News
dmunger | March 5, 2007I've written a review of William Vollmann's Poor People for the spring issue of The Quarterly Conversation. Here's an excerpt:
In the U.S., the "poverty line" for 2006 was set at $9,800 per year of income for a single person, or $20,000 for a family of four. But it is misleading to judge poverty in this way: surely some people can live comfortably below those income levels, and some--those with significant medical problems, for example--couldn't pay for the necessities of life even if they earned substantially more. And doesn't $20,000 go a lot farther in, say, North Dakota, than it does in…
dmunger | March 2, 2007If you haven't heard of the internet phenomenon Second Life, you probably will soon. It's an online world where players create virtual representations of themselves, or rather, themselves as they'd like to be. Then they go about "life" in the way they would if the tedious flaws of everyday life -- gravity, jobs, cellulite, and so on -- didn't exist. It's not that people don't work in the world of Second Life. In fact, people have made thousands of real-world dollars by selling items they created in Second Life.
Now Second Life is about to get an upgrade. Currently, to "talk" to others in the…
dmunger | February 28, 2007Brain Maps offers over 50 terabytes of high-resolution pictures of brains from several different organisms. You're probably familiar with the brain off to the right -- it's good ol' Homo sapiens.
The brain at left may be a bit less readily identifiable. It's Tyto alba, or the barn owl.
Perhaps the most impressive feature of the Brain Maps site isn't its elegant interface or its massive database -- it's its liberal use policy. Anyone can use the database for personal or scientific use, no questions asked. Anyone can use screenshots from the site for any use, even commercial uses, as long as…
dmunger | February 27, 2007Researchers have developed a new method of creating laser beams which they believe may pave the way for practical laser X-rays:
Most of today's X-ray lasers require so much power that they rely on fusion laser facilities the size of football stadiums, making their use impractical.
"We've come up with a good end run around the requirement for a monstrous power source," research Henry Kapteyn said.
Once this hurdle is overcome, the researchers say, a small, inexpensive X-ray laser becomes practical. Instead of shadowy, fuzzy X-ray images, X-rays could become incredibly precise -- perhaps even…
dmunger | February 22, 2007As was noted with irony a few days ago, many psychologists feel obligated to describe the abilities that make humans unique. Perhaps this trait itself is part of human nature: we're constantly seeking to justify our actions -- many of which harm other organisms.
When we learn that an animal can, for example, recognize itself in a mirror, we begin to wonder if we're really so different from the other animals; whether our dominance over the world is really merited. The latest study covering such ground involves the scrub jay, a remarkable bird which hides its food in thousands of caches,…
dmunger | February 20, 2007When Greta and I met with her surgeon a few years back in preparation for a minor surgery, he offered an unusual qualification for the job: he was an avid video game player. He believed that playing video games improved his ability to perform surgery. Many surgeries are now performed remotely, with a very small incision and a video camera to monitor progress, and he claimed the skills involved weren't much different from those he had acquired from years of zapping aliens on his TV.
Turns out, he was probably on to something. A new study has confirmed that surgeons who spend more time playing…
dmunger | February 16, 2007Anyone who has tried to capture a fly or other insect can't help but marvel at their aeronautic prowess. Their reflexes are lightning-fast, and they seem to avoid obstacles before they are even perceptible. The brain of a fly or a honey bee is as little as a millionth the size of a human brain, with as few as a hundred thousand neurons compared to our hundred billion. How can such small computing power lead to such effective flight?
Yet flying insects also exhibit curious behavior. They land when flying into a headwind, and gain elevation with a tailwind. Some honey bees will land on the…
dmunger | February 15, 2007This photo of the World Trade Center burning on September 11 attracted a lot of attention for a curious pattern in the smoke. Was it the face of God? Satan?
Of course it was just a random pattern in the smoke that briefly seemed to look like a face, but many people were not convinced by appeals to rationality. Why is it that people seem to see faces so many places that there aren't actually faces? The New York Times has an excellent article describing how and when we see faces.
As we've reported here before, even if you view a photo or painting at an extreme oblique angle, you can still see…
dmunger | February 14, 2007For children younger than three, most of us agree that crying is acceptable, especially if they are in physical pain. But even for adults, crying is acceptable during periods of grief. Indeed, we often look askance at a person who does not to cry at a funeral or memorial service of a close friend, loved one, or family member. And crying in such cases is not only acceptable, but helpful, both for men and women. From WebMD:
Men and women both feel better after crying, especially when experiencing a major loss.
"But men are more likely to cry as a result of positive feelings, like at sporting…
dmunger | February 13, 2007One of the worst jobs I ever had was in high school. I was a door-to-door salesman for our local newspaper. It seemed like a great job in 1983 -- just three hours a night, and I got paid $4.50 an hour plus $5 for every subscription I sold over 15 a week. We didn't even really have to sell subscriptions -- we got credit for a sale even if the customer just signed up for a free trial month.
