18, 2007
Category: In other news
60 percent of Neuroscience conference authors only present one paper in five years Book Review - On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society Is it possible that most soldiers only rarely use their...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:24 PM • 0 Comments
Category: News
According to a report in the New York Times, frequently-used words evolve more slowly than rarely used ones: Some words evolve rapidly, with a result that there are many different word forms, what linguists call cognates, for meanings across languages....
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Posted by Dave Munger at 8:31 AM • 6 Comments
October 17, 2007
Category: Opinion
John Mashey made a comment over at Deltoid that was so incisive, Tim Lambert decided to turn it into a post of its own. In the comment/post, Mashey outlines several steps scientists can take to pressure reporters to do a...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:44 AM • 22 Comments
October 16, 2007
Category: Reasoning • Research • Social
Does religion increase "virtuous" behavior? So far the research on the topic has been inconclusive. A big problem with most studies is that they tend to be correlational. For example, religious people are more likely to say they are willing...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:41 PM • 21 Comments