News
dmunger | August 13, 2008Over at Sciam's Mind Matters blog, Greta and I have written a guest post about tone deafness and bad singing:
Although there have been many studies of perceptual tone deafness, or amusia, few have compared people's ability to hear differences between musical notes with their ability to produce good music. This fact is what makes the recent study by Pfordresher and Brown so interesting. They tested 79 college students on both their ability to discriminate between musical notes and their ability to sing accurately.
... and here's what they found:
The bad singers were significantly worse than…
pzminion | August 13, 2008Brought to you by guest blogger LisaJ:
Canada lost two soldiers serving in Afghanistan this week. This marks the 89th
and 90th Canadian soldier to be killed since starting our peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan in 2002. Master Corporal Josh Roberts leaves behind his fiancé in Manitoba, and Master Corporal Erin Doyle leaves behind a wife and a young daughter. These stories are just heartbreaking. They are both very young men, and they've had their lives just ripped right out form underneath them. Their families' lives have undoubtedly been shattered. What's more, breaking news this…
pzminion | August 11, 2008[MAJeff here. I'll remember this one of these times.]
Apparently, John Edwards had an affair. I've been out of the news loop and haven't been following it other than what I see in a few blog comment sections. I'm honestly not all that interested in the sex lives of the powerful; I'm more interested in the social reaction. So, I'm going to talk about a few things that I've seen, and tie those into issues of marriage and sex regulation by the state.
One thing I've heard is, "at least he didn't break the law." Well, depending upon where his trysts took place, Edwards may have broken the law.…
pzminion | August 10, 2008[Oops. Forgot again. MAJeff posting this one]
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More War.
I have to admit, this is probably me being an American, but until a few days ago I wasn't aware of all the tensions between Georgia and Russia. What I know now, though, is that people are dying.
So, for the folks in the know, or in the region, what's going on? What do you see as root causes? What will be the effects of this conflict? Any good sites for further reading? Anything average citizens outside the region can do?
illconsidered | August 5, 2008The continued mysterious death of honeybees, (36% loss of all colonies in the US this year alone) is now being linked to pesticides.
There are also typically suspicious shenanigans from the EPA involved:
So why did the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2002 grant an "emergency" exemption allowing increased use of Gaucho -- typically invoked during a major infestation -- when only a few beetles were found in blueberries? Why did the agency also grant a "conditional" registration for its close relative, Pancho, allowing the chemical on the market with only partial testing? And why is the…
illconsidered | August 5, 2008So, investigation of anthrax terrorism attacks ends up pointing to lead investigator who then commits suicide. All neat and tidy, case closed. But it certainly does not look that simple after all. Check out that DemocracyNow! story for some intriguing details. (watch/listen/read)
Additional and voluminous material can be found here:
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/
Lots of interesting reading there.
All that's missing now is for some serious questions to be raised about whether or not it was even a suicide.
They make it so easy to be a conspiracy theroist, where's the challenge aymore…
pharyngula | August 4, 2008It's a small thing, only doing $10,000 worth of damage, but the location is newsworthy.
A fence and garage at Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church became engulfed in flames early Saturday, according to the Topeka Capitol-Journal Web site. The fire did not spread to the church building.
The cause of the fire is unknown, and I sincerely hope it wasn't arson — setting homes on fire is not the way to settle grievances, even against people as despicable as the Phelps clan.
illconsidered | August 1, 2008Via Prometheus I read this article from the AFP that describes some new findings about land mass in the river delta that is Bandladesh. Apparently it is growing and has been for the last 32 years at about 20 km^2/year.
Roger points out, no doubt correctly, that the climate septics will make great hay with this, as supposedly another IPCC prediction turns sour.
But will they be correct?
Regardless of the extent of the Bangladeshi delta, obviously the only thing that will determine if it is submerged or not in future sea level rise scenarios will be its altitude. 640 square km of new land is…
illconsidered | July 23, 2008With that name, the silly post titles just don't quit!
But on the serious side, "This storm, heading for the Mexico-Texas border, is now a hurricane. Our second of the 2008 season, and it's not even August yet" says Chris Mooney.
Read some live storm blogging here, I guess it has already landed.
illconsidered | July 11, 2008This is a little stale, but a new joint statement came out last month from the National Science Academies of all G8 countries and then some, calling for urgent action to address climate change by reducing cabon emissions.
You can read the statement here.
Also included is Canada, a smaller economy but one of the worst per capita CO2 emitters, I think worse than the US and just behind Australia if I recall correctly.
While Australia was not on that list of signatories, its National Science Academy does endorse the statement.
