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cortex | June 11, 2009Mo, over at Neurophilosophy, has a fantastic summary of a new paper from scientists at the University of Toronto investigating the link between affective mood and visual perception. The basic moral is this: If you want to improve your peripheral vision, or become better at noticing seemingly extraneous details, then do something to make yourself happy:
Positive moods enhanced peripheral vision and increased the extent to which the brain encoded information in those parts of the visual field, to which the participants did not pay attention. Conversely, negative moods decreased the encoding of…
gregladen | June 10, 2009a) Yes
b) No
c) If "b" is true, then "a" might be true
d) Almost Diamonds
e) Pick d! Pick d!
gregladen | June 10, 2009My understanding is that most people who go to chiropractors get either nothing, somewhat injured, severely injured, or even (now and then) chiropracted to death. Of course, the same could be said of doctors or health care systems in general: Many people do not walk out of the hospital alive. But, it is also my understanding that Chiropractory does not really offer anything that is medically beneficial and based on any kind of real research. But it continues anyway.
What has happened lately in Britian is that the lack of substantiation behind the claims of chiropractors has become a legal…
wcrawford | June 10, 2009I was going to write a series of posts describing each essay in the current Cites & Insights, and still plan to do so.
But this hit me by surprise--a LISNews item pointing to a makeuseof.com post pointing to Blind Search.
Blind Search?
People who care deeply about open web search engines spend a lot of time figuring out which engine is better for which purposes. For most users, though--at least the minority who appear to be aware that Google's not the only game in town--the look and feel of a site may be as important as the apparent results.
Blind Search takes that away, at least for…
sb admin | June 10, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
Listening to yesterday's press briefing with WHO's Dr. Keiji Fukuda (audio file here), several things seemed clear to me. The first is that everyone, WHO included, thinks a pandemic is well underway. Second, WHO's efforts to explain why they are not making it "official" by going to phase 6 are becoming increasingly awkward and the explanations manifestly tortured. Essentially what Fukuda said was that WHO was waiting for its member nations to signal they knew it was a pandemic and then WHO would say it was a pandemic. It was reminiscent of the cries…
gregladen | June 10, 2009Presumably they are going for the drugs and prostitution.
Up to 4,000 social conservatives are expected to descend upon liberal Amsterdam, Netherlands, on August 10-12 for the biennial World Congress of Families, a meeting that brings together scholars, academics, policy makers, elected officials, and activists for four days of speeches, lectures, and networking.
The Netherlands beat out four other countries in its bid to host what is the largest gathering of social conservatives in the world. Russia, Bolivia, Latvia and Nigeria lost out after the Dutch proposal included support from the…
mspringer | June 10, 2009There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
-Richard Feynman
Not so long ago I wrote a snarky post about economics wherein I joined the chorus of voices deriding the ludicrously horrible track record of predicting the impact of the stimulus. Well, another month another data point, overlaid on the otherwise unmodified Obama stimulus prediction:
Not only is it much worse than what the stimulus was supposed to…
cortex | June 10, 2009A fascinating YouTube video, from the Sasquatch Music Festival:
This reminds me of the classic Milgram study on social conformity. (No, I'm not talking about that Milgram experiment.) In this study, Milgram had "confederates" stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby also looked up, just in case something interesting was happening. (There was nothing to look at, just sky and buildings.) When two people were looking up, 60 of passerby looked up. When there were three people, the percentage jumped to 65…
cortex | June 10, 2009Here's a question I get quite a bit, which usually goes something like this:
Is ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) real? Or is it a made-up diagnosis for misbehaving kids?
The short answer is that ADHD (and its precursor, ADD) are absolutely real disorders. They have real neurological underpinnings (including a large genetic component) and real, consistent symptoms. That, I think, is the current scientific consensus.
