News
dmunger | April 13, 2007A good friend of mine was a bank manager for many years. He told me that robberies are much more common than you might think: bank employees are trained to comply with robbers' demands, minimizing losses by keeping relatively small amounts of cash in their drawers. Typical training also suggests that employees don't confront or establish eye contact with robbers, activating hidden alarms if possible but not causing a stir.
The reason you don't hear about them is banks don't like to publicize robberies -- they're bad for business.
But a new program in Seattle turns all this on its head.…
dmunger | April 3, 2007Just wanted to point out an excellent interview with Philip Zimbardo, the principal researcher of the controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, on the New York Times web site.
If, like me, you couldn't stomach watching the entire video (now removed from YouTube), you should at least watch this 8-minute interview, which also offers a nice summary of the experiment and its relation to Abu Ghraib.
Zimbardo's thesis is that we all have the capacity for good and evil; it's the situations we are put in that cause us to behave in good or evil ways.
dmunger | April 3, 2007Amardeep Singh suggests that bloggers might benefit from some form of peer review:
The idea came to me as I've begun preparing a tenure file at my current university, acutely aware that my blog writing cannot be considered "peer-reviewed" publication by any current standard. Even the rewards of occasional Boing-Boing-ish popularity (my post on "Early Bengali Science Fiction" from awhile ago, for instance) do not help, since that is really popularity rather than review. But why not institute a review of some sort?
But how to go about it? Getting scholars to review academic work is often like…
dmunger | March 29, 2007Computers have become such an integral part of life that it's often tempting to believe that they work just like the human brain (or that the brain works just like a computer). However, those of us who've spent time programming computers know that we don't "think" like computers: if we did, a single misplaced semicolon could turn Hamlet into meaningless babble.
Chris Chatham has developed an excellent list of 10 differences between brains and computers. I think the difference that best illustrates the programmer's dilemma is Number 2:
Difference # 2: The brain uses content-addressable memory…
dmunger | March 28, 2007John Tierney wonders whether doctors should be prosecuted for prescribing too much pain medication. Tierney makes some good points. One "warning sign" that a patient may be abusing drugs is that they come back for a refill early because their medicine has run out. Couldn't this also be a sign that the patient is in pain and needs more medication? There's tons of individual variation in sensitivity to pain. If the doctor believes the patient to be earnest, why is the doctor the one being prosecuted?
Another good New York Times article. This one is about the limits of multitasking ability. The…
dmunger | March 27, 2007This week's edition of Encephalon and an email from the Neurophilosopher has reminded me that I've been rather negligent of my blogroll lately.
I believe a blogroll should represent the sites a blogger visits frequently; it's an invitation into that blogger's community. Surely you'd get a sense of that by reading a couple months' worth of posts, but who has time for that? The blogroll is a shortcut.
Unfortunately, I'm busy too -- reading (and writing about) these blogs. It becomes easy to neglect a blogroll, because it's not something I use every day -- I use an RSS reader to follow my…
dmunger | March 26, 2007A rat's brain has millions of neurons, each with up to 10,000 connections to other neurons. This "simple" animal's neural network is mind-bogglingly complex. Yet a Swiss laboratory has achieved remarkable success duplicating a vast region of a rat's brain using a supercomputer. They still have a ways to go, however. The computer currently has 10,000 microprocessors, each representing a single neuron in the rat's brain. To duplicate the entire brain they'll need a computer 2,000 times bigger. Their ultimate goal is even more ambitious: to create a model of the human brain, with its hundred…
dmunger | March 23, 2007Greta has a jar of candy in her office, and she eats exactly one piece of candy per day (as well as offering it to her students whenever they visit). By contrast, if I have candy within 50 yards of my office, it will disappear within a day or two at the most (which is why I don't keep candy in my office!). Why can Greta resist temptation while I cannot? A new study suggests that part of the reason may have to do with heart rate.
The Science Daily headline, "Why We Give In To Temptation," is a little misleading. The research doesn't show why I give into temptation while Greta does not; it…
dmunger | March 22, 2007The New York Times has a great article on the Japanese gaming company responsible for the Sudoku craze. The article is interesting, but be sure to check out the sidebar, where you can try three up-and-coming rivals to Sudoku.
Personally I find Sudoku a little boring: After I figured out a "system" that allowed me to work out almost any puzzle, it just doesn't offer much challenge. So what's next? I really like Kakuro, which has actually been around for a while (I can even remember its U.S. version from the 1970s: "Cross-Sums"). You can try the sample puzzle on the New York Times page, but the…
dmunger | March 21, 2007Several news outlets are reporting on a study, in some cases claiming that racing video games "cause" accidents or reckless driving. But causality is difficult to demonstrate in psychology research. Do the games really cause accidents?
Many of the irate commenters on the news articles claim that the study doesn't really show causality, or that it's not well-designed. I took a quick look at the actual study, and came away impressed: the study does show some causal links between racing games and poor driving behavior in simulations, but it also has some limitations.
