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SOCIAL MODELING CLIMATE ACTIVISM: Director Says DVD Version of Inconvenient Truth May Include Vignettes of How Citizens Can Get Involved

There are two generalizable findings on influencing behavior change. First, citizens are more likely to get involved politically if they see members of their peer group or social group getting involved. In other words, the choice to participate may be as simple as doing something that everyone else is doing. In this case, there is an element of social pressure exerted, but also witnessing like-minded others "getting active" is a heuristic that the issue merits attention and personal resources. When these peers also start making personal requests to participate, it can be a powerful…

FRAMING 1, THE PUBLIC O: A "Death Tax" or "the Paris Hilton Tax Cut"? The End of the Estate Tax Shows the Power of Framing to Shape Policy Decisions

Buried in today's NYTimes Business section is a report on the vote yesterday by the U.S. House to permanently eliminate the estate tax for about 99.7 percent of all families and reduce tax rates for the few who still faced a bill. Regardless of your partisan affiliation, if you have an appreciation for how the perception of statistics and numbers can be skewed by language and selective definitions, then the Estate Tax is a lesson learned. In an era of skyrocketing deficits, the bill, reports the NYTIMES "would reduce tax revenue by $282 billion in the first five years after it took full…

Lawyers and Evolution

I've noted before that a significant number of lawyers not only to deny evolution but also appear to think that their training as a lawyer enables them to adjudicate scientific "controversies" (real or percieved). As Nick notes over at the Thumb, the Discovery Institute seems to agree with me by approvingly ("Arizona Republic Columnist Hit the Nail on the Head in His Dover Trial Analysis") quoting the following from an op-ed in the Arizona Republic: Moreover, based upon the extensive expertise he [Judge Jones] professes to have acquired in the course of a six-week trial, he defined science…

Day 2 -- engineering life

Today we get to the science and the issues surrounding it. Karl Deisseroth gave the first keynote lecture. For anyone who's been asleep the past few years, Deisseroth's lab at Stanford is at the cutting edge of a new kind of brain research. They invented optogenetics -- turning brain circuits on and off (in mice, at present) with fiberoptic lasers. Their lab is putting out new methodology at an astounding rate. Their latest is Clarity: a way of making the brain tissue clear, so you can see all the neurons at once. In other words, you can get an image of the whole brain. I know I am not the…

Health care is infrastructure

There's a lot of talk about there about "economic stimulus" and "infrastructure", but what is "infrastructure"? Traditionally, it's the basic physical and social structure needed for a society to operate. Roads, sewers, utilities, schools---these are the "guts" of our nation. Without these things, and the pooling of resources they require, we are nothing more than an anarchic collective coexisting on a shared continent. Much of what is defined as infrastructure is about the basics of life---food and its distribution, public health, safety. How is health care not a part of that? When we…

Animal Liberation, Human Liberation

I'm not going to lie: this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues. This sort of thing -- the morality of Stem Cell Research, "Is Cloning O.K"? -- should remain where it rightly lives, which is to say, "town hall" style discussions on public television. This is not to dub these issues irrelevant. They are, of course, more relevant than anything I will bring up in this forum. However, they are also instant boresville. No one needs an in-depth analysis to realize immediately that people opposed to mild levels of stem-cell research are either conservative wack-jobs or…

Final Winner of the "What's New in Comparative Physiology" t-shirt contest!

Congratulations to Patricia Villalta, a graduate student at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine, our final winner of the "What's New in Comparative Physiology?" t-shirt contest! Here are her reasons for being excited about going to this year's Experimental Biology meeting: "Dear Dr. Dolittle, Every year, I get excited about the Experimental Biology meeting because unexpected opportunities are bound to happen. For example, this past year, I attended for the first time the Science Policy Committee's Symposium "How to Become An Advocate: A Workshop for Scientists", where I…

The classical librarian

Five years ago (really? goodness, it hardly seems possible) I gave a preconference session at the Extreme Markup Languages conference (which is now Balisage) entitled "Classification, Cataloguing, and Categorization Systems: Past, Present, and Future." I have learned to write better talk titles since then. However. The talk was actually a runthrough of library standards and practices for an audience of markup wonks. Like any field, librarianship has its share of jargon and history that legitimately seems impenetrable to outsiders. I'm going to try to reprise some of that talk here in blog…