That said, there is far more controversy over many other pertinent ADHD questions, such as whether or not it's overdiagnosed (approximately 4 percent of show ADHD…
gregladen | June 9, 2009A few blog carnivals for you to enjoy:
Everything Worth Reading: Sweet Little Sixteen Edition
Scientia Pro Publica
Storyblogging Carnival C
edyong | June 9, 2009Many animals use impressive displays to seduce a mate, but few go as far as the male Anna's hummingbird. He performs a death-defying courtship dive, plummeting to the ground at speeds and accelerations that put jet fighters to shame.
The tiny 7cm bird reaches a top speed of 60mph and at the fastest point of the dive, it covers 385 times its own body length every second. For its size, it's the fastest aerial manoeuvre performed by any bird. In contrast, the famous attack dive of the peregrine falcon, while much faster in absolute terms, only covers 200 body lengths per second.
The…
gregladen | June 9, 2009I had finished eating and finally had my hands free to take some notes, but I couldn't keep up with Matt Entenza's torrent of ideas for what he sees in Minnesota's future. In particular, his ideas on what he would like to do for an economy that needs boosting.
.... On Quiche Moraine
wcrawford | June 9, 2009I've just published Cites & Insights 9:8 (July 2009).
The 30-page issue, PDF as usual but with HTML versions of most essays, includes:
Bibs & Blather
Notes on sponsorship for C&I, the status of four possible future projects--and the move of Walt at Random to ScienceBlogs.
Making it Work Perspective: Thinking about Blogging 2: Why We Blog
Continuing the discussion of blogging philosophy and practice that began in Cites & Insights 9:5 with a focus on reasons for blogging.
Interesting & Peculiar Products
Seven individual items and technologies, plus eight editors' choices and…
mspringer | June 9, 2009Ethan at Starts With a Bang busts two Galileo myths.
1) That Galileo actually dropped weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He almost certainly didn't. Like the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, it's an instructive parable not at variance with the character of the man - but not an event that actually happened.
2) That the experiment would have worked even if Galileo had done it. It wouldn't have. Air resistance would mean that otherwise identical objects of the same mass wouldn't have hit the ground at the same time.
Those are the two points that Ethan makes. They're both…
sb admin | June 9, 2009The last time we had a major health reform proposal was the Clinton administration, and it didnât go well. Ezra Klein explains the reasons: Instead of bringing members of Congress and stakeholders into the process early, the administration drafted a detailed proposal and then presented it to Congress. Those in favor of reform failed to mount a coordinated campaign for it, while the Republicans, guided by a memo from William Kristol, united in opposition against it and ruled out compromise. And even before the administration presented its plan, the health-insurance industry was spreading fear…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days. To send your submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right (sometimes that widget doesn't upload when the mother site is sick). Be sure to include the URL or "…
cortex | June 9, 2009What happens to the brain when we drink alcohol? In recent years, scientists have discovered that booze works by binding to and potentiating a specific GABA receptor subtype. (GABA is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain, which means it helps to regulate and quiet cellular activity.) While it remains unclear how, exactly, these chemical tweaks produce the psychological changes triggered by a beer or bourbon, a new study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (along with Jonathan Schooler, at UCSB) have found one intriguing new side-effect of alcohol: it makes…
wcrawford | June 8, 2009I'm Walt Crawford. This is another blog in ScienceBlogs' new Information Science channel. As with the pioneers, John Dupuis and Christina Pikas, it's not a new blog.
And as with those two--both of whose blogs I've followed for years--I was pleasantly surprised when ScienceBlogs contacted me, in the person of Erin Johnson. I was maybe a little more surprised, since I'm neither a science librarian nor, technically, a librarian at all. (I don't have an ML[I]S and am exceedingly unlikely to get one at this point, barring an honorary degree.) I've been hanging around library and information…
gregladen | June 8, 2009A kiss can be erotic. It can be a sign of friendship. It can be affirming of a relationship. (Or it can be other things.) Sheril wants you to help her decide when a kiss is just a kiss. Or not.