General / Site news
dmunger | October 5, 2007I'm not going to lecture you; I'm just going to show you two graphs:
I think you know what to do.
dmunger | October 2, 2007Uriel Klieger has begun work revising the BPR3 icon. He's got a couple different versions up at BPR3.org:
This is the large version of the icon that will replace our icon for posts in the Research category -- those that discuss peer-reviewed research. But now all bloggers will be able to use the icon whenever they are blogging about peer-reviewed research rather than just linking to a press release or media commentary.
The icon on the top left is how he submitted it to win the contest; the two on the top center and top right are proposed revisions.
Please feel free to make your own comments…
dmunger | October 1, 2007
If you're a parent, you're probably familiar with the notes (or emails) home from school asking for help leading a field trip, or classroom supplies, or donations to the PTA. But if you're reading this blog, it's likely your kids are in a school that's already getting plenty of help from parents. What about those other schools -- the ones where 70 percent or more qualify for free lunches, where classes don't get taught because teachers don't have textbooks, where parents are so poor they can't afford to donate, and so busy working to make ends meet they don't have time to help out?
We think…
dmunger | September 22, 2007Just a quick reminder: The voting on the BPR3 icon contest closes on Monday, September 24. If you haven't voted yet, head on over to BPR3 or this CogDaily post and make sure your voice is heard.
dmunger | September 17, 2007Over at BPR3, we've picked the top three icons from the BPR3 icon contest. Here are the top three entries in the contest to design a universal icon that everyone can use on their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal:
Kevin Z:
Uriel Klieger:
Jeff Hunt:
Vote for your favorite, but also please make suggestions for improvements in the comments section -- the winning entry will have the opportunity to be revised before we declare it "final." Feel free to copy this poll and put it on your own blog so we can get the largest…
dmunger | August 24, 2007Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting has announced a contest to design an icon to identify serious blog posts discussing peer-reviewed research.
Anyone will be able to use the icon on their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, and not just a link to a press release or media commentary. Then BPR3.org will track these posts in a centralized listing of the most authoritative writing in the blogosphere.
Although the organization has only existed for 10 days, there's already a great discussion going on there, on…
dmunger | August 15, 2007If you haven't checked out the BPR3 initative (Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting), now's your chance to see everything that's going on with BPR3 in one place: The new web site has just gone live.
Set your bookmarks to researchblogging.org for the latest news on our efforts to identify promote blogging about peer-reviewed research. I'll probably still occasionally post here and link back to BPR3, but from here on out, that's the site to visit for the latest news on the project.
There's still a little dust in the corners as we build the site, and everything is pretty much plain-…
dmunger | August 13, 2007Last week's post on a Peer-Reviewed Research icon has generated a tremendous amount of interest, including many very thoughtful comments and an incisive post over on Cabi Blogs. I'll get to Philip's comments in a moment, because they are at the core of what "peer reviewed" means, but first let me update you on the status of the project.
First off, Kevin Z of the fabulous The Other 95% blog offered the best suggestion for a name for this initiative: PR^3 (Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting). Unfortunately, PR3.org was taken, but fortunately, BPR3.org was not. I decided to risk $9 and registered…
dmunger | August 8, 2007Most CogDaily readers are familiar with the little icon we developed to indicate when we were reporting on peer reviewed research. We created it when we began to offer links to news and blog posts, as a way of distinguishing those less "serious" posts from when we were talking about peer-reviewed journal articles.
But Sister Edith Bogue of Monastic Musings recently pointed out that other academic bloggers could also make use of the icon, to distinguish when they're blogging about news, family, books, etc., from serious scholarship. But our icon isn't ideal for this purpose since its design is…
dmunger | July 21, 2007I'm sitting in an Athens hotel with a cup of coffee pondering my last few hours in Europe. We've had a fabulous vacation, the longest I've ever taken in my life. At the same time, I'm looking forward to getting home.
I've tried to keep you abreast of the psychology-related events that occurred while we were in Europe, but internet access has been too sketchy, and we've been too busy having fun to post everything. Here are a few random snapshots I never managed to post:
A cool "rainbow cloud" from Tuscany, which I had intended to post as a demonstration of why the spectrum doesn't include all…
cogdaily | June 4, 2007Hello Cognitive Daily readers!
