cortex | February 8, 2007That didn't take long. As soon as a gallon of gas stabilized around $2 and change, hybrid sales started to flatline. Now Toyota needs to use incentives to push the Prius:
In April, Toyota will begin its first national advertising campaign for Prius since it began selling the hybrid in the United States in 2000. Ads will begin appearing in local markets before then.
Toyota has also started offering the first incentives on the Prius, including some no-interest financing, and lease deals of as little as $219 a month.
The moves by Toyota come amid flat sales last year for Prius, whose first six…
cortex | February 8, 2007Another week, another fascinating seminar over at Mind Matters. The paper in question concerns a topic near and dear to me: decision making. Here's the abstract:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as…
cortex | February 8, 2007It's only fitting that Harvard, the birthplace of pragmatism, is trying to reform its pedagogy by making learning more practical and "active". Here's the Boston Globe:
In his 2006 book, "Our Underachieving Colleges," Bok cited a study that found that students remembered only 42 percent of what they heard in a lecture by the end of the lecture and only 20 percent a week later. He argued that students learn far more when they are actively engaged in activities related to the course.
As an illustration of how to make learning more active, students in an art course might meet with performers or…
cortex | February 7, 2007Molecular gastronomy, a movement of chefs devoted to the experimental tools of the modern science lab, now has its own Italian convention:
For three days last week some of the biggest names in "molecular gastronomy" (Ferran Adrià , Wylie Dufresne) were mixing and matching secrets with more traditional chefs from Italy, France, Scandinavia, even Japan. The result was a dazzling exploration of new ways to cook fish, present pasta and generally make a restaurant meal more like a night at La Scala. Throw in sugar surrealism for dessert and it was hard to remember this was all happening in the…
cortex | February 7, 2007It doesn't get much more romantic than this:
This pair of embracing human skeletons was found at a Neolithic archaeological dig site near Mantova, Italy, in this photo released by Reuters on February 6, 2007. Archaeologists believe the couple was buried 5000-6000 years ago, their arms wrapped around each other.
Update: This is from the AP:
Buried between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, the prehistoric pair are believed to have been a man and a woman and are thought to have died young, as their teeth were found intact, said Elena Menotti, the archaeologist who led the dig.
"As far as we know, it'…
cortex | February 6, 2007Nick Bostrom offers up a great suggestion for a new academic field:
Perhaps we need a new field of "cognitive forensics" for analyzing and investigating motivated scientific error, bias, and intellectual misconduct. The goal would be to develop a comprehensive toolkit of diagnostic indicators and statistical checks that could be used to detect acts of irrationality and to make it easier to apprehend the culprits. (Robin's recent post gives an example of one study that could be done.) Another goal would be to create a specialization, a community of scholars who had expertise in this subfield,…
cortex | February 6, 2007Freud would be thrilled. Talk therapy seems to be effective, at least when it comes to panic attacks:
Last week, a team of New York analysts published the first scientifically rigorous study of a short-term variation of the therapy for panic disorder, a very common form of anxiety. The study was small, but the therapy proved to be surprisingly effective in a group of severely disabled people.
The paper, which appeared in psychiatry's flagship journal, The American Journal of Psychiatry, is one of the most significant steps in a small but growing effort to study how this so-called…
cortex | February 6, 2007I couldn't sleep last night. As far as I can tell, there was no particular reason for my insomnia. I wasn't stressed, or anxious, or caffeinated, or sick. My mind was tired, but my brain just wasn't in the sleeping mood.
For me, one of the most annoying parts of insomnia is the way I continually almost fall asleep. I'm drifting off into that dreamy netherworld, my thoughts growing languid and slow, when all of a sudden I remember I can't sleep, and snap back into awakeness. It's damn annoying.
What causes this insomniac process? If I had to venture a guess, I'd go with a theory put forth by…
cortex | February 5, 2007There's a pretty interesting interview with the philosopher John Searle in the Boston Globe:
IDEAS: You think that questions about the mind are at the core of philosophy today, don't you?
SEARLE: Right. And that's a big change. If you go back to the 17th century, and Descartes, skepticism -- the question of how it is possible to have knowledge -- was a live issue for philosophy. That put epistemology -- the theory of knowledge -- at the heart of philosophy. How can we know? Shouldn't we seek a foundation for knowledge that overcomes skeptical doubts about it? As recently as a hundred years…
cortex | February 5, 2007Conscious awareness is difficult to measure. On the one hand, it's a private, subjective phenomenon that resists easy quantification. (Only I know what I am aware of.) On the other hand, neuroscience won't be able to understand many mental phenomena - like consciousness - unless it can develop objective measurements for these slippery, subjective phenomena.