The Australian Academy of Science notes the statement on climate…
drorzel | June 17, 2008As noted at Making Light, the recent disasters in Iowa have depleted the American Red Cross's disaster relief fund, and they're borrowing money in order to keep running:
"The disaster relief fund today is completely depleted. The balance is zero," Jeffrey Towers, chief development officer, said in a conference call with reporters.
Towers added that the Red Cross "needs immediate funds to deploy in a variety of ways to provide the scale of services that this disaster demands."
The Red Cross is congressionally chartered to provide disaster relief but operates largely on private donations. The…
illconsidered | June 10, 2008I have not done any checking on this (hey, what are blogs for?) but it is definately plausible and if true very important. It is also potentially avoidable.
What they are saying, if you don't want to watch, is that they have some inside information on major ISP's plans to radically alter the way the internet is accessed. In short, by 2012, if this comes to fruition, ISP's will not offer open internet access, rather you will subsrcibe to packages of popular websites and pay extra for any other sites you want to visit.
Net neutrality is not an unfamiliar issue for most of you out there I am…
dmunger | May 28, 2008The biweekly neuroscience / psychology carnival Encephalon is now live over at the Neurocritic. There are tons of great posts but one of my favorites has to be this one: Would you vaccinate your kids against drugs?
dmunger | May 24, 2008Quick, solve this problem
3 + 5 * 7 = ?
If you still recall high school algebra, you'll remember that you should be doing the multiplication problem first. So the answer would be 35 + 3, or 38. But if you just punch the numbers into your calculator (or if you haven't had occasion to do algebra since the ninth grade), you might do the addition problem first and come up with a different answer.
But even when people are reminded about the algebraic solution to the problem, when the numbers are grouped together a little differently, it has a significant impact on whether they're able to solve the…
dmunger | May 24, 2008Negative stereotypes about Blacks in the U.S. have declined dramatically since the 1930s -- practically no White person to will say that Blacks are lazy, or superstitious, or many other stereotypes, when these views were common 80 years ago.
Yet huge racial disparities still exist infant mortality, unemployment, and poverty are found more than twice as often among Blacks than Whites, and these numbers haven't changed since the 1960s.
In John Dovidio's talk, "Racism Among the Well-Intentioned, he argued that most Whites who say they're not biased, believe they are not biased. Yet at the same…
dmunger | May 23, 2008Just a few quick notes about Michael Frese's talk, "Learning from Errors by Individuals and Organizations."
Frese gives a rule: "You make about 3-4 errors per hour no matter what you're doing."
If errors are so ubiquitous, maybe it makes more sense to train people to deal with errors, rather than to try to flush out every possible error. Frese and others have studied this phenomenon in the lab. They found that error management actually led to improved performance on computer training tasks: if you are trained to expect errors and deal with them, you do better on the task. There are limits to…
dmunger | May 23, 2008This morning I attended a session on the Science of Learning, and heard a bunch of great talks.
I was especially impressed by "There's Nothing so Practical as a Good Theory," by Robert Seigler.
Siegler discussed his work with children's learning of the number line. As children get older, they develop better and better representations of numbers -- this is research we've discussed on Cognitive Daily.
These results correlate significantly with math achievement test scores -- kids who have better representations of numbers score better on the tests.
So what causes math ability in these kids?…
dmunger | May 22, 2008As I write this, Greta and I are on the plane to Chicago, to attend this year's Association for Psychological Science convention. We'll be participating in a symposium on Sunday, talking about Cognitive Daily and ResearchBlogging.org, but until then, we'll be attending other sessions and reporting intermittently here on CogDaily. We won't be "liveblogging" every session we attend, just giving a few thoughts and impressions of what we see and hear in Chicago.
If you're attending the convention, maybe we'll see you there. If not, you'll get some sense of what it's like by checking out CogDaily…
drorzel | May 12, 2008There's been a lot said and written about Cyclone Nargis recently, and reading the coverage by Chris Mooney and others makes me feel a little like a Bad Person for not saying anything myself. But, really, what is there to say? It's a gigantic disaster, and the deplorable political situation in that part of the world isn't helping anything.
In an effort to do something halfway constructive, I'll pass along a link from my email, to Mercy Corps's Myanmar Cyclone page. They're one of the organizations that I sent money to after last summer's atheist charity search, and from all reports are an…
dmunger | April 30, 2008The man behind the amazing Contrast Asynchrony illusion has started a blog! Arthur Shapiro tells me he has a backlog of literally thousands of illusions. He promises to offer a new illusion every week, along with an explanation of the science behind it. Here's a preview of this week's illusion:
For an explanation of how it works, you'll have to visit Shapiro's blog, Illusion Sciences. There are already three illusions posted, with plenty more to come.
Arthur Shapiro is a world-class illusion designer and psychologist whose illusions have won the most prestigious awards in the field. Two…