Psychology
grrlscientist | February 9, 2008tags: gender bias in science, female scientists, science publishing, sexism, feminism
I have been thinking about this problem of reviewer bias against female scientists and have a proposal: all scientists should either choose or be randomly assigned a gender-neutral first name, such as "Lee", "Alex", "Jordan", "Reese" or "Ali" or something like that, followed by the initials denoting the scientist's real first name, along with as many more initials as that person desires, and ending with the surname, spelled out. Thus, if a reviewer is subconsciously biased against his (or her) female…
omnibrain | February 9, 2008To reduce the severity of his seizures, Joe had the bridge between his left and right cerebral hemispheres (the corpus callosum) severed. As a result, his left and right brains no longer communicate through that pathway. Here's what happens as a result:
omnibrain | February 6, 2008"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."
- William James, American psychologist and philosopher (1842 - 1910)
-via Neatorama-
omnibrain | February 1, 2008Here's a wonderful spoof of .. well... I'm not really sure what. Perhaps an old Documentary focusing on the diseases of the mind? In any case it's terribly entertaining.
omnibrain | January 31, 2008Check out the newest events at the Exploratorium. They Sound Great!
Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow/Optimal Experience Researcher)
Among Renowned Speakers To Appear
Mind Lecture Series Continues
February 2, 9, and 23, 2008
"Flow" (Optimal Experience) researcher Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (February 9) is among the renowned speakers featured in the Exploratorium's continuing Mind Lecture Series in February 2008. The series is presented in conjunction with the opening of Mind, a major new Exploratorium collection, four years in the making, made possible by the National Science Foundation.…
terrasig | January 31, 2008So concludes a paper by Drs Andrew Oswald and David Blanchflower in a paper to appear in the journal, Social Science and Medicine. (full text not yet available).
From the UK Telegraph story, the University of Warwick's Oswald explains:
"The first theory is that when you are young you have high aspirations and then in middle age have to learn to quell them. After all we cannot all be captain of the national football team or a rock star.
"The 30s and 40s are therefore painful times when reality sets in but when you get older you've learnt to accept yourself.
"The second theory is that people…
aardvarchaeology | January 30, 2008A pretty Chinese maths teacher said hello to me on ICQ the other day, hoping to marry a Westerner. This inspired me to dig out and re-post the following entry from November 2006.For many years I have spent most of my working days alone at a computer. Alone, but thanks to the internet and messaging software, not lonely. As mentioned before in connection with the story of Lennart, International Casanova, it's good to have a chat now and then with other solitary souls over ICQ. They become your workmates even though they may be located on the other side of the planet in meatspace terms, to use a…
purepedantry | January 29, 2008The NYTimes has an article today about the "science" of online match-making. I put that in quotes because there really isn't any clear evidence about whether it works either way.
You have no doubt seen the ads on TV for the two most popular match-making sites: eHarmony and Chemistry.com. These two differ in approach from the other popular dating site match.com because eHarmony and Chemistry pick matches for you according to a secret algorithm while match.com lets you pick for yourself. (The people at match.com own Chemistry.com, and I assume created it as a competitor for eHarmony.)…
neurophilosophy | January 27, 2008
Last Tuesday's episode of Horizon, called Total Isolation, is available for viewing and download at the BBC iPlayer website for the next 2 days. In the 50-minute documentary, Professor Ian Robbins, a trauma psychologist at the University of Surrey who specializes in supporting torture victims, reconstructs a highly controversial study first performed in the 1950s.
The new study involved six subjects who volunteered to experience 48 hours of complete sensory deprivation. The volunteers first performed a battery of tests designed to assess various cognitive functions, such as visual…
grrlscientist | January 21, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Female Scientists, science publishing, science blogging, gender bias, sexism, feminism
A microbiologist at work.
Image: East Bay AWIS.
In the wake of the Science Blogging Conference in North Carolina, which I was unable to attend due to financial reasons, The Scientist's blog published a piece today that asks "Do Women Blog About Science?" This article was written partially in response to the kerfuffle that was triggered last year after The Scientist asked what were their readers' favorite life science blogs. Several women, including me, noticed that they only…
omnibrain | January 21, 2008For all of you Illusion Junkies out there:
**** THE FOURTH ANNUAL BEST VISUAL ILLUSION OF THE YEAR CONTEST****
http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com
*** We are happy to announce the world's 4th Annual Best Visual Illusion of
the Year Contest!!*** The deadline for illusion submissions is February
15th, 2008!
The 2008 contest will be hosted by Stuart Anstis and held in Naples, Florida
(Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts, http://www.thephil.org) on Sunday,
May 11th, 2008, during the week of the Vision Sciences Society conference
(VSS). The Naples Philharmonic Center is an 8-minute…
omnibrain | January 19, 2008I'm sure it's a rough life being a clown, you know... driving a clown car with 18 other passengers in the driver seat alone, walking and tripping around with those really big shoes, and hours of makeup application. But their job is about to get a lot harder, a new study in a nursing journal shows that kids are terrified of clowns.
A poll by researchers looking at what decor to put in hospital children's wards found that youngsters do not like clowns on the walls and even older ones think they are scary.
"We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite…
omnibrain | January 18, 2008Just a short note via Sports Illustrated:
Georgia football legend Herschel Walker is expected to reveal in an upcoming book that he has multiple personalities -- a revelation that surprises the man who coached the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner.
...
"Breaking Free" will chronicle Walker's life with multiple personality disorder, according to Shida Carr, the book's publicist at Simon & Schuster.
Carr said the book will be published in August, but gave no other details and declined to provide excerpts.
I wonder whether this developed after football? I'm curious to see the book when it comes…
omnibrain | January 18, 2008According to Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago:
"Biological reproduction is not a very efficient way to alleviate one's loneliness, but you can make up people when you're motivated to do so," said Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. "When people lack a sense of connection with other people, they are more likely to see their pets, gadgets or gods as human-like."
In his experiments he showed that the lonelier a person was the more likely they were to believe in supernatural entities such as God, angels…
omnibrain | January 18, 2008Don't play any of the embedded videos if you've ever had a seizure.
Now that we're done with the warning...
We've all heard of the Pokemon incident in Japan where nearly 700 school aged children were admitted to the hospital with "convulsions, vomiting, irritated eyes and other symptoms" common to epilepsy. This lead to a number of government investigations and media companies searching their offerings to determine whether any of their shows had similar scenes that might induce photosensitive epilepsy. According to a CNN report of the incidents:
Dr. Yukio Fukuyama, a juvenile epilepsy…
omnibrain | January 16, 2008
"Have trouble concentrating on your studies? Try the German learning egg."
Those Germans! Always coming up with great feats of engineering.
-Via Modern Mechanix-
Or course you could always get a pair of 0.50$ ear plugs, but hey if you've got the money ;)
omnibrain | January 13, 2008This has to be the coolest face out of art I've ever seen.
-Via Neatorama-
omnibrain | January 12, 2008
The memory-evaluation study, headed by Dr. Franklin McCarroll of New York University's School of Psychology, revealed that approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes. In addition, his entire dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is devoted to remembering the time he did a helicopter dunk from half-court with Shawn Kemp at the buzzer to beat the…
omnibrain | January 10, 2008
This is a good collection of illusions, some of which I haven't seen before. I'm not so sure why they had to include a stupidtramp sound track though.
Here's another collection with some overlap and a techno soundtrack: