dmunger | September 1, 2006This week's Synapse will be at The Mouse Trap.
To submit your entry, email your post to the.synapse.carnival {AT} gmail.com
dmunger | September 1, 2006This past Wednesday, Alvaro Castillo drove a 1997 Dodge Caravan into the parking lot of Orange High School in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Today's Charlotte Observer has the rest of the story:
He threw a smoke bomb onto a vehicle in the parking lot, then got two guns and ammunition out of the van and started shooting...
About 10 shots hit the school's walls in the courtyard near the cafeteria...
Two students were injured. A bullet grazed one in the shoulder, and another was hit by broken glass...
At Castillo's home, a more gruesome scene was found: his father's dead body, shot four times,…
dmunger | August 31, 2006Just by listening to music, we can learn a lot about its structures and conventions. For example, even you have no musical training, you can tell that something is wrong with this scale (it's followed by a proper C-major scale):
But we learn a lot more than just standard scales when we listen to music. When you're exposed to a particular type of music for many years, you learn much more. Consider the following sequence of chords:
Anyone who's been raised listening to Western music should recognize this sequence as an appropriate musical phrase (if you don't read music, don't worry -- I'll…
dmunger | August 31, 2006I try to stay away from answering "Ask a Scienceblogger" when it strays too far from my areas of expertise. This week, the question is the following:
I read this article in the NRO, and the author actually made some interesting arguments. 'Basically,' he said, 'I am questioning the premise that [global warming] is a problem rather than an opportunity.' Does he have a point?...
I don't really think I need to be an expert to respond. The article in question seems to have been written largely as a joke. Al Gore suggests that New York would be underwater as a result of rising sea levels. The…
dmunger | August 30, 2006The local newspaper here in Charlotte was aghast that SAT scores (a test used to help determine college admissions in the US) fell in North Carolina this year, even though the article goes on to point out that nationwide the scores dropped even more.
So what's up? Are schools letting the kids down? Is the new test harder (this year a writing section was added, though the format of the remainder of the test remains the same, and the writing section isn't included in comparisons)? The College Board, which administers the tests, claims that the difference can't be attributed to the longer tests…
dmunger | August 29, 2006Listen to this short audio clip:
Now listen to this one:
Notice any difference? I didn't think so. But if you were a 5-month-old infant named Caroline, the difference would be crystal clear. In the second clip, your name would be indistinguishable from background noise, but in the first clip, you'd be able to hear it above the din. Both clips are played against the identical background noise: ten different women reading ten different stories. But in the first clip, the name "Caroline" is 10 dB louder than the backround noise, while in the second clip, it's just 5 dB louder.
Being able to…
dmunger | August 29, 2006Is the Flynn Effect ending? Are kids getting dumber again? Could it be that after years of striking intelligence gains, we're now actually losing ground? We are if you read this article in the Times Online:
After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King's College London confidently declares: "The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years' worth in the past two decades."
It's an extraordinary claim. But it's one that should startle parents and teachers out of complacency. Shocked by the findings, experts are…
dmunger | August 28, 2006
A judge has ruled against a recent Louisiana law banning the sale of violent video games to children. Since we've been rather outspoken here about the influence of violent games, I did want to reiterate that we've never advocated the sort of sweeping legislation that Louisiana has attempted to foist on the public. That said, it's important to understand that some violent video games can and do cause aggressive behavior in children and adults.
Scienceblogger Coturnix responds to the widely publicized remarks of dolphin-disser Paul Manger (I respond to the reports here). The flaw in Manger's…
dmunger | August 28, 2006NPR has a nice report on the motivations behind false confessions. Give it a listen--it's just over two minutes long, and reporter Andy Bowers gives an excellent explanation of why people such as JonBenet Ramsey "killer" John Mark Karr might be motivated to voluntarily confess to crimes they didn't commit.
Bowers divides false confessions into two types: voluntary and coerced. His report primarily discusses voluntary confessions, which are often related to a mental impairment or obsession on the part of the confessor. If you'd like to know more about coerced confessions, which Bowers says is…
dmunger | August 25, 2006Have you missed Casual Fridays? Our travel schedule over the summer made it impossible for us to keep up with Casual Fridays, but for the 2006-07 school year, we'll be back each Friday with either a new study or the results from the previous week. There's no better time than the present to get started, so let's go:
The inspiration for this week's study came from a dispute among our family members while watching one of our "guilty pleasure" TV shows. Greta disagrees with the rest of the family on the lyrics of the show's theme song. Each of us is certain that the others must be mistaken in…
dmunger | August 24, 2006
Last year, my dad got his pilot's license. He took me up with him a couple months later, and while the view was spectacular, the most surprising aspect of flying is how much of a pilot's time is spent avoiding other aircraft. You might think there's plenty of room up there, and you'd be right, but it also means you have to scan a vast space to locate other planes. Once you spot one, you need to keep track of it to make sure you're not on a collision course. Sometimes, you'll need to track four or more other planes. Is there a limit to how many objects we can track? And how, exactly, do we…
dmunger | August 23, 2006Television sets and video monitors rely on tricking the visual system into believing it is seeing the full range of possible colors. In reality, they are only generating approximations of the light that would actually enter the eye if we were looking at a real object.
