Opinion
sastyk | March 16, 2010A new Gallup poll suggests that Americans are less worried about most environmental issues than they have been since Gallup began polling 20 years ago.
"Americans are less worried about each of eight specific environmental problems than they were a year ago, and on all but global warming and maintenance of the nation's fresh water supply, concern is the lowest Gallup has measured. Americans worry most about drinking-water pollution and least about global warming."
People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them. Overwhelmingly, I think they do not fully grasp what global warming…
dmunger | February 16, 2009In honor of President's Day in the U.S., I bring you this work of "art," generated on the basis of a survey of 1,001 Americans' preferences about art:
The work was created to embody the survey responses. The respondents were asked questions like "what is your favorite color" and "would you prefer paintings of outdoor scenes or indoor scenes." The artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, then tried to paint as many as possible of the survey responses into the scene.
Thus, blue dominates in this painting of an outdoor landscape. There are wild animals (as opposed to pets), and a family group (…
dmunger | December 23, 2008Two summers ago in Paris, I was astounded at the volume of traffic that somehow managed to negotiate the traffic circle at the Arc de Triomphe without incident. Here's the (poor quality) video I made to document traffic flow there:
I learned to drive in my 20s in New York City. Like Paris, New York has a traffic rhythm all its own, where lane markings are mere suggestions. In New York, parking is tolerated nearly anywhere, as long as traffic isn't unduly impeded. I've seen people double-parked, triple-parked, parked on corners, on sidewalks, you name it.
Driving into Manhattan several times…
dmunger | February 12, 2008Cognitive Daily readers know that we generally shy away from political issues on our blog. The goal of this blog is to show readers what science is all about, through the example of the fantastic research being done cognitive psychology.
But when James Watson made his most recent comments about race and intelligence, we took notice. James Watson, renowned for his role in discovering the structure of DNA, is also the adviser to the Seed Media Group Board of Directors. The Seed Media Group owns ScienceBlogs.com, which hosts Cognitive Daily.
That's why were troubled last fall, when Watson was…
dmunger | December 28, 2007Over at BPR3, a reader brought up an interesting question about the nature of peer-reviewed research, which I thought was relevant to our readers here as well. I'm reposting my entire response below.
The system of peer review, the bulwark of academic publishing, has served scholars for centuries. The principle behind the system is simple: If experts in a field find a research report noteworthy, then that report deserves to be published.
But who is an "expert"? And who decides who the experts are? Couldn't a group of individuals committed to promoting their own research -- which may or may not…
gmunger | December 21, 2007I just finished reading Jonah Lehrer's book Proust was a Neuroscientist.
Quick review: good book, very fun read, and I'm happy to recommend it to almost everyone. I just have one small quibble.
For the quibble to make any sense, you need to know something about my teaching. Students in all my psychology classes have to write a few paragraphs to earn "culture points." They must consider how psychology connects to art, though the social context surrounding the event is also fair game for analysis. So my students attend a concert, visit a museum, or go to a play or dance performance and then…
dmunger | December 20, 2007Last year, a friend of Greta's died tragically young. He was a pillar of the community, and Greta was honored to learn that he wanted her to play the oboe at his memorial service, which would be attended by hundreds of people. Greta has performed in countless concerts, with audiences just as large, but the thought of flubbing up at a ceremony honoring the life of a great man was absolutely nerve-wracking. The problem was compounded by the fact that Greta herself was in mourning for her friend.
In the end, she was able to summon up the courage to play beautifully, and received dozens of…
dmunger | November 28, 2007I've just finished reading fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney's new book Storm World, and I highly recommend it -- not only to people interested in hurricanes and global climate change, but also to fans of cognitive psychology.
Why psychology? Because the book offers an excellent case study of how scientific research becomes part of the popular consciousness. Hurricane Katrina was a devastating storm, and its repercussions are still being felt. There's also little doubt that global warming is occurring. While there's a great deal of scientific uncertainty about the precise relationship…
dmunger | November 24, 2007That's right, you can now get the full text of every Cognitive Daily post via RSS. There's just one catch: You must buy a $399 Amazon Kindle and pay 99 cents (per month, I assume) to subscribe to Cognitive Daily.
I don't know if this subscription will allow you to view images, and I'm pretty certain video, polls, and other interactive features won't be available, but for some people this might be a very attractive way to get Cognitive Daily. You can also get the amazing ScienceBlogs Select feed, which includes the best CogDaily posts as well as the best from dozens of other ScienceBlogs for $…
dmunger | November 8, 2007Regular CogDaily readers know that I don't usually harp relentlessly on a single issue. Believe me, I'd much rather be talking about things like this, but it's not very often that I get a chance to make an impact in the blogosphere. Thanks to a link from Fark (via BoingBoing) it looks like today might just be that chance.