Believe it or not, most people were nice to me when I knocked on their doors -- that wasn't the problem with the job. The problem was the other salesmen. We were all driven around in a crew van by our…
dmunger | February 12, 2007Face-composite software is commonly used to generate images of crime suspects. But how accurate is it? We've reported here on a study suggesting that building face-composites may actually harm the memory of eyewitnesses. Now a new review article is suggesting that there are additional problems with the system:
Facial composite systems produce a poor likeness of the intended face. For instance, studies in which individuals attempt to create composites of celebrities have yielded extremely poor results. In one particular study, only 2.8 percent of participants correctly named a well-known…
dmunger | February 9, 2007This week's article on the "most random" number was the most popular post ever on Cognitive Daily. The stats aren't all in yet, but so far the post has been viewed at least 40,000 times. It wasn't long ago that 40,000 was a good month for Cognitive Daily! Since comments and questions about the project were spread over at least four different threads, as well as at least a dozen posts on other blogs, I thought I'd sum up some of the questions about our poll and the results in one place.
We polled 347 CogDaily readers, asking them to simply "think of a random number between 1 and 20," and found…
dmunger | February 8, 2007"Brain fitness" is all the rage lately -- the idea that by "exercising" your brain, you can keep your mental ability at high levels even as you age. The good news is that there's more science to back up this fad than in other recent gimmicks such as the Mozart Effect. The bad news is that "training your brain" takes a bit more work than popping a CD in the car stereo -- and the science to back it up is far from conclusive.
Undaunted, the Wall Street Journal had a panel of reviewers test six "brain fitness" products. Some of them even sound like they might be rather fun. The article,…
dmunger | February 7, 2007Mind Hacks has an excellent review of a case study that appears to contradict some "common knowledge" about the brain:
The hippocampus is thought to be essential for navigation. Surprisingly, a paper published last year reported that a London Taxi driver, who suffered hippocampus damage on both sides of the brain, could successfully navigate around much of London.
If the hippocampus is required, than how can we navigate without it? The researchers believe they have an answer for that as well:
They tested the driver in a complete computer simulation of London (pictured left) and discovered, to…
dmunger | February 6, 2007There's a fantastic discussion over at Text Savvy about the best way to teach multiplication, centered around this impressive video in support of traditional methods.
If you watch the video, make sure you also read Mr. Person's explanation of the problem. It really comes down to this: The traditional method of multiplication is more efficient, as his diagram demonstrates (traditional multiplication on the left, partial products on the right).
But also see Myrtle Hocklemeier's response:
1. If efficiency is your top priority, get a calculator.
2. Timed arithmetic quizzes don't measure math…
dmunger | February 2, 2007Two days before the Super Bowl, two interesting perspectives on the National Football League and how it treats its players. First, the New York Times has an article on the plight of former New England Patriots player Ted Johnson. Johnson claims he was ordered to participate in full-contact drills while he was recovering from a concussion. The resulting injury -- yet another concussion -- led Johnson to seek desperate measures in order to continue to play. Just before the 2004 Super Bowl friend began supplying him with amphetamines, which temporarily masked the effects of the repeated…
dmunger | January 31, 2007When our dentist told us Jim and Nora needed braces, we just took them straight to the orthodontist and signed them up for treatments -- we didn't even think twice about it. On the other hand, their treatments haven't been especially dire -- neither child needed "headgear," for example. I know people who've had elaborate, painful gear, requiring horrific hand-cranking and years of dreaded visits to the orthodontist, beginning as early as the second grade. It does make you wonder: is it all worth it?
A new study suggests that it may not be. Researchers followed a group of children for 20 years…
dmunger | January 30, 2007How much money do you really need? Nearly everyone, regardless of their wealth, responds with an amount higher than what they currently have. Many financial planners suggest that Americans need to save at least $2 million by retirement in order to maintain their lifestyles. Yet what if you die before you spend all that money? What would the point of all that scrimping and saving have been?
A new article in the New York Times suggests that most people can maintain their existing lifestyle while saving just a fraction of that amount -- $400,000 will do for a couple currently making $125,000 per…
dmunger | January 29, 2007Suppose you're a granting agency, and you have $1 million to spend to help foster research in your area of interest. Would you be better off giving ten grants for $100,000 each, in hopes that one or more of the funded projects might produce results, or just announce a $1 million prize -- to be awarded after a researcher achieves the desired goals. Instead of gambling on whether the discovery can be made, you let the researchers do the gambling -- and you only have to pay if they produce the goods.
The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel discusses the growing trend of offering prizes instead of…
dmunger | January 25, 2007I'm currently reading Hugo Münsterberg's fascinating 1916 book, The Photoplay (I'm reading a paper copy, but the link takes you to the complete online text). It's one of the earliest serious works on film, which was unfortunately not well received at the time it was published due to the start of World War I and Münsterberg's strong German nationalism (he was a professor at Harvard at the time).
Anyway, I wanted to direct your attention to a couple descriptions of amazing research conducted with the extremely limited tools available at that time:
If a flash of light at one point is followed…