Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
January 16, 2007
Bora Zivcovic has just accomplished the impossible. He has not only sorted through hundreds of pearls to find those that dazzled most brilliantly, he's also tamed legions of wild rats, herded a flock of irascible cats and squirrels, and done it in just three weeks, all without mixing a single…
January 13, 2007
Here's the Cognitive Daily weekly podcast for January 13. Don't forget that you can subscribe to the podcast using the special RSS feed:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/rss-podcasts.xml
To subscribe using iTunes, select Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu, then paste or type in the…
January 12, 2007
Nonsignificance is the bane of every researcher. They know they've got an effect, but those darned statistics prove otherwise. In cognitive psychology, the standard for significance is p < .05, which means, essentially, that there's a 5 percent chance that the results are simply due to chance,…
January 12, 2007
Thank you to the dozens of readers who took me up on my offer yesterday to give a personal response to every comment or question. As of this writing, I've got two comments left to respond to, and at that point I'm going to declare the offer expired (no complaints--you had your chance! And I've got…
January 11, 2007
Over the past year, CogDaily has had about 400,000 unique visits. During that same time, we've received 3,075 comments. Wow! We're humbled by those numbers. Yet simple division reveals that fewer than 1 in 100 visits actually results in a comment. There must be hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of…
January 10, 2007
We've written a lot about video games and aggression here on CogDaily, and typically there has been heated discussion about the results. Why, commenters ask, aren't you talking about aggression in football players, or road rage, or in any of a thousand other situations? The most important reason is…
January 10, 2007
For some reason I can't resist watching Steve Jobs' Apple keynote speeches. I watched six years ago when he introduced the iPod, and I watched again last night when he introduced his latest "revolutionary" product. People were amazed when the iPod was introduced -- but a little shocked by the price…
January 9, 2007
In movie fight scenes, punches often miss by a foot or more, but when sound effects are added, and the punchee adds an effective-looking recoil, we're convinced that the punch is "real." We've posted on this phenomenon before: when a "click" sound is played as two animated balls pass by each other…
January 9, 2007
Eric Schwitzgebel has just completed an exhaustive study of the behavior of ethicists. He had noticed that a large number of ethics books seemed to be missing from research libraries across the nation. Rather than leave that observation in anecdotal form, he began a systematic analysis of the data…
January 8, 2007
Gualtiero Piccinini writes:
I always put my papers online. I used to publish online a penultimate version, under the assumption that since it's not identical to the published version, it's ok. Lately, taking a cue from the copyright form of Australasian Journal of Philosophy, I've started posting…
January 8, 2007
Jake Mandell, creator of the Tone Deafness Test we discussed on Cognitive Daily, has now posted the results of that study and two others on musical perception:
Effects of musical training:
Subjects who report more years of musical training do better on the musical tests than those who have less…
January 7, 2007
Here's the Cognitive Daily weekly podcast for January 7. Don't forget that you can subscribe to the podcast using the special RSS feed:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/rss-podcasts.xml
To subscribe using iTunes, select Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu, then paste or type in the…
January 5, 2007
We've been doing a lot of social psychology on Casual Fridays lately, what with gift preferences and email sign-offs. So this week we thought we'd get back to basic perception research. We'll see if we can uncover fundamental perceptual differences with a simple online test. I can't tell you much…
January 5, 2007
Greta and I will be at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference two weeks from now at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
An impressive list of bloggers and journalists will be attending, but there are still a few slots left, so if your weekend is still open, you might want to…
January 4, 2007
This year's collegiate national football championship will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, at the usual home of the Arizona Cardinals. Neither competitor, Florida or Ohio State, is playing on its home field, so in principle the game should be an even match. Indeed, neither team has lost a home game…
January 4, 2007
Here's a fun little item, via Digg:
Squinting reduces the amount of peripheral light coming into the eye so that a greater percentage of light comes from the center of the visual field.
Important note: It's wrong to to say that "'squinting squishes the eyeball slightly to correct for a focus point…
January 3, 2007
Watch the quick video below. First you'll fixate on a small dot in the middle of the screen. Then you'll get a visual cue which serves to direct your attention to a particular location. Simultaneously, four letter Os, each colored red or green, will appear. Your task is to say, as quickly as…
January 3, 2007
Last summer, we participated in the Donors Choose challenge, which enabled us to help kids learn science by contributing to specific projects to classrooms in need. With help from our readers, we raised over $2,500, and ScienceBlogs as a whole raised over $34,000. Today, we got our thank you!…
January 2, 2007
Chris Chatham's Developing Intelligence, one of my favorite CogSci blogs, is now a member of ScienceBlogs! Chris has a sharp mind, and he's always willing to offer thorough, readable accounts of peer-reviewed research. Now you'll be able to get his insights alongside the other great resources for…
January 2, 2007
I was on the way out the door for a vacation when the journal Nature published its much-anticipated report on the results of its open peer review experiment, but I did want to offer a few comments on the report, even if I'm arriving to the discussion a bit late.
Peer review, of course, is the gold…
December 31, 2006
Here's the Cognitive Daily weekly podcast for December 31 (one day late -- sorry, we're just back from vacation!). Don't forget that you can subscribe to the podcast using the special RSS feed:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/rss-podcasts.xml
To subscribe using iTunes, select Subscribe to…
December 23, 2006
Here's the Cognitive Daily weekly podcast for December 23. Don't forget that you can subscribe to the podcast using the special RSS feed:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/rss-podcasts.xml
To subscribe using iTunes, select Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu, then paste or type in the…
December 22, 2006
So it's December 22, and you are one of the few people who hasn't already bagged out of work to get ready for the holidays. You've been absolutely deluged -- swamped with work -- the entire month of December. You've hardly had time to think about Christmas, let alone shop. But now, with the holiday…
December 21, 2006
Take a look at these two images. Do they belong in the same category or different categories?
You say the same? Wrong -- they're different! The one on the right is a little blurrier.
What about these two?
These are in the same category. Sure, the one on the right is still blurrier, but now it…
December 20, 2006
Fellow ScienceBlogger and SAT-Challenge co-investigator Chad Orzel has been awarded tenure at Union College. Why not head over there and offer him congratulations? Let's see if we can make his the biggest ScienceBlogs discussion thread ever!
Now get to work updating that bio, Chad!
In other news:…
December 19, 2006
As parents of a 15-year-old, Greta and I are very interested in what causes people to behave aggressively. We know a lot about specific causes of aggression -- violent media, testosterone, guns, and personal insults can all lead to aggressive behavior in certain circumstances. But kids and others…
December 19, 2006
ScienceBlogs is celebrating its first birthday with a wonderful portrait of the entire ScienceBlogs family. It's not quite a year yet (I think we were officially online on January 11, 2005), but if they're happy to celebrate early, so are we! Greta and I shouldn't be too hard to find in the picture…
December 18, 2006
The cover story in this month's Scientific American, written by mega-entrepreneur Bill Gates, discusses the future of robotics. In the article Gates describes one of robotics' thorniest problems. Having spent some time working with Lego Mindstorms, I can vouch that it's a tricky one: "how to…
December 16, 2006
Here's the Cognitive Daily weekly podcast for December 16. Don't forget that you can subscribe to the podcast using the special RSS feed:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/rss-podcasts.xml
To subscribe using iTunes, select Subscribe to Podcast from the Advanced menu, then paste or type in the…
December 15, 2006
Yesterday's report on gift preferences was the inspiration for this week's study. Are some types of gifts simply inappropriate? If it seems clear that not much thought went into a particular gift, does that make it less "special"?
Or does the simple fact that a gift was given make up for any faux…