Ah, the joys of working parenthood

Mr. Jane and I are so, so fortunate that we have good quality, affordable daycare for Baby Jane that we absolutely, positively love. It is so wonderful to drop Baby Jane off in the mornings and know that she is in a secure, loving, enriching care situation. It frees up so much of my mental energy (and Mr. Jane's, too)---I'm not constantly thinking about her, because I know she's having fun and is being well cared for, too---so that I can concentrate on work while at work. A novel concept, I realize. The flip side, though, is that her daycare is a home daycare, which means that if something…

Academic year resolutions

In the past at around this time of year, shamelessly borrowing an idea from Laura at Geeky Mom, I've made resolutions for the new academic year. I've been trying to think about what I want my resolutions to be this year, but I've had a hard time of it. Maybe it's the stress of the tenure year that's making it hard for me to focus (on anything, really, for that matter). Maybe it's a bit of summer angst---you know, summer is over and I had all these big plans and ideas and how many of them came to fruition? (Actually, quite a few---I'm pretty proud of what I accomplished this summer, work-…

A tale of two retailers

This weekend, I went to 2 different retailers to return a couple of items. (Grandma Jane bought Baby Jane an Easter outfit that consisted of a frilly frilly dress and a delicate WHITE sweater. Now, Easter is not exactly a dress-wearing holiday in our household, and if Baby Jane wore either item to daycare, or even around the house for more than 30 seconds, the outfit would be toast.) Since I was there anyway, and since shopping trips ALONE are so rare these days, I decided to check out the baby departments and see if I could spend the store credit then and there. My experience at each…

So what about men in women-dominated professions?

There's a lot of discussion about women in STEM and business and the barriers they face (justifiably so!), but what about men in the "female professions"? Do they face the same glass ceiling? It turns out that there's a classic paper on this that coined the term, "glass escalator." It is somewhat classic, so I briefly looked for more recent work that cited it to see if it had been debunked, but didn't find any studies that did not confirm the results* Here's the citation: Williams, C.L. (1992). The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the "Female" Professions. Social Problems, 39,…

SLA2009: Unified Discovery Services

(came in late because the speaker I initially chose to see failed to show up) A speaker from Serials Solutionâs Summon reviewed various pieces of research done recently both by LIS researchers and by big libraries. Summed up pretty well by Tenopir (he copied her graph), increasing costs, decreasing importance as a gateway for research creates a value gap for the library.  Scholars view the library and its resources as reliable and authoritative, but painful to use. So they start with google, because itâs easy and then link out to our subscriptions and my never know theyâre using library…

The erroneous text that was cut from Mustard's section

Lott has a new posting where he has some more about the important matter of the coding errors in his data. Sandwiched between some more complaints about unfair the Stanford Law Review has been and some imaginary errors in Ayres and Donohue, we have: Of course, this is nothing new with their misleading attacks on David Mustard, where minor coding errors did not change what he had written. (Instead of letting David correct a small mistake which did not fundamentally change the results, David was forced to cut out what would have been a damaging evidence…

Seeds of Doubt sown on my bottom in a dream

When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I was fascinated by dreams. My father had a book on dreams (Interpreting Dreams, or some such title) that was pure psycho-babble but I didn't know that. Even a bad book can fuel our imagination. I played the interpretation game every time I woke up and remembered a dream. Childish hope on the wings of ignorance. One cold December night, I was sleeping and apparently dreaming of knights and swords. A battle scene and I was in the middle of it. When would a 12 year old be in a battlefield? When he has just watched a historical movie with an impressive…

Today in History: Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of DNA

On July 25, 1920 the English biophysicist Rosalind Franklin was born. She was instrumental in discovering the molecular structure of DNA, though her vital contributions were only posthumously acknowledged. After receiving her PhD from Cambridge in 1945 she worked as a research associate for John Randall at King's College in London. Beginning in early 1951 she took X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA that showed a helical form of the molecule, a finding confirmed by James Watson and Francis Crick who subsequently won the Nobel Prize for their DNA research. In lecture notes dated November…

