News
dmunger | September 20, 2006Simon Owens has posted the results of his survey of diversity in the blogosphere at his site Bloggasm.
Here are the results for the blogosphere as a whole:
Male: 69%
Female: 31%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 73%
Black/African: 9%
Asian: 10%
Middle Eastern/Arab: 1%
Latino/Hispanic: 6%
Native American: 1%
This seems about right to me, based on anecdotal experience. Simon also broke down his results by niche. Here are the findings for science blogs (which presumably includes CogDaily's response):
Male: 71%
Female: 29%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 88%
Black/African: 6%
Asian: 6%
One thing I…
dmunger | September 18, 2006Science writer Edmund Blair Bolles has begun a new blog on the origin of speech: Babel's Dawn. If it lives up to the promise of its first post, it may prove to be a valuable resource. The blog
aims to become the main source of news and information about the evolution of speech, from primate vocalizations to meaningful exchanges.
I say speech rather than language because speech is a concrete behavior while language is an abstraction. In order to speak our ancestors had to evolve all the general elements of language (e.g., the ability to utter words in syntactical form) along with the specific…
dmunger | September 13, 2006So, researchers have found a way to "edit" the memories of rats. Rats can easily be trained to avoid an electrically charged region of their cages. Then researchers injected a chemical into the rats' memory centers, and successfully "erased" the memory, so the rats no longer knew to avoid getting shocked.
This brings up the question: can we change our own memories in a similar manner? Could we conveniently be made to forget a traumatic event from childhood or war? Could we add new memories of events that never occurred, artificial memories as vivid as the real thing? The Ledger has exciting…
dmunger | September 12, 2006A fascinating press release is starting to gain attention.
Researcher Ian Walker equipped his bike with a precise sensor that measured exactly how much room British drivers gave him when they passed. After tracking thousands of motorists, he was able to make an astonishing claim: when he was wearing a helmet, drivers gave him significantly less room on the road -- over 8 centimeters less.
He suspects the reason is that drivers make judgements about the competence of a cyclist based on whether or not he is wearing a helmet. Indeed, Walker was struck by cars twice during the experiment -- both…
dmunger | September 12, 2006
The blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of a new experiment purporting to show brain activity in a woman who was in a "persistent vegetative state." For a good summary of the experiment, visit Mind Hacks. Then take a look at Brain Ethics' analysis. I think the best analysis comes from ScienceBlogs' own Jake at Pure Pedantry. The upshot: The "persistent vegetative state" was probably misdiagnosed. FMRI imaging can help diagnose true cases of persistent vegetative state.
There's a nice article at New Scientist discussing decision-making in adolescents. Again fMRI was used to record brain…
dmunger | September 11, 2006It's no surprise that on the fifth anniversary of the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, most newspapers and many blogs are offering reflections and analysis of what happened. This morning I asked my kids, who were in the third and fourth grade on the day of the attacks, if they remembered what happened that day. Of course they did -- the bigger question is what of the world before September 11 they remembered. Nearly everyone has a story to tell about September 11, 2001.
It seems almost human nature to reflect on our memories of shocking events such as September 11. In fact many…
dmunger | September 8, 2006Take a look at this little video of a baby monkey. It's just three days old. Isn't it just adorable?
Oh, there's also this little bit about how the monkeys imitating humans is similar to earlier research on human babies, suggesting that it's a social adaptation that is common not to just humans, but also other primates. You can read all about it here, or in summaries on BrainEthics or John Hawkes.
But aren't the little monkeys cute?
dmunger | September 7, 2006The Wall Street Journal has an article discussing the accuracy of patient survey results in determining the effectiveness of HMOs. I'm not sure if it's behind a paywall, so I'm going to quote liberally from the article:
Researchers from the Rand Corp. think tank, the University of California at Los Angeles and the federal Department of Veterans Affairs asked 236 elderly patients at two big managed-care plans, one in the Southwest and the other in the Northeast, to rate the medical care they were getting. The average score was high -- about 8.9 on a scale from zero to 10.
Asked questions such…
dmunger | September 5, 2006
An excellent article in American Scientist compares "animal math" with math ability in infants. Some similarities and limitations emerge. While rhesus monkeys appear to successfully understand concepts such as 1+1=2 or 1+2=3, 2+2=4 appears beyond their ken. Five-month-old babies show about the same level of expertise.
The always-excellent BPS Research Digest has an article on the differences between people who think about suicide and those who attempt suicide. While suicidal thoughts are common, a much smaller group actually attempts suicide. There are gender differences -- men who feel…
dmunger | September 1, 2006This week's Synapse will be at The Mouse Trap.