As you may have already read, I have been hired by Dave and Greta as the Cognitive Daily summer intern while they're away on vacation for the next couple of months, so I thought I'd give a brief introduction. My name is Aaron Couch and I am a junior student at Davidson College in North Carolina, majoring in both Psychology and Economics. I have been a long time reader of the blog (off and on for the last three years), was part of Greta's "Psychology Goes to the Movies" seminar this past semester, and she's also my major advisor. I am staying in the town of…
dmunger | June 1, 2007This post is scheduled to appear the moment our plane takes off for a very extended vacation to Europe. We'll be gone for seven weeks, but we won't be abandoning Cognitive Daily. We've scheduled two extended research posts to appear each week, each written by one of Greta's top student writers and carefully edited for accuracy and readability by both me and Greta.
Aaron Couch, the Cognitive Daily intern, will be here to help manage the comment discussion threads, post news items, and make sure there aren't any technical glitches.
I'll also be hauling my computer along for the journey, so…
dmunger | May 31, 2007More and more studies are online these days, which means that researchers can find a whole new array of participants for their studies, and anyone who's interested can become a real part of cutting-edge research.
But how can researchers find interested research subjects -- and how can people who want to participate find the studies that are interesting to them? We think we might be able to help. If you're conducting an online psychology study, or really any study that can be conducted remotely, just put all the vital details in a comment below.
Your study will appear in the "recent comments"…
dmunger | May 21, 2007Last week we reported on our site statistics after going to a full RSS feed. The results were disappointing; our numbers went down. We said we'd continue the experiment for another week to see if the trend was reversed once more people heard about the option of viewing all CogDaily content in RSS feeds.
Now, after another week of full RSS feeds, we have more results to report. These results confirm what we found last week: while RSS subscriptions are up, page views are down:
The dotted line represents the date we switched to full RSS feeds, and as you can see, the trend continues. Last…
dmunger | May 14, 2007For the past week, we've been conducting a little experiment with Cognitive Daily. In the past, we've had several readers complain that we don't include the full post in the RSS feed for CogDaily, so last week we published every post in its entirety on RSS (if you don't know what RSS is, I explain it below). Today I'm going to share the results of that experiment.
There are two primary philosophies about RSS feeds. The first one says that the point of RSS is just to alert users to new content. Users don't want to read content using their RSS reader; they'll visit the original web site to do…
dmunger | May 4, 2007Cognitive Daily now has a facebook profile.
I've never done facebook and I don't know how active this will be, but perhaps some of our readers are facebook users and this will be a way for you to connect with each other. There's also a ScienceBlogs fan club on facebook, so that's another way to get to know some of the people you may only currently recognize in comments threads here.
dmunger | April 30, 2007The post on showing only part of the RSS feeds has attracted quite a lot of attention, including some rather strident comments, such as this one from "Aurora":
How lazy are some people? What kind of society do we live in where people are too f**ing annoyed to click a mouse button to read an entire article?
But Christopher Davis offered a compelling response:
Perhaps you can tell me how to "click through" when I'm reading RSS feeds on my PDA on the subway. Not all applications have always-on connectivity.
Excellent point. But I wonder how many people really do read RSS feeds offline. Sounds…
dmunger | April 23, 2007One of the most hated practices on the Internet is the breaking of articles into pages. Jason Kottke swearingly rants against it here, and Mike Davidson denounces the practice here. I don't much like the practice either, especially when a short, pointless article is broken into four or more pages (Davidson mockingly points to this extreme example).
Davidson argues that only extremely long articles -- more than 20 screens long -- should be broken up into pages, and these pages should correspond to logical divisions within the article, which he calls "acts" (I'd call them "chapters" or "…
dmunger | April 2, 2007Just a quick announcement: I've changed my email address, so if you need to get in touch with me, please update your address books. The new address is dsmunger--at--gmail--dot--com.
dmunger | March 29, 2007Cognitive Daily gets a lot of complaints about graphs, mostly from readers who say the graphs are useless without error bars. My response is that error bars are confusing to most readers. But perhaps I'm wrong about that. Now I'm going to put my money where my mouth is.
Take a look at this graph. It represents a fictional experiment where two different groups of 50 people took a memory test. The mean scores of each group are shown, along with error bars showing standard error:
Based on this graph, can you tell if there is a significant difference (p<.05) between the scores of the two…