An interview in which I'm on the wrong side of the table

Research Digest has posted an q&a interview with me as part of their The Bloggers Behind the Blog series. Here are a few key tidbits. Do read the rest there, as well as the other interviews already run and to come. On why I write about psychology, psychiatry, and other behavioral sciences: Science constitutes our most serious and rigorous attempt to understand the world -- and psychiatry, psychology, and now neuroscience make great material partly because they so often and starkly show science's power and pitfalls. These disciplines are hard. The people who work in them, whether…

Flu news you can use

The excellent blog H5N1 (now covering H1N1 as well, and all over it), points us to the New York Times for an op-ed by John M. Barry, author of the definitive history of the Spanish flu in the US: Where Will the Swine Flu Go Next? Excerpt: As the swine flu threatens to become the next pandemic, the biggest questions are whether its transmission from human to human will be sustained and, if so, how virulent it might become. But even if this virus were to peter out soon, there is a strong possibility it would only go underground, quietly continuing to infect some people while becoming…

How to make your scientific paper absolutely suck

A great abstract I found via improbable research blog: How to write consistently boring scientific literature Kaj Sand-Jensen (ksandjensen@bi.ku.dk), Freshwater Biological Laboratory, Univ. of Copenhagen, Helsingørsgade 51, DK-3400 Hillerød, Denmark. Abstract Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to…

Chris Mooney is crazy for agreeing to do this

He's planning to debate Jonathan Wells…on Fox radio. I guess we can only hope the host, Alan Colmes, is a little less passive than Flatow was in the Mooney/Bethell debate, but we can guarantee that Wells is as ignorant and foolish as Bethell. I am going to have to turn my attention soon to Wells' new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but for two things: 1) The New Semester! Is! Flying! into my Face! for the next few weeks, and 2) Wells is a tawdry slug of a writer, who just thumps out lie after lie about the state of modern…

Politics Tuesday: Politicians Might Listen To Us...If We Listen To Them

Posted by Dr. David Wilmot, dave@oceanchampions.org Last week I made the case that if you care about good public policy, you should care about politics. I suspect my strong bias that the key to ultimate success in the public policy arena is political power/leverage with elected officials came through loud and clear. Now taking a step back, where does communication fit in? In our Turning the Tide report, public communication and grassroots support are the foundation for building political strength, while lobbying and direct involvement in the electoral process gives this foundation a voice…

WICKEDpedia, Forgotten Libraries, and the Blessed (?) Shifting Baseline of Academic Research

This weekend I heard from my sister--a biomedical engineer who did her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. At 33, she has decided to become a physical therapist and must now take introductory biology courses to qualify for the program. Her reintroduction to academia was a shock to her system and she sent me a slideshow presentation she made up along with a rant on how the academic world has changed (how the baseline has shifted, if you will). I found enjoyment in her horror at the rampant use of Wikipedia and, moreover, her 'Letter to a…

SBFlix contest winners are in!

FIRST ANNUAL SB FLIX CONTEST AWARDS GO TO: "WHAT'S WITH THE WATER," (1ST), "YOUR DINNER" (2ND), AND "OCEAN WAR" (3RD). The Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project announces the winners of the first annual SB FLIX Contest, sponsored by Patagonia, Disney Environmentality and Seed Magazine. The cash awards and prizes will go to three videos which are about water pollution, fish contamination, and a micro-documentary about the war President George W. Bush has apparently declared (at least in the filmmakers' imagination) upon the nation's oceans. The winners are among over 70 submissions of one…

The Plight of the Great White

It's really hard for me to write about sharks. It makes me angry. Unlike with so many species under the threat of extinction, when I try to talk to people about sharks, the message just doesn't get through. Show them a movie about Taji and they get infuriated. Have them look into the eyes of a tiger cub and they are overwhelmed with emotion. Maybe it's that sharks aren't warm and fuzzy enough - maybe if they had hair, people wouldn't be so leery of them. Maybe it's too many childhood memories of late-night Jawsfests. But when I try to explain to people that sharks are in trouble, that they…

What is Intelligent Design Creationism?

