Casual Fridays
dmunger | May 4, 2007It used to be that everyone who needed to type took typing class in school. I was probably part of the last generation that actually learned on a typewriter rather than a computer: we clacked for 55 minutes a day in Mr. Butler's room full of IBM Selectrics. No correction keys, either: if you made a mistake, you had to retype the whole thing.
But even though Mr. Butler drilled us incessantly about proper typing form, I still have a few typing quirks. I don't use the proper finger to type "backspace," and I'm not properly ambidextrous with the space bar.
This got me to thinking. Does "proper…
dmunger | April 30, 2007Context. It can make all the difference in the world. The word "suck" can describe the action of a vacuum cleaner or a sex act that was illegal in the state of North Carolina until 2003.
Following our analysis of last Friday's curse word study, several of the commenters pointed out that without the context for a particular curse word, it's difficult to say whether or not the word is offensive. Heck, calling someone a "cow" can be awfully offensive in the right (or, should I say wrong) context.
There's no question these people are right. Yet on the other hand, the U.S. government has often…
dmunger | April 27, 2007Last week's Casual Fridays study was the most popular ever: Despite its grueling 58-question length, over 750 respondents completed the entire thing. We got so much data on foul language that I probably won't finish writing all of it up today.
As you might suspect, in reporting these results it's really impossible to avoid using the offensive words themselves, so if you think you might be offended, I'd recommend not reading any further. One thing our results confirmed, however: if you're like most people who completed the survey, you don't find most of these words generally offensive, so read…
dmunger | April 25, 2007Last week's Casual Fridays study filled up so quickly that many of those who wanted to participate weren't able to. This was due to our survey provider's limits on the number of responses. After a preliminary look at the data, it does look like it would be helpful if we could get more respondents.
Now I've located a survey provider that allows us to collect unlimited responses, so for $15, it seemed worth it to give this new provider a shot. If everyone likes the new survey site, we'll ditch the old one and go with this one. However, I'd ask that if you've participated in this study…
dmunger | April 20, 2007Update: New version of the study is up here!
#@*& it if I couldn't come up with a shorter Casual Friday study this week. When we started doing Casual Fridays a year and a half ago, the goal was to keep them short -- less than five questions, if possible. They've gradually expanded from week to week, but we've typically been able to keep to around ten questions.
But this week I came up with a *@&&ing good idea for a study that just wouldn't cooperate with the length limits. Fortunately, the subject matter tends to be quite arousing: offensive language. What words really get you *…
dmunger | April 13, 2007There was a lot of talk on the ScienceBlogs back channel last week about Mike Dunford's post on President Bush's wrangling with Congress over funding the Iraq war. The post attracted a lot of attention, including many comments from readers who claimed Dunford didn't "support the troops." If they had actually read the post they would have realized that the "troops" include Mike's wife and two brothers.
Bora Zivcovic remembered a post by Chris Clarke, which argued that very few readers were willing to read very long blog posts. In the past, he had written several three-part articles, requiring…
dmunger | April 6, 2007This week's Casual Fridays study plays off a post written by Mike Dunford. The question is, how are political attitudes affected by legal knowledge? Do you let the law get in the way of a political position, or do political goals trump legal ones? In fact, you might what to read Mike's post before you participate. It's an excellent post, and it really highlights the kind of issues I'm talking about.
Mike Dunford's Post
The link brings up the article in a new tab or window (because we want you to come back and take the survey!).
Click here to participate.
The study is brief, with just 10 quick…
dmunger | March 30, 2007This week's Casual Friday study attempted to get to the bottom of the age-old thermostat battle. In every office, classroom, and home, it seems, no one can agree on the proper temperature to set the thermostat. While one person is shivering like a wet poodle, their office-mate is sweating like fountain. I've talked with a few of my (now over-40) friends about the issue, and several of us agree that we seem to be getting more sensitive to temperature as we age.
A much more common stereotype, however, is that men tend to run hot while women run cold. When my family watches TV together, Jim and…
dmunger | March 23, 2007Last weekend Greta and I had a joint party celebrating our fortieth birthdays (my birthday was in January, Greta's is in May, so we split the difference). Naturally, the conversation turned to the changes that occur as we get older. I said that I thought I felt cold more often than when I was younger, and one friend, just a couple years older than me, said the same thing happened to him.
I can recall a time just seven or eight years ago when I was always the warmest person in the office -- I was the guy who constantly wanted to turn the thermostat down, while everyone else wanted it much…
dmunger | March 16, 2007The general consensus about last week's world accent test is that it was very difficult, but also quite fun. Everyone also wanted to know the answers to the quiz. I'm not going to make it that easy for you, but at the end of the post I will offer a way for you to figure out which is which.
The test required participants to listen to ten people from different parts of the world reading the same English text sample (via the fantastic Speech Accent Archive). Then they had to choose which accent was which from a list of 15 countries (actually 15 countries and 2 U.S. states). Which accent was…
dmunger | March 9, 2007Do you speak with an accent? How well do you understand the accents of others? Do you think you can identify where someone came from just based on his or her accent? Now's your chance to put that knowledge to the test.
