Enjoy!

-via Neatorama-

There is also an interesting (if you have about 2 hours) debate on youtube with the author and a skeptic or two that was just posted online.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/omnibrain/2011/05/02/psi-a-debate/feed/ 9 http://scienceblogs.com/omnibrain/2011/05/02/so-i-walked-into-the-womens-lo/ http://scienceblogs.com/omnibrain/2011/05/02/so-i-walked-into-the-womens-lo/#comments Mon, 02 May 2011 21:09:59 +0000 The Omnibrain http://scienceblogs.com/omnibrain/2011/05/02/so-i-walked-into-the-womens-lo/ And you can too! All you have to do is win this gorilla costume. This is guaranteed to work in a women’s locker room*. I can’t vouch for its success rate in men’s locker rooms since.. well… I don’t really have to sneak in there. Anyway, all you have to do to have a chance of winning this amazing gorilla suit is to pre-order the new paper back version of Dan Simons’ and Chris Chabris’ book The Invisible Gorilla.

If you’re not into sick horrible ideas like sneaking into locker rooms (because clearly, that is the only thing you could possibly do with that costume) you could also pre-order the book and do the complete opposite – donate to charity. According to the authors:

If you pre-order or purchase the paperback edition of The Invisible Gorilla on or before June 11, 2011, Chris Chabris and Dan Simons will jointly donate $5 to the charity you choose. The charity selected most often at the end of the promotion will receive an additional $2000 donation! We will donate up to a total of $25,000.

Whether you want to be a skeevy (is that spelled right?) locker room peeping tom or a god like charity giving machine you should definitely pre-order the book. I really enjoyed it.

* For this to work the women must be wearing only black shirts or white shirts and be passing two basketballs. In addition, you should make sure the women are counting the passes and have very low working memory capacity.

Also, if you want an idea of what the book is about keep reading…

From the authors website:

Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself-and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, we use a wide assortment of stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to reveal an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.

We combine the work of other researchers with our own findings on attention, perception, memory, and reasoning to reveal how faulty intuitions often get us into trouble. In the process, we explain:

* Why a company would spend billions to launch a product that its own analysts know will fail
* How a police officer could run right past a brutal assault without seeing it
* Why award-winning movies are full of editing mistakes
* What criminals have in common with chess masters
* Why measles and other childhood diseases are making a comeback
* Why money managers could learn a lot from weather forecasters

Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our mind with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.

The Invisible Gorilla reveals the numerous ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s more than a catalog of human failings. In the book, we also explain why people succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. In short, we try to give you a sort of “x-ray vision” into your own minds, with the ultimate goal of helping you notice the invisible gorillas in your own life.

Someone want to build me this table?

I stopped blogging consistently a while back, and it was for a great reason, I promise!

About a year ago, after I passed my prelims, I went on the job market. I interviewed for a couple academic positions (mainly liberal arts) and a number of industry/government jobs. I finally decided to ‘sell out’ and take the applied psychology route. This decision deserves a blog post of its own and over the next couple days I hope to post something about the whole process and why I decided to leave academia.

I ended up taking a job with a very large government organization that employs a number of Human Factors Engineers / Engineering Research Psychologists (there are so many jobs titles for what I do – but these seem to cover a majority of work places). Besides the first couple of months, during which I was honestly pretty bored, I’ve come to really enjoy my job.

My job is to basically use what we know (or more often discover something new) to assist in the design of a large complex system that millions of people interact with and whose lives depend on daily. I realize I said that I’m not the type of psychologist that helps people but I guess that joke came back to bite me in the ass. I guess It could be worse – like me becoming a self-help author. More specifically though, after doing basic vision research for the last 5 or so years, I’ve gotten back to my neuroscience roots. I’ve been establishing a neuroergonomics ‘lab’ to explore a number of physiological measures of performance. I use techniques like, fNIRS and EEG to explore psychological constructs like workload, fatigue, and confusion. I also use sEMG to measure muscle activity in some more classic ergonomics. While this is only marginally psychology – when you go into industry you have to be wiling to be flexible with what you use your scientific skills with.

During the first six months of my job I was also working nights to finish up my Ph.D. I finally headed back to my department a few weeks ago to defend. While I’m happy to announce that I successfully defended, and I can now say “That’s *DR* Asshole to you!”, It was a little bit of a let down – I think they should have abused me more during the defense. This I have to say is my own fault – I picked the greatest group of people anyone could ever have for a committee. My advisor is a super laid-back, supportive, brilliant, and conscientious person. I have worked with some of my committee outside of my dissertation and have nothing but wonderful things to say about them – I’ve learned a lot from them. My committee is also made up of great people and I’m happy that I can call all of them friends. I’ve read (blogs, chronicle, etc.) and heard so many horror stories personally about graduate school that I started to wonder what was wrong with me – grad school was a generally positive experience for me. I guess I could complain about the crappy salary (it wasn’t that bad since my now-wife and I were both able to buy property), and the temporary nature of the job (although some people don’t treat it that way). Anyway, back to the story.

I always had a rule, “No marriage before Ph.D.”

I cut it close. I got my Ph.D. only a few weeks before I got married to a wonderful woman just a few days ago. The planning was stressful and long, but the wedding was perfect.

Now I have a normal job and no crazy after-work requirements like dissertating or wedding planning…. maybe more time for blogging?!

I suspect this is more sensitive to viewpoint than the previous post.

-via BoingBoing-

Here’s some great examples:

Check out bookofjoe for some more examples.

-Via Neatorama-

Anyway, here’s one of my favorite posts from Audrey Lustig:

How do people judge fashion design? Fashion experts are notorious for using vague criteria, saying things like “I know it when I see it.” This kind of response implies that good design can’t be analyzed objectively. In a recent interview, Project Runway’s Tim Gunn even claims that people should avoid consciously analyzing fashion:

Read the rest here and check out all the other great writing.

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