Obvs, he did it. Larry Moran discusses some apologetics from Jonathan McLatchie, in which McLatchie briefly argues for intelligent design. I think the fact that it's in the context of Christian apologetics already gives away the store, but at least he gives a succinct definition of intelligent design: The study of patterns in nature which bear the hallmarks of an intelligent cause Oh, so it's 19th century natural history? Been there, done that. About two centuries ago and a little less, that was the underlying assumption of natural theology: that studying science was for the purpose of…

In Hawaii, Big Women Are Sexy

"Sleep, and dream of large women..." Westley might have been talking to a giant, but he could have said the same thing to the humpback whale population that spends every December to April in the "four-island" region off of the coast of Maui, Hawaii. Researchers from the Dolphin Institute in Honolulu have been monitoring, photographing, and recording information about humpbacks in the area for years. They wanted to better understand the mating behavior of these immense aquatic beasts. Humpback whales are one of the largest whales in the ocean, but even still observing and recording data on…

Correcting some of Chris Matthews Misunderstandings: More on the Fort Hood Shootings

The amazing amount of uninformed speculation that's coming out of the mouth of Chris Matthews right now is mind numbing. Speaking as someone who lives and works on a military post, I have absolutely no doubt that I have a better understanding of the dynamics of the military base than he does. I'm just going to hit some of the major issues. 1: In the United States Army, it's hard to describe a Major as a "high ranking officer". It's typically a mid-career rank. Given that there are somewhere around 5000 officers assigned at Fort Hood, I would be surprised if there were fewer than 500…

The Egnorance - It Returns. And Still Burns

Everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon is back. Today, Michael Egnor brought forth yet another remarkably inept attempt to find a way to justify egnoring the relationship between natural selection and antibiotic resistance. This time, he's apparently decided that there's no hope in finding a substantive argument, so he's resorting to nothing more than a childish rhetorical game. One of the authors of a recently published scientific paper that examined antibiotic resistance left a comment at The Panda's Thumb noting that his research did in fact rely on Darwinian evolution. In a…

Women in Medicine; Our Bodies and the Law - New Books

Via the Chronicle Review New Scholarly Books section: I haven't read either of these but both look good and I thought they would be of interest to readers of this blog. The first is Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women's Reproduction in America, by Jeanne Flavin. In Our Bodies, Our Crimes, Jeanne Flavin argues that, not only has the state's control of womens bodies become more intrusive and more pervasive, it has also become invisible and taken for granted. This important work is framed around several vivid case studies, each taking place at a different time in the reproductive…

2008 ScienceBlogs DonorsChoose Challenge: Support Teacher Proposals, Help the Kids!

It's October, and that means it's DonorsChoose time again! ScienceBlogs bloggers are, once again, participating in the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. Basically, we ask you, our readers, to help public school teachers across the U.S. fund proposals for classroom supplies, activities, and field trips. It's a shame we have to ask at all, but our nation's public school teachers are woefully underfunded and often spend their own personal money to purchase needed classroom supplies. Looking over proposals to build my challenge, it was heartbreaking to see that for some teachers, the lack of…

A Word From Our Sponsors

At the Science Blogging Conference, Bora urged us to visit the conference wiki and "click on the logos of our donors to show them interest in their sites". Because it was Bora who asked me to do so, and because I want our donors to come back next year and support us in this endeavor again, I obediently went to the conference wiki and started clicking on donor logos. And what a lot of fun I have been having! Who knows when I might have discovered the Endeavors site without the conference wiki donors page, with this nifity article on Cultivating New Scientists. Eleven years ago, Tomeiko…

Planning for Stormy Weather

Right now, I'm sitting under one of the outer rain bands associated with newly-formed Tropical Storm Erin. We're seeing a moderately heavy thunderstorm right now. The rain's coming down fast and heavy. There's a lot of lightning right now, with thunder that's loud enough to set off the occasional car alarm and close enough to send my thunderphobic dog off to the dubious shelter of the bathtub. Under the circumstances, it seems like a pretty good time to talk about getting prepared for a storm. This really should go without saying, but while this might be a very good time for me to write…

