Casual Fridays
dmunger | December 14, 2007A few weeks ago, I was excited to learn that a project I'm working on got written up on NPR's News Blog. However, I was less excited when I saw the way my own status was described:
Dave Munger, a science blogger and stay-at-home dad in Davidson, N.C., wanted to find a way to show people that some blog posts are meant to carry more weight than a rant or an off-hand comment.
Would people consider my project to be less noteworthy if they thought of me as a "stay-at-home dad"? Technically, I guess I am a stay-at-home parent because my office is in my house, but since my primary occupation has…
dmunger | December 7, 2007This week's Casual Fridays study is just a quick reading comprehension test. Is that all it is? I can't tell you. Why not just try it and find out for yourself?
Click here to participate
As usual, the survey is quite short, with just 8 questions. It should take only a minute or two to complete. You have until the morning of Thursday, December 13, to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents.
Don't forget to come back next Friday to see the results!
[Since there are a few "secret" details to this study, I'm going to close the comments for now.]
dmunger | November 30, 2007Two weeks ago, we challenged our readers to see if they could discern the difference between MP3 recordings at different sampling data rates. Nearly 700 completed our study. So does a very high data rate result in a noticeable difference? Here our are basic results:
Respondents rated two recordings, one by rock guitarist Carlos Santana, and another by orchestral composer Aaron Copland. Each recording was encoded into an MP3 file at three different data rates: 64, 128, and 256 kbps. For both recordings, there was a significant difference between ratings of the 64 kbps data rate and the 128…
dmunger | November 16, 2007There's a lot of debate online about whether people can really tell the difference between the various audio formats -- AAC, MP3, you name it. Does it really make a difference?
Recently I saw a blog post suggesting that the methodology for many so-called studies on the phenomenon was flawed. If you're going to test this sort of thing, listeners shouldn't be aware of the format they're listening to. And they shouldn't be asked to compare two versions of a song, they should simply rate how good each particular recording sounds. According to this post, few studies take the time to be rigorous…
dmunger | November 9, 2007Last week's Casual Friday study focused on messes around the home. We identified eight common household messes, and then asked readers how annoying they were, and who cleaned up.
An interesting thing happened: for the first time ever, we had significantly more female respondents than male respondents: Nearly 60 percent of the 490 responses to the study came from women. We've had as many as 70 percent male respondents to Casual Fridays studies, and the previous best showing for women was right about 50 percent. My best guess at the gender ratio in our readership is about 60-40 (male-female),…
dmunger | November 2, 2007I'll fess up: I leave coffee grounds on the kitchen counter when I make coffee. It bugs Greta, but it doesn't bother me. Meanwhile, it bothers me when Greta leaves her shoes next to the stools in the kitchen, and it drives both of us crazy when the kids pile their backpacks at the bottom of the stairs -- then immediately head up to their rooms without their stuff.
This week's study is about household messes. Is it just the messes that other people make that bother us? Or are we sometimes annoyed by our own messes? Maybe the messes we dislike the most are the ones we think someone else should…
dmunger | November 1, 2007Tomorrow's Casual Fridays study will be about messes: who makes messes, and who cleans them up. In order to do this right I'm going to need a little help from you.
What I need to know are the typical sorts of messes people (including you) create in your home or workplace. Everything from dirty socks on the living room floor, to coffee grounds on the kitchen counter, to muddy footprints in the entry hall. Just help me out by listing some of the messes that particularly bother you in the place you live or work.
dmunger | October 19, 2007With hundreds of seemingly worthy charities out there, how do we decide which ones to donate to? Even if we eliminate charities that aren't effective, there are still too many choices, and too little money, to donate to all of them. In the Donors Choose campaign, bloggers are going to impressive lengths to coax their readers into giving. But do incentives such as this really work?
We asked our readers, and 261 of them responded. That's the lowest response rate we've had this year, suggesting that many readers aren't much interested in charity, even when motivated by a cute photo of a child.…
dmunger | October 12, 2007When I was a kid, I participated in all sorts of fund raisers for charity. It wasn't hard to get people to donate -- all I had to do was go door to door and ask for donations. One year I raised over $1,500 for a local children's hospital. Who can resist a face like this?
Typically at least half the people I asked would donate $10 or $15. Somehow I don't think the same strategy would work as well today, now that I'm a big, bearded adult. Clearly my charitable efforts aren't as effective over the internet, where fewer than one percent of our readers donate.
That got me to wondering: what…
dmunger | October 6, 2007Last week we wondered how thorough news reporters were being when they conducted "person on the street" interviews with questions from the U.S. citizenship test. We decided to administer the test a bit more systematically (but still not scientifically). Over 680 people responded to our study, allowing us to get some pretty solid results.
The headline is what we stated above: Most U.S. citizens didn't get a passing grade on the test -- even though we were very generous in grading the tests. We didn't even count off for spelling errors and accepted answers that were only partially correct. But…
dmunger | September 28, 2007The U.S. Department of Immigration unveiled its new U.S. citizenship test today. Whenever these tests come out, news organizations inevitably send reporters out to find out if actual U.S. citizens know the answers we expect immigrants to know. The results, as you might expect, are generally not impressive.
