Jason Goldman
jgoldman
Posts by this author
September 30, 2010
Aaron Rowe and I are organizing a tweet-up for LA-area science writers/communicators. Many of us interact daily through our blogs or through twitter, but rarely in person - so this is a chance to meet up face to face. If you're interested, please click the link to this survey, which we'll use to…
September 29, 2010
via Voice of America News blog:
Organizers of the Commonwealth Games in India say they will try to prevent wild monkeys from disrupting the event by deploying a team of larger, fiercer monkeys to scare off their smaller cousins.
Indian security officials put 10 langur monkeys and their handlers on…
September 29, 2010
The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. Continue to submit your best posts, and the best posts you read online. Especially those art/cartoon posts, and poems!
The Submission form is here…
September 28, 2010
Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week:
American family values: where even the dull can dream! "One of the issues when talking about the effect of environment and genes on behavioral and social outcomes is that the entanglements are so complicated. That is why cross-…
September 27, 2010
Your humble narrator finds himself sick with a cold, so here's a post from the archives.
There is considerable research on how children interact with other children and with adults, and how child development can be influenced by those interactions. But research on children's interactions with non-…
September 26, 2010
Science
The NY Times had an article on why we like spicy foods...a week after I had my piece in the Guardian making the same arguments. Coincidence? Probably.
"As the cost of DNA sequencing continues to plummet, I predict that these canine genetic/genomic studies will get much more common."…
September 24, 2010
Ravi Iyer, a graduate student and colleague of mine at the University of Southern California in social psychology, blogs regularly about moral psychology at polipsych.com, and tweets from @ravi_polipsych. He collaborates with others on YourMorals.org, where interested individuals may participate in…
September 23, 2010
Below the fold, you'll find a complete listing of all tweets from #SMWUSC, in reverse chronological order.
@jgold85 Thus concludes "Biomimicry" @USCedu #smwuscThu, 23 Sep 2010 23:32:58 +0000 - tweet id 25352854351 - #1tweet details
@JessikaWalsten Wrapping up the biomimicry event at #smwusc…
September 23, 2010
The time is upon us. As I wrote about earlier this week, it is Social Media Week in Los Angeles, and I'm participating, liveblogging (on this post! refresh for updates below the fold), and livetweeting, and streaming a session at USC called Biomimcry: Science and Social Media.
An incomplete list of…
September 23, 2010
Morality and convention are so mired in culture that it may seem near impossible to determine the extent to which biology and environment give rise to it. And yet it is possible to investigate the evolutionary origins of morality. Research with infants - especially pre-verbal infants - who have not…
September 21, 2010
This week is Social Media Week in Los Angeles, as well as in Mexico City, Milan, Bogota, and Buenos Aires.
What does that mean, exactly?
Social Media Week is a multi-city global conference connecting people, content and conversations around emerging trends in social and mobile media. Dozens of…
September 21, 2010
We initially planned on doing these group blogcasts roughly once per month, but then, well, Pepsigate happened and blogs were moved, people were distracted, and so on. But the dust is finally starting to settle, so it was time for another. I should point out how awesome it is that this group…
September 21, 2010
Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week.
Dr. Shock says that Internet and Video Games Improve Reading Skills and Visual Spatial Skills in Children. If the kids are initially low in those skills, at least.
At the Global Change blog: Do women and men differ in their…
September 20, 2010
Cooperation and conflict are both a part of human society. While a good deal of the academic literature addresses the evolutionary origins of conflict, in recent years there has been an increased focus on the investigation of the evolutionary origins of cooperative behavior. One component of…
September 19, 2010
Another week, another new blog network. Go say hello to the bloggers at Wired Science. Five of the six should look familiar, if you've been around Scienceblogs for a while: Brian Switek, David Dobbs, Daniel Macarthur, Maryn McKenna, Rhett Allain and Brian Romans, joined Jonah Lehrer, who had…
September 18, 2010
My Child's Play co-blogger Melody and I are the subjects of today's Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday program. Watch us chat with eachother for about an hour on how we became scientists and science bloggers, our thoughts on the state of psychology as a field, peer review and the journal system,…
September 17, 2010
The schwag shop has opened!
Imagine how awesome your desk would look with a Thoughtful Animal mug on it. Need a bag to lug your books around in? Why not use a Thoughtful Animal tote bag?
Right now I've got some coffee/tea mugs, travel mugs, beer mugs, and water bottles available, as well as a few…
September 17, 2010
Quandaries such as those involving stealing a drug to save a spouse's life or whether or not to have an abortion have historically dominated the study of the development of moral thinking. The predominant research programs in psychology today use dilemmas in which one choice is deontologically…
September 16, 2010
Figure 1: Deep sea coral. Click to awesomely embiggen!
Another awesome exclusive video from our friends over at BBC Life Is. This month, the theme is corals, and the video (behind the fold, since it takes up a decent amount of bandwidth) features an interesting new attempt in Fiji to restore coral…
September 14, 2010
Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week.
"The relationship between leaders and followers reflects a social contract wherein followers trust leaders to make decisions that benefit the group and leaders agree to pursue actions that are in the group's best interests. The…
September 14, 2010
My contribution for the Guardian's Science Blogging Festival has been posted!
Healthy, sane humans do not stab themselves in the thighs, or bathe their eyes in lemon juice. So why do we so love to assault one of the most sensitive organs in the human body, the tongue, with what amounts to chemical…
September 13, 2010
At least one dog can be found in forty percent of US households, and forty percent of those owners allow their dogs to sleep on their beds. To put this in perspective, in a family with five children, two of them can be expected to become dog owners, and one of them will probably allow the dog to…
September 12, 2010
There was A LOT of stuff this week. Was this week particularly good for blogging or am I just aware of more blogs and blog posts in recent weeks? Am I paying more attention because of the new networks? Am I just filtering less, and including more in the round-up? Anyway, lots of awesome.
Science
I…
September 10, 2010
If I had to describe the mission, the point, the raison d'etre of the entire field of psychology in just one sentence, I would say: Psychology aims to determine the relative extents to which biology and experience determine cognition and behavior." And, as you might expect, there are widely…
September 7, 2010
This talk, from last spring's TEDxUSC (for those not in the know, USC held the first ever TEDx event, in 2009), is made of awesome, and worth watching in its entirety. It will be especially interesting for those who have read The Invisible Gorilla.
As I'm always looking for good teaching tips,…
September 7, 2010
Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week:
"Now, five years later, there's new evidence of the significant, negative impact of Hurricane Katrina on children's mental health." Many Children Still Haven't Recovered from Katrina.
"Congenital amusia is one of several different…
September 6, 2010
New-born twin giant pandas made their media debut at a zoo in Japan on Friday. The twins, one male and one female, were born on August 11 to mother Rauhin and father Eimei, by artificial insemination. (video via BBC News)
September 6, 2010
For today's dose of monday pet blogging, head on over to a piece that I wrote for Scientific American that went up today. I used the invitation as an opportunity to a dig a little deeper into the story of Belyaev and his domesticated silver foxes (I previously wrote about them, here and here)
September 5, 2010
Links, links, and more links. Lots of good stuff this week.
Science
Brains and Beauty: a three-movement concerto was written inspired by a poem written by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and set to images culled from the research of Hanna Damasio.
How does beer become whiskey? At the Guardian…