One thing I like about the…
dmunger | March 20, 2007Eric Schwitzgebel offers an interesting paradox:
When I was a graduate student, a girlfriend asked me what, of all things, I most enjoyed doing. Eschewing the obvious and half-clever reply, I answered skiing -- thinking of those moments of breathing the cold, clean air, taking in the mountain view, then expertly carving a steep, lonely slope. But how long had it been since I'd gone skiing -- maybe three years? My girlfriend suggested that if has been three years since I've done what I most enjoyed doing, then maybe I wasn't living wisely.
Schwitzgebel argues that the negatives of these…
dmunger | March 19, 2007It seems that students (and their parents) are more stressed than ever about whether they'll get into the right college. Admission to places like Harvard, Stanford, and Duke is getting more competitive each year, with less than ten percent of applicants actually admitted. Because attending the best high schools increases chances of admission, the stress doesn't start in senior year -- the competition to get into high school can be almost as stressful. And, of course, getting into the right high school requires the proper elementary education, so many kids are subjected to intense competitive…
dmunger | March 16, 2007I've found a few articles that I've got couple sentences' worth of thoughts about, but not a couple paragraphs, so I'm going to write them all up here. This is sort of halfway between a news and an in other news post.
1. Neuroscience and science writing. Jonah Lehrer argues that it's okay for science writers to use generalizations like "the amygdala is the center of fear and anxiety" when actually all we can say for certain is that region is activated more when people claim they are afraid or anxious, compared to a "resting state." I agree; writers need to take shortcuts sometimes, but an…
dmunger | March 15, 2007When a suspect confesses to a crime, it's often seen as a clear victory for the prosecution. But what if the confession was coerced? Under the emotional strain of an interrogation, it happens more often than you'd think. In response to the problem of coercion, many police departments now videotape interrogations. This should eliminate all potential for abuse, right? Wrong. Teams led by Daniel Lassiter have found that when the camera is focused on the suspect instead of both the suspect and the interrogator, people are more likely to view the confession as voluntary rather than coerced (the…
dmunger | March 14, 2007Yesterday's "Buzz in the blogosphere" on the ScienceBlogs main page was all about medically unfit troops being sent in to battle. You should definitely check out some of those articles, including a discussion of whether the reports are accurate.
However, those reports don't cover another troubling phenomenon of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: the military's poor record handling mental illness. On Monday's Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed two reporters who had uncovered serious issues with the U.S. military's handling of life-threatening battlefield mental illness. They reported on the…
dmunger | March 13, 2007Is it better to meet your special someone by picking them up at a rock concert, or by serving on the same church committee? Actually, the rock concert might be the better bet, assuming you're both enjoying the music. Chris at Mixing Memory has a fascinating discussion of why musical tastes may be a more important gauge of personality than any other measure (we've discussed some of the same research here).
Confident that people really do use musical preferences as indicators of personal qualities, Rentfrow and Gosling next sought to map out the dimensions of those preferences. They started…
dmunger | March 12, 2007When I was a paper boy back in the 1980s, I always hated daylight-saving time. Just when the mornings were finally starting to lighten after a long, dark winter, daylight-saving time came along and ruined everything: when clocks "spring" forward, the sunrise arrives one hour later. It would be several weeks before I'd be able to deliver my papers in the light. This weekend, daylight-saving time arrived even earlier than usual, thanks to a new law supposedly designed to save energy.
Since many people are still asleep while it's light outside in the morning, the reasoning goes, all that light…
dmunger | March 9, 2007On Thursday, March 15, HBO will premier an ambitious series of documentaries entitled Addiction. Although HBO is a premium cable service usually costing an extra $10 or more per month, they are offering their service for free to regular cable and satellite subscribers during the four-day weekend beginning March 15, and all the shows will play at some point during that time. According to the press kit they sent me, you'll also be able to stream the shows from their website. (It's not clear whether all 14 programs will be available in this form. Right now all that's up is a short teaser video…
dmunger | March 8, 2007There's been a lot of news about robots lately, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to synthesize what's going on in this field and offer a bit of speculation about where robotics is headed.
First: From Neurodudes comes news of an artificial robotic limb that not only responds to nerve impulses but also has the potential to give feedback to its human host -- as if she was sensing her environment with her own hands. Is this the first cyborg? What's next -- direct mind control of machines?
Actually, a company is working on just such an interface -- a video game controller that works by…
dmunger | March 6, 2007The NPR had a wonderful report this weekend about the Speech Accent archive, including an extended interview with the archive's creator, Steven Weinberger.
It's simply fascinating to listen to the hundreds of different voices in the archive, all reading the same passage, and noting the geographical differences. Can you guess this one (Quicktime required)?
How about this one?
Visit the archive yourself to find out more. Here's the purpose statement from the archives:
Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person's linguistic…