dmunger | September 26, 2008Last week we sought to uncover the truth behind the stereotype: Are Prius owners really just like Mac owners? In a non-scientific fashion, we quizzed our readers about several of the most common stereotypes that seem to follow these two trendy groups: They're arrogant, they think they're better informed than the rest of us, not to mention smarter, more attractive, and more concerned about the environment. They're Obama-supporting, latte-drinking, iPhone-toting snobs who always favor style over substance. Or are they?
Over 1,600 readers responded to our survey -- the most responses to a Casual…
dmunger | September 25, 2008Notwithstanding the cute pictures from yesterday's post, Jim is now nearly seventeen years old. He's taller than me, has a beard, and is much less interested in having his photo taken, so I don't have any recent pictures. He also plays a mean bass guitar, and he's in a band, which means -- you guessed it -- girls have started taking an interest in him.
Of course we've explained to him the basics of sex, including contraception and preventing sexually transmitted diseases, but we always wonder whether we've done enough. If you're a parent (or a son or daughter) who's had one of these…
dmunger | September 24, 2008When Jimmy and Nora were toddlers, we bought them great little plastic scooters to ride around the house. They were the perfect size for a small child. Yet Jimmy preferred to ride around on a plastic garbage truck instead, despite the fact that there was no steering wheel and the "seat" wasn't nearly as comfortable, at least to our adult eyes:
We figured this behavior was just one of Jimmy's unique quirks. It didn't really bother us, except for the knowledge that we could have saved 20 bucks on the "real" scooter if we'd only known he would end up preferring the garbage truck.
In 2003, Judy…
dmunger | September 22, 2008You might think the zoo is an odd place for psychology bloggers to meet up. But on Saturday not only did Greta and I get a chance to connect with some of our readers and fellow bloggers, we also received some fascinating insight into the psychology of zookeeping. Our group toured the North Carolina Zoo, led by Jayne Owen Parker, Ph.D., the Director of Conservation Education of the Zoo Society.
As we strolled from exhibit to exhibit and listened to Jayne's comments, we were struck by how frequently psychology enters into the daily routine of managing a zoo. Through operant conditioning, the…
dmunger | September 19, 2008A few days ago I noticed a comment on an online forum: "Prius owners are just like Mac owners." As a Mac owner and Prius owner, I felt that this comment needlessly stereotyped me. Were they implying that there was something wrong with me? That I was superficial? That I thought I was better than other people? On the other hand, as a Mac owner and a Prius owner, wasn't I confirming the stereotype?
Perhaps there is something to this stereotype, and Casual Friday may be just the time to find out. I've created a brief survey that asks you a few questions about your car, your computer, and your…
dmunger | September 17, 2008One of Jimmy's favorite toys as a toddler was a simple little bucket of blocks. There were three shapes: a rectangular prism, a triangular prism, and a cylinder. The bucket's lid had three holes: a square, a triangle, and a circle (The picture at right was the only one I could find online -- this sort of toy has gotten much fancier in recent years).
For an adult, it's a simple matter to properly sort the shapes by placing them into the corresponding holes, but for a toddler, it's a real challenge. It took months before Jim was able to put any of the blocks through the holes, despite…
dmunger | September 16, 2008Greta and I will be at the North Carolina Zoo this coming Saturday, September 20, to meet with readers and practically all of the North Carolina ScienceBloggers. We've arranged a special tour of the zoo with an expert member of the zoo staff, a party afterwards at a local watering hole, and now, ScienceBlogs will provide tickets to the zoo too!
Not only will Greta and I be there, you can also meet Bora Zivkovic, Sheril Kirshenbaum, James Hrynyshyn, Abel PharmBoy, ScienceWoman, Kevin Zelnio, SciCurious, and Russ Williams, along with many of our kids!
This party is one of several taking place…
dmunger | September 15, 2008If you're like me, your eyes might have glazed over just a bit at the fields of red and blue text generated by ScienceDebate 2008. Obviously these issues are important, but a quick cut-and-paste job into my word processor reveals that the two candidates have written over 12,000 words in response to the 14 questions! Let's distill that information into slightly more digestible chunks.
1. Innovation
Obama: More money for schools, more NSF Fellowships, extend R&D tax credit for business.
McCain: White House Science and Tech adviser, Fund research (no specifics on how).
The Skinny: Obama has…
dmunger | September 15, 2008It's now taken as a given that the musical score of a movie can have huge influence on our perception of the movie. From the pulsating terror achieved in films like Psycho and Jaws, to the triumphant victories in Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean, it's hard to think about a great film without also being influenced by that film's score. Music is such an important aspect of film that when a group of students was asked to rate the emotions evoked by music in six film excerpts, only a third of them noticed that all the film clips had no music. This was on a multiple choice test, where the…
dmunger | September 12, 2008Last week we asked readers how much sleep they lost staying up to watch the political coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions, and how that compared to the sleep they lost a few weeks earlier watching the coverage of the Beijing Olympics.
