General / Site news
dmunger | June 28, 2006We've got just three days left for our Donors Choose Challenge. Based on the poll we conducted last week, the primary reason (short of being broke) for not donating is not seeing a worthwhile project. I've now added one more that I think is particularly worthy: The Shocking Simplicity of Electric Circuits. This project would serve a classroom whose families are 76 percent low-income, and get them excited about science with a real hands-on activity about electric circuits.
To fully fund this project, we need to raise just $846. Some of that could come from SEED's $10,000 in matching funds, and…
dmunger | June 26, 2006The first edition of The Synapse is up over at Pure Pedantry. Jake Young has spearheaded the formation of this brand-new carnival, assembling a worthy collection of neuroscience posts. Be sure to check it out. The next edition will be on July 9 at A Blog Around the Clock, so if you missed this one, make sure you get your submissions ready for the next time around.
dmunger | June 21, 2006Since polls and surveys are always some of our most popular posts, we decided to post today's gentle reminder in the form of a poll:
To donate, just click on the box to the left... or click here. It's completely legit to donate before you respond!
dmunger | June 16, 2006We're off to a great start in the ScienceBloggers' Donors Choose fundraiser for teachers, but we've still got a long way to go. Now there's even more great news: SEED magazine will match all the funds we raise up to $10,000. Add that to my and Greta's offer to do a 10 percent match if Cognitive Daily reaches its goal of $1,000, and there's never been a better time to donate. Give $25, and it's like giving $52.50. Give $100, and it's like giving $210. Give $100 million, and send Dave and Greta to the poor house -- or at least determine the limits of our generosity -- either way, it's a nifty…
dmunger | June 15, 2006Greta and I love what we do here at Cognitive Daily, and we'd love to see more people getting excited about careers in cognitive psychology. But before you can become a scientist (or a science writer), you need a good background in the basics. Unfortunately, for too many children, that education is just out of reach. They've got great teachers, but the teachers don't have the resources to provide them with the learning experience that will help them not only build skills, but get excited about science.
That's where you come in. We're participating in the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-…
dmunger | June 9, 2006If you haven't had a chance to visit the new ScienceBlogs home page, go now. It's got a slew of brand-new features, and we've more than doubled the number of bloggers. What's more, there are now several blogs that are in fields closely related to Cognitive Daily, which have conveniently been grouped together under the Brain and Behavior channel.
Actually, the channels are a bit more sophisticated than that. Every blogger can categorize every post into a channel. So if, for example, I write something about, say, academic publishing, I can specify that it's placed into the "academia" channel,…
dmunger | June 5, 2006I have a review of The Lost Men by Kelly Tyler-Lewis up at The Quarterly Conversation. You might want to give it a look. Here's an excerpt:
At current count, several recent books, documentaries, and even an IMAX film have covered Ernest Shackleton's now legendary failed attempt to be the first explorer to cross Antarctica. His ship Endurance became trapped in the sea ice before he even spotted land in the Weddell Sea. The ship was eventually crushed, forcing Shackleton to sail a 20-foot dinghy 2,000 miles across some of the most tempestuous seas on the planet to find help for his party, who…
dmunger | May 18, 2006My article The Economics of Conservation is up on seedmagazine.com. The article discusses the clash over global warming, and how economists and climatologists deal with the uncertainty inherent in each of their disciplines. It was an interesting article to write -- I got to talk with a number of economists and a climatologist, and I learned a lot about how these disciplines work.
Since you can't make comments directly on Seed articles, feel free to use this post for discussion.
dmunger | May 12, 2006Some site news:
Now that summer is upon us, Casual Fridays is going to take a little hiatus. Don't worry, it will be back next fall, but it's pretty much impossible for us to keep Casual Fridays going in the summer since we'll be traveling quite a bit. We can schedule regular posts in advance, but Casual Fridays require us to respond in real-time.
Also, over the next few days, I anticipate doing a little design work on the site. If things don't look or work quite right, please let me know in a comment on this post, or you could also e-mail me using the "Contact" link above.
Update: A…
dmunger | April 28, 2006The transfer of archives from the old Cognitive Daily site is now complete; all of our archives are now available here at ScienceBlogs! There really are some amazing articles back there. Here are some of my favorites from CogDaily's adolescent months:
Can our understanding of "Normal" and "Beautiful" be distorted?
A boy and his dog
False confessions: Not as rare as you think
Do women perceive color differently from men?
Can we compensate for the distraction of driving with a cell phone?
The Mozart Effect: Is it really all about attitude?