To submit your entry, email your post to the.synapse.carnival {AT} gmail.com
dmunger | September 1, 2006This past Wednesday, Alvaro Castillo drove a 1997 Dodge Caravan into the parking lot of Orange High School in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Today's Charlotte Observer has the rest of the story:
He threw a smoke bomb onto a vehicle in the parking lot, then got two guns and ammunition out of the van and started shooting...
About 10 shots hit the school's walls in the courtyard near the cafeteria...
Two students were injured. A bullet grazed one in the shoulder, and another was hit by broken glass...
At Castillo's home, a more gruesome scene was found: his father's dead body, shot four times,…
dmunger | August 29, 2006Is the Flynn Effect ending? Are kids getting dumber again? Could it be that after years of striking intelligence gains, we're now actually losing ground? We are if you read this article in the Times Online:
After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King's College London confidently declares: "The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years' worth in the past two decades."
It's an extraordinary claim. But it's one that should startle parents and teachers out of complacency. Shocked by the findings, experts are…
dmunger | August 28, 2006
A judge has ruled against a recent Louisiana law banning the sale of violent video games to children. Since we've been rather outspoken here about the influence of violent games, I did want to reiterate that we've never advocated the sort of sweeping legislation that Louisiana has attempted to foist on the public. That said, it's important to understand that some violent video games can and do cause aggressive behavior in children and adults.
Scienceblogger Coturnix responds to the widely publicized remarks of dolphin-disser Paul Manger (I respond to the reports here). The flaw in Manger's…
dmunger | August 28, 2006NPR has a nice report on the motivations behind false confessions. Give it a listen--it's just over two minutes long, and reporter Andy Bowers gives an excellent explanation of why people such as JonBenet Ramsey "killer" John Mark Karr might be motivated to voluntarily confess to crimes they didn't commit.
Bowers divides false confessions into two types: voluntary and coerced. His report primarily discusses voluntary confessions, which are often related to a mental impairment or obsession on the part of the confessor. If you'd like to know more about coerced confessions, which Bowers says is…
dmunger | August 23, 2006Television sets and video monitors rely on tricking the visual system into believing it is seeing the full range of possible colors. In reality, they are only generating approximations of the light that would actually enter the eye if we were looking at a real object.
The problem is this: the visible spectrum actually consists of an infinite number of possible light wavelengths in the range from 380 to 700 nm; light waves from across that range enter the eye and are capable of activating photoreceptors within the eye: this corresponds to the wide range of colors we can perceive.
But TVs and…
dmunger | August 23, 2006The Washington Post has an article claiming that being just a few pounds overweight can lead to premature death:
The 10-year study of more than 500,000 U.S. adults found that those who were just moderately overweight in their fifties were 20 percent to 40 percent more likely to die in the next decade. Another study involving more than 1 million Korean adults, also being published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, produced similar results.
Meanwhile, Jake at Pure Pedantry has uncovered a report claiming just the opposite:
In a review of the studies published on the subject,…
dmunger | August 22, 2006A new study finds that 3- to 5-year-olds appear to conflate their future needs with those of the present. Young children who have been fed pretzels and are thirsty are more likely to say they'll need water tomorrow than pretzels. If they haven't eaten pretzels, they'll say they will need pretzels tomorrow.
One of the researchers, Cristina Atance, said the research will help adults understand childrens' needs:
We often see children object when mom asks them to put on their coat in a warm house before going outside into the cold, or when she tells them to bring water to the park when they are…
dmunger | August 21, 2006Slashdot points to an Aljazeera (!) article about dolphin intelligence (or lack thereof). The article quotes scientist Paul Manger, who argues that since dolphins never think to jump out of enclosures such as holding tanks in aquariums, or tuna nets, they clearly aren't very smart. After all, even a goldfish will jump out of its tank if you don't put a lid on it.
Manger's argument may be a little simplistic ("escaping" to suffocation is hardly an example of "intelligence"), but it does bring up an interesting point: are dolphins really as smart as most people seem to think? A Wikipedia…
dmunger | August 10, 2006Scientific American has an article covering recent research about neighborly relations. The conclusion: people living in desert climates get along better with neighbors when they have nice, shady green lawns, as opposed to natural desert landscaping.
From the SciAm article:
The 60 or so individual subjects have been living within the various landscapes since 2005 and already have shown a strong preference for lush conditions. In surveys done before the landscaping took place, the residents, particularly those with children, rated mesic and oasis conditions more highly than their desert…
dmunger | August 7, 2006An emailer made me aware of a nice new resource: the Psychology Wiki. From the home page:
The Psychology Wiki started on 21st January 2006 and is now one of the largest psychology resources on the internet. We currently have 12832 pages and are working on 8,061 articles and have over 45 MB of content.
Here's their summary of the site's mission:
The Psychology Wiki's mission is to create an online resource placing the entire body of psychology knowledge in the hands of its users, be they academics, practitioners or users of psychology services.
In doing so we are looking to address three…