mixingmemory | May 9, 2007Cool video (via Bill Benzon over at The Valve:
A bit more below the fold, but only after you watch the video.
What a great example of change blindness, eh? I missed them all.
mixingmemory | May 8, 2007From the proud papa.
First, the league's best right fielder:
He hasn't let a ball past him all year. Granted, no balls have been hit to him this year, but that's neither here nor there.
Next up, at the plate. Notice the bent knees, with the elbow up. That's pretty good form for a beginner (his Dad taught him that).
That picture is from his second at bat. In his first, he walked after looking at a 3-2 pitch in the dirt. That landed him on first (I don't think the first baseman is very happy with him):
From there he made it to second on a single, just beating out the throw from the center…
mixingmemory | May 7, 2007The story of research on linguistic relativity can be summarized thusly: early cognitive scientists, inspired by the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, were all-too eager to find that thought is influenced, if not determined, by language (either by its grammatical categories, ala Whorf, or by the words we use). Their enthusiasm caused them to get greedy, and instead of starting simple, they went straight to perceptual properties that are sorted out very early in visual perception. If the perception of such properties could be shown to have top-down influences (like linguistic influences…
mixingmemory | May 2, 2007Even though study after study has shown that implicit race bias is pretty much ubiquitous in American society, I'm still occasionally surprised when a study comes out demonstrating it in an area I hadn't previously thought about. That was the case when a friend emailed me a New York Times article on a study of racial bias in NBA referees (the working paper on the study is here. Why did the study authors, Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers, choose NBA referees? Here's their explanation, from the paper:
Our setting provides intriguing insights into own-race bias; relative to social, judicial, or…
mixingmemory | May 1, 2007Jeremy Dean of PsyBlog is doing another online study, this time on emotions, and he needs participants. So if you have about 10 minutes, and you'd like to participate in some real live research, click here and follow his instructions.
mixingmemory | April 25, 2007In case you haven't heard about it already, fellow ScienceBlogger and neuroblogger Shelley has been threatened by lawyers for using images from a journal article in her blog posts. Now, I do this all the time (check two posts back), because the whole point of posting about research is so that people who probably aren't reading the cog sci literature can learn about and evaluate theories and studies. My main reason for blogging is promoting this stuff, not stealing journals', authors', or publishers' thunder. Letting people see figures that are a pain to reproduce in Excel or R (like large…
mixingmemory | April 24, 2007As Trinifar says, we're witnessing a great atheist schism. While there are actually several different types of atheists participating (I wonder if we're just playing into the hands of anti-atheist rhetoric by pretending we are, or should be, a homogenous group), the tendency is to classify the participants into one of two groups. I'm not really sure, at this point, what we should call these groups. Those on one side of the schism have been called Churchill school atheist, skeptical atheists, new atheists (new to what, I'm not sure), "meanie" atheists, and several less flattering names (anti-…
mixingmemory | April 23, 2007Have you ever read about a study, perhaps on this blog even, and thought to yourself, "Well those results are interesting in the lab, but they have absolutely no implications for life outside of the lab?" I remember quite clearly thinking exactly that when I was told about the name-letter effect several years ago. The name-letter effect is the entirely unsurprising finding, first reported (as far as I know) by Nuttin1, that people prefer letters in their names, especially their first and last initials, over other letters. They also prefer numbers in their birth date over other numbers. Wow!…
mixingmemory | April 22, 2007Below is the text of a post I wrote for the old blog back in March of '06. I'm putting it here now because, given the discussion of the new atheist-suffragist analogy, I think it will provide some much needed perspective. In the article below, you will see just what the women's rights movement was up against, and why rhetorical force was necessary for it to accomplish even the simplest of its goals. I apologize in advance for any typos and misspellings (some of the spellings are just outdated ones, though), because I typed the article out while reading it in a 136 year old journal in the…