Do people stay up later to watch politics, or sports? Or are sports fans less likely to watch politics, and vice versa?
First off, let's take a look at how much sleep was lost overall.
The Olympics were clearly a much bigger diversion than politics, with an average of an hour lost sleep per night for those who watched during the first week.…
dmunger | September 11, 2008One big problem with many of the studies of video game violence is that they compare different games. Sure, people might behave more aggressively after playing Carmaggeddon instead of Tetris -- they're completely different games! What would be more impressive is if we could simply remove some of the violence from a game and see if the violence itself -- rather than, say, the game's storyline -- is what's actually the root of the aggressive behavior.
Fortunately, the standard settings of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance allowed a team led by Christopher Barlett to do just that.
They had avid…
dmunger | September 8, 2008Take a look at these pictures.
Each picture depicts four shapes -- irregular vertical columns spanning the height of the picture. It's easy to tell which letter is on a column and which is not, right? If our readers are typical, over 90 percent would agree that a is on a column and b is not. But why? The space defined by the irregular vertical lines is equal in both cases. The only difference between the two figures is which direction the "pointy" curves face and which direction the convex, "smooth" curves face. Yet nearly everyone agrees that areas defined by the convex curves (like those…
dmunger | September 5, 2008I've been dragging for the last few days -- I just can't seem to resist watching the latest speeches from the Republican National Convention. I was similarly distracted by the Democratic Convention last week. It's affected my sleep habits: I got 1 to 2 hours less sleep than normal each night I stayed up to watch the politicians pontificate.
Greta, on the other hand, is content to watch the wrap-up coverage on the news the next morning while she works out on the treadmill. But even Greta couldn't resist the temptation of another recent event: the Olympic Games in Beijing. For the first week of…
dmunger | September 3, 2008You may have heard of the idea that people can only remember seven things at a time -- a seven-digit phone number, a license-plate, etc. While the size of working memory actually varies from person to person (it usually ranges from 6 to 8 items), and while people can use strategies like "chunking" to remember more, this observation is basically true.
Except when it's not true. In the 1970s, researchers found that there are actually at least two different and distinct areas of working memory, each with its own separate capacity. One is called the "phonological loop" and is used for recall of…
dmunger | September 2, 2008Over the weekend we finished transferring ResearchBlogging.org from its dependably quirky old home to sleek new digs. If you haven't visited the site in the past 72 hours, you should definitely head over to take a look -- or even if you have, you should go back again, since dozens of new posts have been added over the weekend. In addition to a fantastic redesign, the site has tons of new features.
We've been working for the last six months with Seed Media Group, who has generously donated hundreds of hours of project management, site design, and development from their expert SMG Technology…
dmunger | September 2, 2008On Saturday, September 20, the action in North Carolina will be at the Asheboro zoo. All the North Carolina ScienceBloggers will be there, and you can too -- there will be a guided tour of the zoo led by one of their staffers, a get-together afterwards with tons of zoo staffers and volunteers, and food and beverages at a local watering hole later!
This is all in celebration of ScienceBlogs' millionth comment, which, if all goes as expected, will be appearing on one of our blogs sometime in the next two weeks. If you don't live in North Carolina, you can meet Sciblings and fellow-readers at…
dmunger | August 29, 2008I've always been a fan of literary studies -- I was an English major in college and I continue to blog about literature on my personal blog. But when I first learned about the concept of alliteration (I must have been in middle school), I was unimpressed. Obviously making a poem rhyme requires some serious skill, since not just one sound but a series of sounds must be repeated at the same point in the poem's meter. Alliteration, by contrast, only requires the repetition of a single consonant sound at the beginning of a few words. Clearly, creating clever combinations of consonant sounds wasn'…
dmunger | August 27, 2008"Impossible objects" like the etchings of M.C. Escher have fascinated adults for centuries. You can't help but stare and wonder at a drawing like this, which seems to defy the laws of nature:
The drawing seems strange to us because our visual system tells us that when an object or part of an object occludes another, it's in front. Since the parts of the cube are all connected, it's clear that the vertical bar in the "back" of the cube shouldn't be in front of any other bars.
Some research has suggested that young babies don't have the same ability as adults to determine how close objects…
dmunger | August 25, 2008Take a look at this short video -- it's a list of animals. Try to remember as many animals as you can.
If you're like me, you're pretty confident that you will remember the entire list, even after ten minutes or so. In my case, that's not so much because the list names animals that most of us are familiar with. After all, there are plenty of other animals not on my list. How would I remember the precise animals that were included from the thousands of possibilities?
Well, I would remember them -- or think I would -- because they are all names of football teams that play in the NFL. Since I'm…
dmunger | August 21, 2008As a child (and like most children, I imagine) I used to think conducting an orchestra entailed something like what Bugs Bunny does in this video:
Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared to me to be more dancing along with the music than actually leading the musicians in any meaningful way. It wasn't until I married an amateur musician that I actually learned that the conductor could have an important influence on the way an orchestra sounds. But as Greta and I moved from place to place and she joined a variety of different ensembles, I…