We had so much fun with the little accent quiz we did earlier this week that we thought we'd expand it into a full-blown Casual Fridays study. You'll listen to ten different people reading the same excerpt, and you'll guess where they came from. Then come back next Friday to see how you did!
Click here to participate.
The study is brief, with just 13 quick questions, but it's a…
dmunger | March 2, 2007How good are humans at identifying faces? Amazingly good, even with only a few sparse pixels' worth of information. Inspired by the research of Pawan Sinha, who had found that people can recognize faces using just 12 × 14 pixels' worth of information, we wondered if people can distinguish between faces and non-faces with even less information. So, last Friday, we asked CogDaily readers to try to identify faces as small as one-quarter the size of those used in Sinha's study: just 6 by 7 pixels. Readers rated 8 different photos in four different sizes ranging from 20 pixels wide to just 6…
dmunger | February 26, 2007Did you miss the cut-off for the Casual Fridays study last week? Now's your chance to see more mystery photos. In this post, you'll find eight new versions of the photos -- ones which didn't appear in the original study. Each photo is followed by a poll so we can track responses. The idea is to see how little information it takes to recognize and possibly identify a face. It's been established that people can reliably discern faces from non-faces with 12 × 14 pixel images, but how about for smaller images?
As you can see, these pictures vary from 20 pixels wide down to just 6 pixels wide, so…
dmunger | February 23, 2007Remember these photos from earlier this week?
Readers were intrigued with the idea that we can tell which photo is a face, despite the fact that the photos are just 12 by 14 pixels! That brings the question: can we identify faces with even *less* information? This week's study may help answer that question. You'll be presented with eight images of different resolutions. Some will be faces, and some won't be. Can you tell the difference?
Click here to participate
As usual, the study is brief, with just 8 quick questions, so it should only take a minute of your time. You have until 11:59 p.…
dmunger | February 16, 2007If you didn't participate in last week's Casual Friday study, you should definitely see what it's like to experience the flash-lag effect:
When the blue rectangle flashes, it's always precisely aligned with the gray bar, yet it appears to be behind the bar. Cool, isn't it? You can stop the movie and check for yourself that there's no funny business going on.
Another illusion we've discussed recently is a visual-sound illusion. Here, the dot flashes just once, but when it's accompanied by two beeps, it appears to flash twice:
Clearly sound can affect what we see. So can sound affect the…
dmunger | February 9, 2007Today's study will explore how sound is related to perception of motion and illusions. We'll be examining a couple of different, really cool phenomena that may or may not be related.
If you've been reading CogDaily regularly, you might be familiar with some of the stimuli, but you won't have seen them combined in this way. It should be a lot of fun!
Perhaps most importantly, it doesn't matter what nationality you are; everyone should be on equal footing for this one as long as they have reasonably good hearing and vision.
Click here to participate
Since we didn't do a Casual Friday last week…
dmunger | January 26, 2007Last week's Casual Fridays study was inspired partially by reports we see in the mainstream media so often, proclaiming that Americans are ignorant about the rest of the world. If the rest of the world really is better than Americans at geography, then maybe they can beat us even on our home turf. Our quiz compared non-Americans' knowledge of U.S. states to Americans' knowledge about the rest of the world (you can see the maps and answers here).
I randomly chose ten countries and U.S. states, then created a multiple-choice quiz where a map was displayed and five plausible choices were given…
dmunger | January 22, 2007The America versus the World Casual Fridays study was our most popular test yet: The 500 survey slots filled in less than 24 hours. I promised to provide the quiz answers, and you'll find them below.
Some of our readers have asked why we don't allow everyone to respond, and the reason is simple: we have to pay for the survey software, and it costs us 5 cents per response. If one of our studies was linked by a major site such as Digg or Slashdot, that could amount to hundreds of dollars. If anyone knows of a survey site that doesn't have this requirement, please let us know!
That said, I have…
dmunger | January 19, 2007This post on Pharyngula made me realize that most non-Americans really have no occasion to learn the names of U.S. states. As one commenter put it:
That map would be much more useful if it labeled the American states as well. The only ones I can pick off with real certainty are California, Texas, Hawaii and Alaska. I have a good idea of where a lot of the others are generally, but others, I have no idea whereabouts in the US they are. Dakota? No idea. Virginia? Um, in the bottom/east 2/3rds.
It does make sense that non-Americans wouldn't have learned the names of all the U.S. states, but with…
dmunger | January 12, 2007Nonsignificance is the bane of every researcher. They know they've got an effect, but those darned statistics prove otherwise. In cognitive psychology, the standard for significance is p < .05, which means, essentially, that there's a 5 percent chance that the results are simply due to chance, instead of revealing a bona-fide phenomenon. For this week's Casual Friday, try as I may, I just couldn't find a significant effect.
The idea was straightforward enough. We based our design on a really cool study from Gillian Rhodes' lab, which found that by repeatedly exposing viewers to fatter-than…