mixingmemory | April 21, 2007This is the way it always works. I quit the nouveau atheist blogs cold turkey, and their nonsense starts popping up elsewhere so that I can't escape it. That's how I learned that some of them are now comparing their movement to the suffragists. The comparison seems to have been first made by Larry Moron Moran in a comment at yet another blog (see, they're everywhere!), and was subsequently endorsed by PZ Myers, who writes in a comment:
When we compare atheists to feminists, the labor movement, gays, or civil rights, we are not saying these are identical; in this case, it is to a narrower…
mixingmemory | April 20, 2007
OK, this research is pretty silly, and quite frankly, I can't imagine what compelled the researchers to undertake it, but because it has to do with something I love, soccer, I feel compelled to blog about it. There this short report in the March issue of Psychological Science that I just got around to reading on goalies' influence of the direction of penalty shots in professional soccer matches. Masters et al.1 start with the recognition that goalies stop only 18% of penalty kicks. Given that goals are at a premium in soccer, with games frequently won by one goal (often the only goal of the…
mixingmemory | April 19, 2007I have to admit that I've been avoiding the "framing science" discussion that's been going on in the science blogosphere recently, mostly because I'd rather talk about what framing is and how it works than two author's rather vague ideas about how to use framing in a particular area of discourse. And because the Science article has made framing a hot topic again, and because it is clear from much of the discussion that many are still very confused about what framing is (if I see someone describe framing as "spin," again, I'm going to throw something at them), I think it's important to talk…
mixingmemory | April 19, 2007In the recent dust up over "framing science," there's been more hand waving than any actual discussion of, you know, framing. However, I was struck by one point that fellow ScienceBlogger Matt Nisbet, one of the authors of the Science article that sparked this whole mess, made in comments to my post on the discussion. He wrote (emoticon removed, for your sanity):
In part what we have across the various disciplines studying framing is a classic "levels of analysis" problem. Some working at the micro and cognitive level, others working at the macro and sociological level.
My reaction that…
mixingmemory | April 14, 2007I recently made my third attempt at Finnegan's Wake, and as with the first two, failed miserably. At some point I'm going to decide, once and for all, that I will never be able to read that God forsaken book. It helps that I heard this the other day (via The Valve). I figure if the author reads his own book, and I can't understand half of what he's saying, there's no point in trying to read his damn book.
mixingmemory | April 10, 2007Everyone should stop by and tell Richard of Philosophy, etcetera congratulations. He was accepted by pretty much every top analytical philosophy program in the U.S., and after a whirlwind tour of the states, has chosen Princeton.
Richard's was one of the first blogs I read (and I think he was one of the first to read mine), so when he's a world famous philosopher in a few years, I'll be able to say, "I knew him when..."
mixingmemory | April 10, 2007As you all know, fellow ScienceBloggers Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney published an article in the April 6 issue of Science on the topic of "framing science." The article has sparked a great deal of (sometimes heated) debate on ScienceBlogs and off (Bora has a list of links, to which I'd add John Hawks, Greg Laden, and Sean Carroll; especially the Laden post, because it points out how wrong Nisbet and Mooney get the idea of "framing" in many places). The impression I've gotten from reading this discussion is that most scientists (or at least most science bloggers) agree that we need to do a…
mixingmemory | April 3, 2007Sorry for the lack of posting lately. I've got some half-written posts that should be interesting, but between baseball 4 day a week, and an unhealthily large number of current research projects, I'm completely exhausted. So instead of finishing one of those half-written posts tonight, I'm just going to be lazy and link you to two recent discussions between Sam Harris and religious folk.
Sam Harris v. Andrew Sullivan
Sam Harris v. Rick Warren
I don't think Harris, Sullivan, or Warren really come out of these discussions looking that great, but that could just be because I disagree with all of…
mixingmemory | March 27, 2007Some of you may find this book chapter interesting:
Hauer, M.D., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (in press): Reviving Rawls' Linguistic Analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions. In Moral Psychology and Biology.