mixingmemory

A few months ago, I posted about a study showing implicit racial bias in NBA referees' calls. Now it's baseball's turn, because yesterday reports of study by Parsons et al.1 that shows analogous results for home plate umpires began popping up all over the media. The study is pretty…

Does anyone around here know of a program or programs that can do the following things with text: Frequency counts for parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.). Sort or score words/phrases based on how abstract or concrete they are. UPDATE: Thank you everyone for the suggestions and tips.…

Over at his blog The Loom, Carl Zimmer asked people to send him photos of their science-related tattoos. So far, it appears that only one (here) is cog sci related. Anyone else out there have a cog sci-related tattoo?

Over at one of her other blogospheric homes, Channel N, fellow ScienceBlogger has posted a link to a great talk on modeling qualitative physics by Ken Forbus. It was one of the earliest of the Cognitive Science Society's virtual colloquia, a series that it has, for some reason, discontinued. "…

So mirror neurons have been back in the news recently, as the result of a paper in the July 2007 issue of PLoS one titled, "Do you see what I mean? Corticospinal excitability during observation of culture-specific gestures"(1). Sounds interesting in a geeky sort of way, right? The paper starts with…

In my first month of blogging, way back in September of 2004, I posted a picture that my father (I think) had taken when he, my son, and I went to hang out in Centennial Park in Nashville while I was visiting home that summer. Here's the picture: I remarked in the post that Nashville is just about…

Taking a break from my mini-hiatus. I watched Barry Bonds hit his 755th tonight, live. It was a historic occasion, but judging by the fans' reaction, the commissioner's reaction (did he mouth "no" as the ball landed in the left field seats?), and his teammate's subdued congratulations, I wasn't…

I usually avoid linking to the continental philosophy blogs that I read because I'm well aware of the attitudes towards "pomo" stuff among many of the readers of this blog, but this post at Larval Subjects (a blog by a Deleuze scholar who, if I'm not mistaken, also practices some form of Lacanian…

I've been out of town since Saturday, with no internet access. Thank goodness for tiny islands on the gulf coast of Florida. Unfortunately, I'm still sick, and I'm exhausted, so I'm going to have to hold off on posts that actually require work. Just to give you some previews, I'm working on some…

"Connectionist Sticker Propaganda" by atomicity, some rights reserved. I may actually keep this picture up.

Through Saturday, a bunch of posts containing pictures and little more will be showing up here while I'm traveling on airplanes. They're meant to make a point, but what that point is will be clear only to a few of you. Some of the pictures are kinda cool, but for most of them, I recommend ignoring…

Here is an interesting article by Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas (via Integrated Science) on Jackson Pollock and the physics behind his work's appeal: This question triggers reservations from both scientists and artists. However, for the abstract paintings produced by Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s…

So the last post was pretty dense, and I haven't used an example since the first post, so I thought I'd throw one out there that you can play with. In what follows, I pretend to use the equations, but I'm actually doing all this in Excel. If you've got Excel, here are some helpful functions.…

So far we've been talking about different distributions and their parameters. If we're looking at a population with known parameters, then we're going to be dealing with either a normal distribution or a standardized normal distribution (Post I and II). If we're dealing with samples, we're going to…

Before we start in on new stuff, let's recap what we've covered so far. We started with the Central Limit Theorem, which tells us that if a bunch of random variables go into determining the values of yet another variable, then the values of that variable will approximate a normal distribution. The…

I'm sorry, I simply couldn't resist.

For the 4th of July I give you America circa 1995, in 4 minutes and 50 seconds, as seen through a Super 8, and with a soundtrack:

Long, long ago, during my first summer as a grad student (technically, I wasn't even a student yet), in one of my first meetings with my graduate adviser, he suggested that I think about the problem of representing negation. The problem of representing negation? That seemed like an odd suggestion.…

In case you haven't noticed, ScienceBlogs has a new neuro-blogger, and he's one you probably already know: MC, or Mo, the Neurophilospher. And he's hosting the 26th edition of Encaphalon at his new digs.

Apparently so. Recent research has shown that pleasant smells can increase pain tolerance, and a recent paper by Prescott and Wilkie(1) suggests that it is specifically sweet smells that do so. I'll just skip to the experiment, and spare you the background, because the experiment contains all you…

So in the last post, we talked about the normal distribution, and at the very end, discussed that if you knew the mean and standard deviation of a population for a particular variable, than you can compute the probabilities associated with a particular value of that variable within that population…

Ah, yes, a real game (kidding, Scrabble people). If you've watched many baseball games or baseball movies, you know that one of the things that makes for a successful hitter is the ability to predict what the next pitch will be. Is it going to be inside or outside? Will it be a fastball or a…

I know I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again. Anyone who reads the fundamentalist atheist blogs (you know, like the biggest blog on ScienceBlogs) knows that these people have a lot of passion and energy. They use it to write 50 posts a week pummeling creationists and telling us how…

So here's the first post on statistics. If you know the basics, and I suspect most of you do, then you can just ignore these posts (unless you want to check to make sure I'm getting it right). If you don't know the basics, then hopefully you will when I'm done. Even for those of you who've never…

I kid you not: Halpern, D.F., & Wai, J. (2007). The world of competitive Scrabble: Novice and expert differences in visuospatial and verbal vbilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 13(2), 79-94. Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr a week memorizing words from the…

So the other day, I was talking to someone about one of the studies I was planning on posting about. I mentioned one of the results, and he said he'd really like to see the means and standard deviations. I thought to myself, "Alright, I'll put those in the post," but when I actually started writing…

It's now clear that by age 3, children have a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, which includes an understanding of the limits of the causal powers of thought. They know that thoughts cause behaviors and other thoughts, but they're also aware that simply thinking about something can't affect it.…

Picture in your head one person throwing a ball to another. How were the two people oriented spatially? Was one on the left, and the other on the right? If so, which one was on the left, and which on the right? Chances are, the thrower was on the left, and the catcher was on the right. For some…

Jonathan Rowe, over at Positive Liberty, posted a link to Ophelia from The Last Waltz. Because I've been a fan of The Band since I was a little kid, I'm upping the ante, with "Carivan" with Van, the Man, who just tosses the mic and walks off stage at the end: and "Mannish Boy," with you know who…

All of you are probably familiar with color opponency, but just in case, I'll give you a quick refresher. I'll even start with the history. In the 19th century, there were two competing theories of color vision. The first was the Young-Helmholtz theory (sometimes called the trichromatic theory),…