But these reporters generally aren't tackling the issue in a very scientific manner: typically they just ask random people in a train station or on the street, then report the most amusing answers.
We thought we'd be a little more systematic about it. This week, our casual study asks our…
dmunger | September 21, 2007You might have thought we'd have a new study for you to participate in this week. You're half right. If you've read CogDaily, Terra Sigillata, Uncertain Principles, or Chaotic Utopia in the past two weeks, you've actually been participating in today's non-scientific study.
ScienceBloggers have a private forum where we can discuss technical issues with the blogs, talk about our latest successes or failures, and even coordinate super-secret studies of our readers. Many of us have observed that a blogger can spend 5 minutes posting a YouTube link or a cartoon, and somehow that will be their most…
dmunger | September 14, 2007Last week's Casual Friday study had a secret: We weren't just interested in whether you like light desserts; we also wanted to know if the weight and/or gender of the dessert chef influenced your opinion of a dessert.
Each survey participant saw two different versions of a dessert recipe:
Each recipe was randomly credited to one of four chefs:
Then readers rated the recipes for taste, creativity, and healthiness. We wanted to know the dessert chef would influence the ratings. Maybe the heavier chefs would be seen as less credible in presenting the "light" recipes. Maybe heavier chefs…
dmunger | September 13, 2007We got a great response to last week's Casual Friday study on dessert preferences. However, I've realized that there's one more bit of information I need. Ideally I should have put this question in the survey itself, but it's too late for that, so this follow-up will have to do. I need to know what CogDaily readers think of the celebrity chefs we featured -- so I'd appreciate it if you responded to this poll (whether or not you took the survey). Here are the chefs that were featured in the survey:
Now for the secret about the study. While we were interested in the question of whether…
dmunger | September 7, 2007Some people suck down diet soft drinks, eat diet potato chips, even put diet creamer in their coffee. Others say part of the enjoyment of these things is knowing they're not "good for you."
When it comes to eating dessert, that dividing line can seem even stronger. Some people say that if you want to watch your weight, you shouldn't be eating dessert in the first place, while others argue that dessert's an important part of every meal, so it's a good idea to come up with low-fat, low-calorie desserts that still taste good.
So how prevalent is each of these schools of thought? What type of…
dmunger | August 31, 2007Last week we asked our readers about where they got their news. I haven't watched local news for years, and I was wondering if anyone else in the blogosphere did. As several respondents pointed out, our results aren't going to be exactly a cross-section of society at large, but it may be useful to see the relative importance of different news sources among our readers. Here's a snapshot of the results:
As you can see, only two sources of local news were less important to our readers than television, and only one of those ("other print source") was significantly less important. The only…
dmunger | August 24, 2007The other day I got a phone call from a marketing research firm. I'm a sucker for these things, so I agreed to answer the questions, even though the caller said it might take up to 20 minutes.
CALLER: Can you tell me which local news shows you watch on TV from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. on Monday through Friday?
ME: I don't watch any local news.
CALLER: Okay. Now can you tell me which local news you watch from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. on Monday through Friday?
ME: Actually, I don't watch any local news on TV, at any time.
CALLER: Oh. I guess this is going to be a short survey.
But the call got me wondering…
dmunger | May 25, 2007Last week we wondered whether sports fans and arts buffs were nonintersecting groups. I knew there were some exceptions to the idea that an arts snob wouldn't set foot inside an athletic complex. For example, a friend of mine is an art history professor, but also such a big football fan that in his spare time he serves as an equipment manager (read "cleans soiled jockstraps") for the Carolina Panthers. Despite exceptions like this, we wanted to know if on the whole the stereotype was true. There's also a second possibility, one which was borne out by our results: perhaps some people like to…
dmunger | May 18, 2007Are sports fans ignorant about the arts? Do opera buffs have trouble distinguishing a fastball from a slider? Greta has never been much of a sports fan, but she loves taking in the arts, cultural events, and Broadway shows. I know lots of sports fans who've never heard an opera. Are sports and fine art mutually exclusive?
If this is a rule, there's at least one exception: I love sports, but I also enjoy visiting museums and listening to the symphony. But maybe I'm not as uncommon as it seems. Maybe lots of people enjoy both fine arts and sports. Now's our chance to find out. This week's…
dmunger | May 11, 2007I'm a fast typist, but Greta types much faster than me. I've taken a few years of piano lessons, but Greta could read music before she could read, and she still plays oboe and English horn with the Davidson College Symphony Orchestra. Could her 30+ years of musical training be the reason she's a faster typist?
This week's Casual Fridays study was inspired by my observations about my personal typing quirks, but it quickly morphed into a new justification for music lessons. Commenter (and perception of music blogger) Scott Spiegelberg felt his musical training might have had something to do…