News
dmunger | May 22, 2007When Joanne Rowling sat in an Edinburgh coffee shop, nearly broke, her baby sleeping nearby in a stroller, penning a fantastic story about a school for wizards, could anyone have predicted that she would soon be the most successful novelist in history?
Certainly not the twelve publishers who rejected her manuscript before Bloomsbury finally offered her a trifling £1,500 advance for a work that would ultimately become the basis for a billion-dollar publishing empire.
Probability expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes that our inability to predict blockbuster successes like Harry Potter is…
dmunger | May 21, 2007A fascinating study has just found that hearing one person's opinion repeated is almost as effective as hearing several different people's opinions.
Repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient's sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is.
The researchers had over a thousand student volunteers read statements that were supposed to represent…
dmunger | May 18, 2007Much research has found that there are IQ differences based on socioeconomic background of children: poorer children have lower IQs. But it's possible that these differences may be due to health problems in some groups: if poor kids are more likely to get sick, wouldn't that have some impact on their mental abilities as well?
A new study tries to control for that problem by identifying extremely healthy kids from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds:
To find a group of healthy children, the NIH researchers screened more than 35,000 youngsters for medical, neurologic and psychiatric…
dmunger | May 17, 2007Check this out:
As you might guess, all these bands are actually horizontal, but the stripes cause each band to be perceived as sloping up or down. But take a closer look: the top pair of bands appears to be getting closer together as you move from left to right, while the bottom pair appears to be getting farther apart. Yet the stripes on each pair of bands are slanted in the same direction: the only thing that makes the bands appear to slope in different directions is the frequency of the stripes.
I found this illusion via David Whitaker's web site. Whitaker submitted one of the top ten…
dmunger | May 16, 2007Lots of news outlets are buzzing about a new stand-up treadmill workstation. The idea is that you work standing up for part of the day, walking at a very slow pace, burning calories but still getting just as much done. Here's a photo from the Cleveland Leader:
My first thought is "how could I possibly get any work done standing on that contraption?", but results of an initial study suggest that workers are just as productive:
The authors add that the study participants found the equipment easy to use and were able to work normally, to the extent that they wanted to continue using it after…
dmunger | May 15, 2007The emoticon for "smile" in most western cultures is this :). One of the ScienceBloggers does it backwards (: (can you guess who?), but the symbol is essentially the same. In Japan, however, the smile is depicted like this: ^_^.
You might think that's just because the traditions evolved separately, but emotion researcher Masaki Yuki doesn't buy it. He argues that the difference in Japanese emoticons is related to cultural differences in real smiles.
when Yuki entered graduate school and began communicating with American scholars over e-mail, he was often confused by their use of emoticons…
dmunger | May 10, 2007In education school, I was taught that the purpose of grading was to rank-order students -- to create a system whereby the highest-achieving students were ranked at the top and the lowest-achieving students were at the bottom. But recently there have been worries that grade inflation is making it difficult to use grades to rank students.
At most Ivy League schools, nearly 50 percent of grades given are A or A minus. When dozens of students have perfect GPAs, how do you determine who is best? If the average GPA at a school is 3.4, then what's the point of having a four-point scale: half the…
dmunger | May 9, 2007In Star Wars, the real hero might be R2D2 -- the only character who makes it through all six episodes without falling to the "dark side" of the force. R2D2 is a robot, but everyone in the film treats "him" like a person, even commending him for "bravery." As viewers, we don't have a problem with that. R2D2 was Jim's favorite character -- he even had a stuffed animal version of the robot to sleep with.
But as real robots become more a part of society, will we form human bonds with them? It's already happening; the Washington Post has the details. U.S. soldiers who regularly use robots as…
dmunger | May 8, 2007A new blog has emerged in Terre Haute, Indiana. Its message is somewhat cryptic, including such gems as this one, from "annefernald":
For those who think of surgeons as spending their days operating on people, this would definitely not be Dr. Johnson....Not, in fact a medical doctor at all, the wit and writer is constantly trailed by a companion, one Boswell, who does most of his writing for him.
What's the point of all this? It's a protest of sorts, inspired by a recent article in the New York Times discussing the decline of book review sections in newspapers, and the rising role blogs are…
dmunger | May 7, 2007Many studies of the electrical activity in the brain have found consistent differences in activity when people look at faces compared to other stimuli such as cars or tools. This has led some researchers to conclude that face processing is fundamentally different from other visual processing. But a recent study has found some evidence to challenge that notion, and the Phineas Gage Fan Club has the details:
Many studies have compared faces presented at the same angle and size to a control category, presented with widely differing angle and size. If you then find that based on your study,…
dmunger | May 4, 2007They say exercise can help you lose weight. What they didn't tell you is how much exercise.
