Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
May 4, 2007
They say exercise can help you lose weight. What they didn't tell you is how much exercise.
A new study offers the depressing truth: more than you ever imagined. Thousands of volunteers reported their weight and exercise regimens over a seven-year period. Here are the results:
25-to-34-year-old men…
May 4, 2007
Cognitive Daily now has a facebook profile.
I've never done facebook and I don't know how active this will be, but perhaps some of our readers are facebook users and this will be a way for you to connect with each other. There's also a ScienceBlogs fan club on facebook, so that's another way to get…
May 3, 2007
How many moving objects can you keep track of at once? Clicking on the image below will take you to Lana M. Trick's web site, where she has a nifty demo of a multi-object tracking task. You're asked to keep track one to four of the smiley-faces as they move randomly around the screen. Then when the…
May 3, 2007
Fellow ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer has a nice article on the new respect cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have for emotion. Here's an excerpt:
Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide:…
May 2, 2007
Yesterday the preeminent socially generated news site, digg.com, nearly exploded. The way the site is supposed to work is that users submit links to stories (and web sites, photos, and videos) they think will be interesting, and others give those stories a thumbs-up (a "digg") or thumbs-down. If…
May 1, 2007
Kevin Granata, one of the authors of the work described here, was killed in in the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.
A back injury can destroy a person's life. The pain can be so excruciating that even "passive" activities like sitting up to read a book become intolerable. Whether you…
May 1, 2007
This month's issue of Seed magazine features an interview, or really more of a discussion between music researcher Daniel Levitin and David Byrne. Even better, you can read the whole article online!
Byrne has been one of my musical heroes for decades now, and Levitin is a phenomenal researcher who…
April 30, 2007
Context. It can make all the difference in the world. The word "suck" can describe the action of a vacuum cleaner or a sex act that was illegal in the state of North Carolina until 2003.
Following our analysis of last Friday's curse word study, several of the commenters pointed out that without the…
April 30, 2007
The post on showing only part of the RSS feeds has attracted quite a lot of attention, including some rather strident comments, such as this one from "Aurora":
How lazy are some people? What kind of society do we live in where people are too f**ing annoyed to click a mouse button to read an entire…
April 30, 2007
I know, I know, I promised more analysis of the results from last Friday's curse word study, but I haven't gotten to it yet. Busy, busy, busy. In the meantime, you can head over to Word Munger and read about my hike in Mount Rogers Wilderness last week (click on the photo!):
I should have a post…
April 27, 2007
Last week's Casual Fridays study was the most popular ever: Despite its grueling 58-question length, over 750 respondents completed the entire thing. We got so much data on foul language that I probably won't finish writing all of it up today.
As you might suspect, in reporting these results it's…
April 27, 2007
Very young children learn better from photos. When they are read to from a picture book describing how to make a rattle, 18-months-old do better at trying to make the rattle when the book had realistic photos compared to line drawings. I've always found instructions that use photos very difficult…
April 26, 2007
There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if you consistently look at the person you speak to, you will have much more social influence over that person than you…
April 26, 2007
When Shelley Batts wrote up a report on an article about antioxidants in fruits, she never expected to get contacted by the copyright police, but that's exactly what happened. She had reproduced a table and a figure from the article, and got this notice from an editorial assistant at the publisher…
April 25, 2007
Last week's Casual Fridays study filled up so quickly that many of those who wanted to participate weren't able to. This was due to our survey provider's limits on the number of responses. After a preliminary look at the data, it does look like it would be helpful if we could get more respondents…
April 24, 2007
The Beck effect is difficult to replicate online, because it involves testing reaction times. However, I think I've figured out a way to approximate the effect. This movie (Quicktime required) will show you how it works. Just follow the directions on the opening screen:
Now, which letter did you…
April 24, 2007
Penalty kicks are nearly universally reviled among soccer fans, yet they remain an important part of the game. The sport is so exhausting that extending it beyond 30 minutes of extra time in a playoff game could be dangerous for the players. Typically in playoff or championship matches, tie games…
April 23, 2007
One of the most hated practices on the Internet is the breaking of articles into pages. Jason Kottke swearingly rants against it here, and Mike Davidson denounces the practice here. I don't much like the practice either, especially when a short, pointless article is broken into four or more pages (…
April 20, 2007
Update: New version of the study is up here!
#@*& it if I couldn't come up with a shorter Casual Friday study this week. When we started doing Casual Fridays a year and a half ago, the goal was to keep them short -- less than five questions, if possible. They've gradually expanded from week to…
April 19, 2007
While the debate over guns and gun control has taken center stage on ScienceBlogs, ultimately there's a human pulling the trigger. The New York Times has an interesting article about the problems getting troubled students to seek help before they harm themselves or others. The facts about college…
April 18, 2007
One "trick" dieters often use is to put their food on a smaller plate. The idea is to fool yourself into thinking you're eating more food than you really are. But doesn't our stomach tell us how full we are?
Actually, it doesn't. Brian Wansink has devoted his career to studying how perception of…
April 18, 2007
Madam Fathom has an excellent discussion of nicotine's effect on the brain and cognitive function. First off, I've rarely seen a clearer explanation of how neurons actually work:
Neurons are functionally integrated in expansive neural networks, with each neuron receiving up to thousands of inputs…
April 17, 2007
Earlier today I wrote a post about optical illusions. I was hoping it would distract me from thinking about the Virginia Tech shootings. It didn't. I began to see connections between the illusions and the tragedy: That sinking feeling that somebody was being shot, that spiral like a gun sight.
The…
April 17, 2007
Tired of depressing news? Take a break and look at some optical illusions!
For more, visit SandLot Science.
Haven't seen enough illusions? There are more below!
Q: How many spirals are in this picture?
A: None
For more, visit Michael Bach's illusion page.
Akiyoshi's got a new one:
For more,…
April 16, 2007
Today at least 31 people were killed by gunfire at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in senseless violence. Early reports suggest that the perpetrator was a boyfriend of a Virginia Tech student who was "looking for his girlfriend."
But whatever the proximal cause of this tragedy, the larger question…
April 16, 2007
How many hours did you spend watching TV news coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks on that day?* Now, did you have dreams about it in the following days and weeks?
According to a newly published study, the more hours you spent watching news coverage, the more likely you were to have…
April 13, 2007
There was a lot of talk on the ScienceBlogs back channel last week about Mike Dunford's post on President Bush's wrangling with Congress over funding the Iraq war. The post attracted a lot of attention, including many comments from readers who claimed Dunford didn't "support the troops." If they…
April 13, 2007
A good friend of mine was a bank manager for many years. He told me that robberies are much more common than you might think: bank employees are trained to comply with robbers' demands, minimizing losses by keeping relatively small amounts of cash in their drawers. Typical training also suggests…
April 12, 2007
Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. "Brain fitness" products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There's even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can…
April 12, 2007
Yesterday, we conducted a poll asking how often our readers would give money to truly talented street performers. The poll was in response to a Washington Post experiment where world-famous violinist Joshua Bell performed in a subway station for 45 minutes and only earned $32, an amount that would…