Is the mind like a computer? Evidence that it is not…
dmunger | April 27, 2006I've now finished posting archives up through June of 2005. There's some great stuff in there -- here are some highlights:
Drumbeats alone can convey emotion
Is memory better for shocking events?
Why we can't all be divas
What makes a wine expert?
Kids' unreliability as witnesses: Hard wired into the brain?
Why some of us choke under pressure
Who believes in magic?
Who still believes in magic?
Music and IQ
Why do we forget our childhood?
When do we learn what colors mean?
Does racial diversity help students learn?
There's lots more great stuff that I skipped over, so give yourself a treat and…
dmunger | April 26, 2006Over the next few days I'll be dusting off the old Cognitive Daily posts and moving them over to this site. If you'll scroll down a bit to the archives section on the sidebar to the left, you'll notice that they now extend all the way back to our first post back in January of 2005. I've even imported most of the comments (I did take the liberty of deleting over 300 pieces of spam). Of course, there's a bit of a gap between March of 2005 and January of 2006, but that will be fixed soon enough. In the meantime, here is some great reading from the early days of Cognitive Daily:
Troxler -- and…
dmunger | March 13, 2006In case you're reading Cognitive Daily on RSS or don't always check out the links to the (generally very good) seedmagazine.com articles in the column just to the right of this blog, I did want to point you to an article I wrote for them about peer review.
One of the things we like to do on Cognitive Daily is take a closer look at psychology articles in the mainstream media, to see if the media reporting on research matches up with the actual data. But we've been frustrated recently on several occasions because the actual data hadn't been published yet.
The answer isn't as simple as you think…
dmunger | March 6, 2006We usually try to stay focused on cognitive psychology here at Cognitive Daily, but today I did want to point you to a book review I've written in The Quarterly Conversation. I think Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers may just be the kind of book that can change the way the world thinks about global warming. Here's some of why I found it so compelling:
Perhaps most convincing is The Weather Makers' presentation of the vast amount of knowledge about historical climate change that has been accumulated. The information puts our era into context, and provides a compelling rebuttal for those who…
dmunger | January 24, 2006January 27 is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 250th birthday. In honor of the event, Greta Munger is giving a talk entitled "In the Mood: The Real Mozart Effect" discussing how scientific research addresses the claim that listening to the music of Mozart actually makes you more intelligent.
If you're in the area of Davidson, NC (about 20 miles north of Charlotte), stop by and see her talk, along with several others presented on this special day, including "Mozart in Hollywood" by Neil Lerner and "Grief, Denial, and a Piano Sonata" by Mauro Bothello. The talks are free, and start at 2:30 in Tyler-…
dmunger | January 11, 2006Welcome to the new Cognitive Daily! If you've been a regular visitor to the old Cognitive Daily, then I don't expect you'll find much has changed. Cognitive Daily, whether in our old digs or with our snazzy new host, is a great place to read about peer-reviewed psychology research explained in language that everyone can understand. And if there's something you don't understand, or if you'd like to engage in a more in-depth discussion of an issue, feel free to ask a question in the comments section.
In the past we've had some great discussions, ranging from the impact of video games to the…
dmunger | September 8, 2005One of our missions at Cognitive Daily has always been to get our message about the science of psychology out to as large and diverse an audience as possible. So far, the message has been passed along mainly by the Internet equivalent of word of mouth—blogs—and we've been amazed at the number of people who've taken the time to read and comment on our articles. And though Cognitive Daily has now had over 80,000 visitors, we'd like to extend our message even further.
So naturally, we were thrilled when Mike Rundle of the 9rules Network invited us to join. 9rules is a consortium of dozens of…
dmunger | August 24, 2005Welcome to Tangled Bank—we're thrilled to finally have the opportunity to host. For CogDaily readers who may not be aware of Tangled Bank, it's a fortnightly "carnival" of the best science blog postings from the previous two weeks. There's always an incredible variety of posts from all areas of the scientific world, and this week is no exception. Even if you're normally only interested in psychology, we encourage you to take this opportunity to see what else is going on in the world of science. We think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
We've done something a bit unusual with Tangled Bank this…
dmunger | August 22, 2005This Wednesday, we'll be hosting Tangled Bank, a nifty collection of the best science blog postings for the last two weeks. If you've got a science blog—or any kind of a blog, actually, consider yourself invited to submit! Just pick your best science-related post from the past two weeks (and we're defining science very loosely), give a couple-sentence description and a link, and e-mail it to host (at) tangledbank (dot) net or dave (at) wordmunger (dot) com, and we'll consider it for inclusion!