Aloha Oe

It's been a quiet week or two (or three) on this blog, mostly because it's been a busy week or three in the house. We've been finishing off our moving process over the last few days. Since Wednesday, we've mostly been getting ready to clear quarters. Most of you probably don't know what "clearing quarters" really means (and those who do have my respect and sympathy). The short version is that you get to clean the house to within an inch of your life. The longer version is that the military really does take the old expression "leave it better than you got it" seriously. Actually, clearing…

In the News Today: Dog Bites Man, Bear Takes Magazine Into Woods, Civil War in Iraq

I woke up early today, went downstairs, turned on the news, and very quickly discovered that I'd made it all of 5 minutes into my morning before making a bad decision. The lead-off story on MSNBC's top of the hour coverage: NBC News' decision to start calling what's happening in Iraq a "civil war." This was followed by several minutes of self-absorbed commentary by Tucker Carlson. As I write, I'm being treated to another dose of coverage on this same "top story," this time complete with a "debate" between talking heads from the two sides of the political spectrum, each armed with a brand-new…

Science and nonscience again

I just can't escape that damned Demarcation Principle... A fellow emailed me the other day, asking what I thought about String Theory. Was it science? He was trying to argue with Intelligent Design folk, and they brought String Theory up as a case of science that doesn't have any testable evidence yet. He responded "science is what scientists do", and ask my opinion about that claim... I responded thus [names removed to protect the innocent] [Name], you are stepping in deep, very cold, and very dank waters. In public, when trying to deal with soundbite science, it is worthwhile saying…

A poem to be getting on with

I'm fairly busy right now what with job applications, selling a house and attempting murder on my teenage son, but while all that's going on here at The Laboratory of Doom behind the scenes, here's a poem below the fold, by Philip Larkin: Philip Larkin - Church Going Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long.…

The Rally for Tone

I had the Stewart/Colbert rally on in the background most of today. There were funny bits, there were entertaining bits, I'm sure everyone there had a good time. It was a pleasant afternoon of entertainment on the mall. But in the end, I was disappointed. It was also an afternoon of false equivalence, of civility fetishism, of nothing but a cry about the national tone, of a plea for moderation. And you can guess what I think of moderation. A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice. Tom Paine…

Pro-Test, and the war on another kind of terrorism

When I was sixteen, I was rebelling against whatever society had got by getting stoned, generally screwing up, and eventually getting thrown out of high school six months before I graduated. Laurie Pycroft on the other hand, decided enough was enough with the Animal Liberation Front's terrorism activities, and began blogging about it, leading to the foundation of, wait for it, a pro-science movement defending the use of animal experimentation. Seed Magazine has a short item about Laurie that got me interested, so a short Google later, I discovered that not only did he set off a…

Cognitive Daily Closes Shop after a Fantastic Five-Year Run

Five years ago today, we made the first post that would eventually make its way onto a blog called Cognitive Daily. We thought we were keeping notes for a book, but in reality we were helping build a network that represented a new way of sharing psychology with the world. Cognitive Daily wasn't the first psychology blog, but clearly it filled an important niche, because within a year, we were receiving over 30,000 page views a month. Now we often get over 100,000 page views a month, and we've totaled over four million. We reach many more people than would ever have bought our book, and we've…

Beyond change blindness: Change deafness works almost the same way

We've talked a lot on Cognitive Daily about change blindness: the inability to spot visual differences between images and even real people and objects right before our eyes. The most dramatic demonstration might be Daniel Simons' "experiment" that took place before participants even knew they were being studied: More recently researchers have uncovered a similar phenomenon for sounds: Change deafness. Listeners are asked to listen to two one-second clips separated by 350 milliseconds of white noise. The clips are composite sounds, combinations of four different familiar sounds: If one of…

Smells we can't detect affect judgments we make about people

[Originally posted in December, 2007] Do smells have an impact on how we judge people? Certainly if someone smells bad, we may have a negative impression of the person. But what if the smell is so subtle we don't consciously notice it? Research results have been mixed, with some studies actually reporting that we like people more when in the presence of undetectable amounts of bad-smelling stuff. How could that be? A team led by Wen Li believes that the judges might have actually been able to detect the odor, and then accounted for it in their response -- giving a face the benefit of the…

