coglanglab's blog
There's an interesting article today over at Slate (Why Babies Crave Magic) that features work from one of my favorite
Parenting advice is no doubt as old as time itself. There is good advice, and then there are myths.
I had always though that refusal to get a flu vaccination was relatively harmless masochism. Refusal to vaccinate one's own children, on the other hand, should probably be prosecuted as child abuse, but at the least the negative consequences stay close to home.
An interest in puns has led me to start reading the literature on homophones. Interestingly, in appears that in the scientific literature "homophone" and "homograph" mean the same thing, which explains why there are so many papers about mispronouncing homophones.
People who have been following this blog know that birth order affects who you are friends with and who you marry. Here's some comprehensive recent evidence on race. It probably won't come as a surprise, but it's nice to have numbers.
Where do research participants come from?
I am in the process of revamping the Internet laboratory, as I'm trying to increase the number of participants. Some very successful websites recruit ~500/day. I have been averaging about 30/day -- still respectable, but it limits what I can do.
I'm revamping the Web-based lab. Can you help?
"Good" is a notoriously difficult word to define. A pretty common and reasonably uncontroversial definition of a good paper, though, is one that has significantly advanced human knowledge. The question is how do we measure that?
The idealized scientist might start by questioning everything and assuming nothing. However, one usually has to make starting assumptions to get things going. For instance, David Hume proved that the notion that science works at all is founded on the un-provable assumption that the future will conform to the past (i.e., if e=mc2 yesterday, it will do so again tomorrow).
According to Dick Morris, I've joined a cushy profession. Professors don't teach very much, which makes college expensive. He argues that by requiring faculty to work harder "approximating the work week the rest of us find normal" and holding down some administrative costs, the tuition can be cut in half!
The radio show I discussed a couple weeks ago finally aired.
I have an article on the Scientific American website (part of the Mind Matters blog) this week. It's on the relationship between language and thought. Check it out.
Every year, the Harvard Laboratory for Developmental Studies (of which I am a part) sends out a newsletter to all the parents of the kids have participated in our research studies. For every project conducted in the last year, the lead experimenter (usually a grad student or post-doc) writes up the results in layperson-friendly terms. This year's newsletter was just published.