A new study offers the depressing truth: more than you ever imagined. Thousands of volunteers reported their weight and exercise regimens over a seven-year period. Here are the results:
25-to-34-year-old men gained 1.4 pounds annually if they ran less than 15 miles per week. In addition, male runners gained 0.8 pounds annually if they ran between 15 and 30 miles per week, and 0.6 pounds annually if they ran more than 30 miles per week.
Even running four miles a day three times a week couldn't prevent…
dmunger | May 3, 2007Fellow ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer has a nice article on the new respect cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have for emotion. Here's an excerpt:
Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.
"Because we subscribed to this false ideal of…
dmunger | May 2, 2007Yesterday the preeminent socially generated news site, digg.com, nearly exploded. The way the site is supposed to work is that users submit links to stories (and web sites, photos, and videos) they think will be interesting, and others give those stories a thumbs-up (a "digg") or thumbs-down. If enough users digg a story, it will be promoted to the top of the front page, and this constantly-updated page will reflect a diversity of interesting stories from around the world.
Ideally, this system is completely controlled by Digg's users, and the only interference from "management" is to remove…
dmunger | May 1, 2007This month's issue of Seed magazine features an interview, or really more of a discussion between music researcher Daniel Levitin and David Byrne. Even better, you can read the whole article online!
Byrne has been one of my musical heroes for decades now, and Levitin is a phenomenal researcher who really knows how to write. I'm about two-thirds of the way through his book This Is Your Brain on Music now, and I'm very much enjoying the read.
So how does the interview go? It reads a little awkwardly -- you get the sense that Byrne and Levitin just sat down for a somewhat choreographed chat, and…
dmunger | April 27, 2007
Very young children learn better from photos. When they are read to from a picture book describing how to make a rattle, 18-months-old do better at trying to make the rattle when the book had realistic photos compared to line drawings. I've always found instructions that use photos very difficult to follow because it's hard to highlight the relevant portion of the photo. But apparently at a very young age, children don't understand the relationship between a drawing and a real object.
Left-handers have faster connections between brain hemispheres. I knew it! Left-handers are superior! But…
dmunger | April 24, 2007Penalty kicks are nearly universally reviled among soccer fans, yet they remain an important part of the game. The sport is so exhausting that extending it beyond 30 minutes of extra time in a playoff game could be dangerous for the players. Typically in playoff or championship matches, tie games get decided by a penalty kick competition.
But penalty kicks offer such an advantage to the shooter that it often seems like dumb luck when a goalkeeper manages to make a save. The usual strategy is simply to dive randomly to the left or right, and hope you guessed right. Why not just flip a coin to…
dmunger | April 19, 2007While the debate over guns and gun control has taken center stage on ScienceBlogs, ultimately there's a human pulling the trigger. The New York Times has an interesting article about the problems getting troubled students to seek help before they harm themselves or others. The facts about college suicide are startlingly grim:
While shootings like the one at Virginia Tech are extremely rare, suicides, threats and serious mental-health problems are not. Last year, the American College Health Association's National College Health Assessment, covering nearly 95,000 students at 117 campuses, found…
dmunger | April 18, 2007Madam Fathom has an excellent discussion of nicotine's effect on the brain and cognitive function. First off, I've rarely seen a clearer explanation of how neurons actually work:
Neurons are functionally integrated in expansive neural networks, with each neuron receiving up to thousands of inputs from other neurons. However, the neurons are not actually physically connected to one another; there is a tiny gap that separates neurons, called a synapse.
When a neuron is activated, an electrical pulse (an action potential) travels down its membrane; the neuron is said to "fire" an action…
dmunger | April 16, 2007Today at least 31 people were killed by gunfire at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in senseless violence. Early reports suggest that the perpetrator was a boyfriend of a Virginia Tech student who was "looking for his girlfriend."
But whatever the proximal cause of this tragedy, the larger question is how we can prevent such incidents in the future. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, one report (PDF) from the National Institute of Justice suggests that as many as two-thirds of these seemingly random occurrences are preventable. Large attacks are planned, and attackers reveal their plans…
dmunger | April 16, 2007How many hours did you spend watching TV news coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks on that day?* Now, did you have dreams about it in the following days and weeks?
According to a newly published study, the more hours you spent watching news coverage, the more likely you were to have dreams with specific references to the attacks. Ruth Propper had been asking her psychology students at Merrimack College to keep dream journals for several weeks before September 11, and they continued to maintain them afterwards. In class on September 12, the students filled out questionnaires about…