If you voted in the Weblog Awards Best Science Blog Contest yesterday when I first posted about it, you can now vote again. If you didn't get a chance to vote because the site was down, it looks like it's up again. I'll post the poll below as well for your convenience. This…
dmunger | November 7, 2007Update: Thanks to everyone who voted. The contest is over; it has been declared a tie. That's a little odd because at last count, Bad Astronomy was ahead. But it's likely there were trickerations on both sides. Oh well.
Thousands of Google Reader users subscribe to Cognitive Daily's feed via the Google Science bundle. This means you've chosen to seek out the best science content on the internet. Most Google Reader users never click through to this site to read our posts -- and that's fine with us. You're busy people.
However, I would like to ask you do one thing for us in the name of…
dmunger | October 17, 2007John Mashey made a comment over at Deltoid that was so incisive, Tim Lambert decided to turn it into a post of its own. In the comment/post, Mashey outlines several steps scientists can take to pressure reporters to do a better job reporting science. Indeed, the list is a little daunting. Among other things, he recommends that you
Pick a modest handful of reporters with which to build up rapport, even if it takes a couple years, and half a dozen emails. In particular, try to take good care of any reporter who actually replies (non-negatively) to an email.
That's a pretty big commitment. A…
dmunger | October 1, 2007To me, few things are more annoying than someone who nitpicks about grammar. Grammar is important, to be sure, but how much does it really matter if your sentences are grammatically "correct," as long as your message is communicated clearly?
Michael Bach recently emailed me lamenting that often reviewers comment that "the English could be improved" in his papers. That comment could be made about at least 99 percent of all papers published, but what does it help? If a reviewer can't point to a specific instance where the language is unclear, why make the observation in the first place?
But…
dmunger | August 29, 2007Apropos of the Chess/AI discussion that's going on on the front page of ScienceBlogs today (and here at CogDaily), I noticed this little gem in a book I'm currently reading for a review (Sandra and Michael Blakeslee's The Body Has a Mind of Its Own):
Meaning is rooted in agency (the ability to act and choose), and agency depends on embodiment. In fact, this is a hard-won lesson that the artificial intelligence community has finally begun to grasp after decades of frustration: Nothing truly intelligent is going to develop in a bodiless mainframe. In real life there is no such thing as…
dmunger | August 27, 2007The blogosphere is abuzz with reports about a new initiative by commercial scholarly publishers to discredit the open access movement.
Prism describes itself as an organization to "protect the quality of scientific research", which it hopes to do by opposing policies "that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing." What policies are they opposed to? Why, this one, which recommends that NIH-funded research results be freely available to the public when they are published.
In short, they want to protect science by locking it up under copyright.…
dmunger | August 27, 2007It's been a decade since world chess champion Garry Kasparov was first defeated by a computer. Since then, even after humans retooled their games to match computers, computers have managed draws against the world's greatest players. It seems only a matter of time before computers will win every time -- if humans are willing to play them, that is.
But each time computers have shown their remarkable abilities, detractors have claimed that the computers are really inferior because they apply brute-force tactics: methodically tracing every possible move instead of creatively reasoning toward a…
dmunger | August 1, 2007Eric Schwitzgebel has been doing a lot of thinking about the relationship between thinking about ethical behavior and actually behaving ethically. In his most recent post, he takes on a meta-analysis claiming that religious belief correlates negatively with criminal activity:
I found a 2001 "meta-analysis" (Baier & Wright) of the literature that shows all the usual blindnesses of meta-analyses. Oh, you don't know what a meta-analysis is? As usually practiced, it's a way of doing math instead of thinking. First, you find all the published experiments pertinent to Hypothesis X (e.g., "…
dmunger | July 17, 2007Let's suppose you're the proprietor of a European tourist attraction. We're not talking about a Louvre or Uffizi here, or even a Leaning Tower of Pisa. No, you're in charge of a hidden gem: the scenic Church of the Saint No One Has Ever Heard Of, or the lovely little Museum of the Famous Artist Which Possesses None of His Famous Works.
Your job is to show why this Saint really is someone important, or why the lesser-known works of the Famous Artist should get broader recognition. You also need to preserve your attraction for future generations, and (most importantly) give yourself a nice…
dmunger | June 8, 2007We've spent an exciting week in Paris, seeing all the fabulous sites, from the Louvre to the Tour Eiffel.
Today we decided to do something different and headed for the Georges Pompidou Center, where the national galleries of modern art are housed. Some fascinating stuff there, including some works which attempted to question the very nature of art itself. Jim was particularly perplexed by this piece:
The work consisted of three panels, painted completely white. The artist insisted that the color white represented nothing at all. Is this art?
And what about this?
Another work, of similar…
dmunger | April 10, 2007These days, it seems like everyone's got a science book. Not a small number of them end up on my desk -- apparently Cognitive Daily is "important" enough that publicists feel a review from us is worth the cost of printing and mailing me a book. But just because they send me the book doesn't mean I have to review it. Often I simply ignore these books, putting them on my shelf or throwing them away. The most recent book I've received, however, is so bad that I couldn't just ignore it: this book is actually instructive -- of how NOT to write a science book. Reading just a few chapters of this…