The problem is this: the visible spectrum actually consists of an infinite number of possible light wavelengths in the range from 380 to 700 nm; light waves from across that range enter the eye and are capable of activating photoreceptors within the eye: this corresponds to the wide range of colors we can perceive.
But TVs and…
dmunger | August 23, 2006The Washington Post has an article claiming that being just a few pounds overweight can lead to premature death:
The 10-year study of more than 500,000 U.S. adults found that those who were just moderately overweight in their fifties were 20 percent to 40 percent more likely to die in the next decade. Another study involving more than 1 million Korean adults, also being published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, produced similar results.
Meanwhile, Jake at Pure Pedantry has uncovered a report claiming just the opposite:
In a review of the studies published on the subject,…
dmunger | August 22, 2006 Learning to navigate through an unfamiliar environment can be a difficult challenge. Could you find your way through the crowded, narrow streets of the city depicted at left -- especially if the signs were in a foreign language (bonus points if you can identify the city in the comments section!)?
If you do have to get around in a new place, what's the best way to learn? People have different preferences -- some prefer to look at a map first, while others orient themselves using landmarks. Is one method better for you? I prefer maps; nothing's more frustrating to me than getting directions…
dmunger | August 22, 2006A new study finds that 3- to 5-year-olds appear to conflate their future needs with those of the present. Young children who have been fed pretzels and are thirsty are more likely to say they'll need water tomorrow than pretzels. If they haven't eaten pretzels, they'll say they will need pretzels tomorrow.
One of the researchers, Cristina Atance, said the research will help adults understand childrens' needs:
We often see children object when mom asks them to put on their coat in a warm house before going outside into the cold, or when she tells them to bring water to the park when they are…
dmunger | August 21, 2006Why does Greta look so happy in this photo?
Perhaps it's because she's wearing her new neurotransmitter earrings, chosen by CogDaily readers (for the results of our poll, see this post).
Seratonin and dopamine were in a dead heat, so she got one of each. A close-up of the earrings is below the fold.
dmunger | August 21, 2006Slashdot points to an Aljazeera (!) article about dolphin intelligence (or lack thereof). The article quotes scientist Paul Manger, who argues that since dolphins never think to jump out of enclosures such as holding tanks in aquariums, or tuna nets, they clearly aren't very smart. After all, even a goldfish will jump out of its tank if you don't put a lid on it.
Manger's argument may be a little simplistic ("escaping" to suffocation is hardly an example of "intelligence"), but it does bring up an interesting point: are dolphins really as smart as most people seem to think? A Wikipedia…
dmunger | August 17, 2006By the time a baby is 4 months old, she has begun to amass an impressive array of skills. She might be able to roll over, as Nora is demonstrating in this picture. She will almost certainly be able to follow an object with her eyes as it moves across her field of vision. But research about the ability of babies to follow objects has had conflicting results. In some cases, babies this age seem to understand that when one object passes out of view behind another, it's still "there," just hidden from view.
Consider a simple example: a single ball moves back and forth behind a rectangular box,…
dmunger | August 15, 2006When Jim and Nora talk about the social groups in their school, they matter-of-factly categorize almost every fellow student into stereotyped pigeonholes. There are the nerds, the rockers, the cools, the goths, and of course, the jocks.
The assumption, naturally, is that none of these groups intersect. Jocks are dumb, nerds are smart, and cools could be smart if they cared about grades. But what of this "dumb jock" stereotype? Does it actually pan out in real life?
Herbert Marsh and Sabina Kleitman have conducted an exhaustive study of the records of over 12,000 American students, following…
dmunger | August 11, 2006What in the world is this thing?
It's called an optokinetic drum, and it's one of the many implements of torture you'll find in a spatial orientation lab. In an optokinetic drum, you sit or stand inside while the entire drum rotates around you. By changing the pattern on the inside of the drum, or by changing the way the drum rotates, a researcher can easily make you lose your lunch, breakfast, or even last night's dinner.
I got the picture of the drum from the Ashton Graybill Spatial Orientation Lab, where you'll find plenty of other devices that I sincerely hope the U.S. military doesn't…