So this is what scientists are suppose to look like

Last Friday, I had a photo shoot in my lab, where a firm called Corbis spent the day taking a variety of stock "sciency" photos. It was quite the machine in place, with a crew of about half a dozen, a group of well over 25 extras lounging around, lights angled at beakers full of coloured water (why are they always coloured?), and an atmosphere that I thought was usually only reserved for fashion photography. Really ironic, since here I was, face to face to poser scientists, whereas 72 hours later, I would have a room full of the real thing. Anyway, I did ask a few questions out of…

2 Americans Win Nobel Prize for Discovery of RNAi

Andrew Fire and Craig Mello have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of RNA interference: Americans Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine Monday for discovering a powerful way to turn off the effect of specific genes, opening a new avenue for disease treatment. ''RNA interference'' is already being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes and it is being studied as a treatment for infections such as the AIDS and hepatitis viruses and for other conditions, including heart disease and cancer. Fire, 47, of…

Durham district attorney race: Nifong

We've been out-of-town for a few days but the election day "Ask A ScienceBlogger" requested that we note a local election of special import. One cannot live in the North Carolina Research Triangle area without being aware of the polarizing re-election campaign for Durham district attorney, Mike Nifong. Nifong, whose claim to fame has been the indictment of Duke men's lacrosse players in the alleged rape of a hired stripper, has been viewed widely as using this case as the basis for his re-election. Simply Google "Duke lacrosse case" and you'll know of which I speak. Let it suffice to say…

Smells we can't detect affect judgments we make about people

Do smells have an impact on how we judge people? Certainly if someone smells bad, we may have a negative impression of the person. But what if the smell is so subtle we don't consciously notice it? Research results have been mixed, with some studies actually reporting that we like people more when in the presence of undetectable amounts of bad-smelling stuff. How could that be? A team led by Wen Li believes that the judges might have actually been able to detect the odor, and then accounted for it in their response -- giving a face the benefit of the doubt when there's a hint of bad odor. But…

Is (are) data singular?

To me, few things are more annoying than someone who nitpicks about grammar. Grammar is important, to be sure, but how much does it really matter if your sentences are grammatically "correct," as long as your message is communicated clearly? Michael Bach recently emailed me lamenting that often reviewers comment that "the English could be improved" in his papers. That comment could be made about at least 99 percent of all papers published, but what does it help? If a reviewer can't point to a specific instance where the language is unclear, why make the observation in the first place? But…

I get email

Sometimes they sucker me. I thought James was writing a nice letter, at first. I found your site to be entertaining. I must say after reading the comments from your site I can see where the problem really is in this country. The fools follow the leaders of silly nonsense. See? It sort of sounds like he's agreeing with me. Little did I know how he was using the word "entertaining", which isn't always complimentary. James is probably more familiar with the word in its less than flattering sense. Like when he turns to his date after sex to murmur, "Was it good for you, baby?" and she replies…

When an object seems brighter, does it cause a stronger afterimage?

Take a look at the following two circles. At the center, they're both the identical bright white. But which one seems brighter? Let's make this a poll: I'm not sure if this illusion will work when respondents know the objects are the same brightness, but naive viewers will reliably rate the circle on the left as brighter -- this is called the "glare effect," and it occurs whenever there's a gradual gradient around a circle or other shapes (the gradient must approach the color of the shape as it gets closer to the shape itself). I found the illusion so powerful that I had to close the…

Why do you look where you look?

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 possible, the COLOR of the letter in the direction indicated by the cue. Now try this one, same task, but with a different cue. Much research on visual attention during the past 30 years has focused on the difference between these two types of cues -- central arrows versus peripheral indicators such as…

Do we all mean the same thing when we talk about colors?

The World Color Survey is a massive project which attempts to understand how colors are categorized in different languages. The researchers studied 110 different languages, none of which had a written component, which ensured that only spoken word categories would be used to describe the colors. Do the speakers all understand colors the same way? Is "red" red whether you're speaking Chumburu or Saramaccan? Rolf Kuehni undertook an analysis of the data to try to find out. To discuss colors and language, it's important to differentiate between the word we're using to describe a color, and the…