Traditional measurements of awareness have relied on self-reports of confidence. For example, experimental subjects might be asked to judge whether a cloud of dots moved to the left or to the right. They are then asked to report how…
cortex | February 3, 2007What you believe about your body affects your body:
Psychology researcher Ellen Langer of Harvard University has long been intrigued by mind-over-body effects. She and student Alia Crum therefore invited 84 women, ages 18 to 55 years old, who worked as housekeepers at seven Boston hotels, to participate in a study. Those in four hotels were told that their regular work was good exercise and met the guidelines for a healthy, active lifestyle. After all, the women cleaned about 15 rooms a day, taking 20 to 30 minutes for each, so they did get a bit of a workout. Those in the other three hotels…
cortex | February 2, 2007From Harold McGee's charming new blog:
Tomato lovers know that a sprinkling of salt enhances the flavor of even the best field-ripened specimen. Some recent news that bodes well for improved flavor in greenhouse tomatoes: you can enhance tomato flavor by salting the plant as the fruit grows! At the Institute of Vegetable Science in Freising, German scientists grew hydroponic tomatoes in a solution that was 0.1% sodium chloride, about one-thirtieth the salinity of seawater. The plants produced fruits with significantly higher levels of flavorful organic acids and sugars, and as much as a third…
cortex | February 2, 2007It's a shocker: getting hit in the head by enormous men running at high speed is bad for your brain. The NY Times today has a riveting article chronicling the retirement travails of Ted Johnson, a former middle lineback for the Patriots:
Ted Johnson helped the New England Patriots win three of the past five Super Bowls before retiring in 2005. Now, he says, he forgets people's names, misses appointments and, because of an addiction to amphetamines, can become so terrified of the outside world that he locks himself alone inside his Boston apartment in bed with the blinds drawn for days at a…
cortex | February 2, 2007Ezra Klein laments his dental inheritance:
I have weak teeth. Always have. My father has weak teeth, my mother has weak teeth, and I, their dutiful son, possess weak teeth. My sister doesn't suffer from this malady. I remember a joint dentist appointment we had, where the doctor returned with our X-Rays, informed me that I had no cavities, and told my sister she had eight. But I had barely commenced my big brotherly gloating when he glanced back at the films and said, "Oh wait, nevermind. Lili, you have no cavities, and as for you, Ezra..."
Well, today I beat my own record. I need eight…
cortex | February 1, 2007Your unconscious brain is better at processing information than you are. Here's Ap Dijksterhuis:
We gave our subjects information pertaining to a choice--for example, which of four apartments was the most attractive, or which of four cars was the best. They had three options: They could make a choice immediately; they could take time for conscious deliberation; or they could figuratively sleep on it--that is, engage in unconscious thought. The subjects who chose the third option were first given information about the decision in question and then given information about an unrelated task, to…
cortex | February 1, 2007This will surely rank as one of the major scientific breakthroughs of the 21st century*:
This winter, a sparkling diamond landed in front of a technician at the Gemological Institute of America in New York City. He ran tests, noted the stone was man-made, and graded it as he would any diamond. It was the gem industry's strongest acknowledgment yet that lab-grown diamonds are just as real as natural ones.
For years, De Beers, the world's largest purveyor of natural diamonds, argued against the acceptance and GIA grading of lab-grown stones. But since 2003, synthetic diamond production has…
cortex | February 1, 2007Over at Scientific American, David Dobbs has introduced a wonderful new "seminar blog" in which researchers discuss a specific topic or paper. This week's topic is the prevalence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among Vietnam veterans. The catalyst is a Science paper by Bruce Dohrenwend published last year which concluded that actual rates of PTSD were roughly 40 percent lower than previous studies had shown.
But that reduction in PTSD - a statistic that the popular media trumpeted - occludes the larger lesson of the study:
The Dohrenwend study provides not a refutation or even a "…
cortex | January 31, 2007Over at Slate, Gregg Easterbrook argues that the President's recent proposal to increase the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard by 4 percent a year is a brilliant and bold policy that will "reverse [oil] consumption trends". He blames the liberal media for not giving Bush the credit he deserves.
I'm skeptical. While I'm glad Bush has agreed to strengthen CAFE standards, I also think that CAFE standards are relatively useless. There are simply too many loopholes. Automakers can avoid CAFE standards by building trucks and SUV's - Bush wants "to extend the current Light Truck Rule…
cortex | January 31, 2007The epic battle between video game consoles seems to have a clear winner: the Nintendo Wii.
The Wii, which uses an innovative wireless controller to translate the players' motions onto the screen, has upset the order of the video game world. In electronics stores and elsewhere, there are growing signs that the Wii has taken the lead in buzz and sales over another new console, the Sony PlayStation 3, which offers new superlatives in processing power and graphics.
The competitive picture became clearer on Tuesday, when Sony reported disappointing profits that industry analysts attributed…
cortex | January 30, 2007In the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock decided to eat nothing but McDonald's for 30 days. He ended up gaining lots of weight, suffering liver damage, and enduring intense mood swings. But now Spurlock's movie has been repeated under experimental conditions. The results are good news for McDonald's:
A Swedish researcher put 18 volunteers on the same diet that filmmaker Morgan Spurlock went on while filming "Super Size Me."
To his great surprise, the researcher discovered that eating mass quantities of junk food affected each participant differently. While one volunteer gained…