When aniseed does not smell at all like lemon: Sugar helps you tell apart smells,

Strawberries taste great. So does Rogan Josh or falafel, though perhaps not all together at the same time. What does it mean for something to “taste great”? Wikipedia tells us that “Taste is the sensation produced when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with taste receptor cells located on taste buds.” But is that it? No. […]

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People conform–sometimes we even conform with a computer

We are social beings. As much as we admire the “rugged individualist”, from the Lone Ranger to Crocodile Dundee, in reality most of us are sensitive to the behavior of others around us. We conform to “social norms” on a myriad of occasions: when queueing for the bus, when participating in recycling because our neighbors do, when we do […]

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A picture is worth a thousand words—or is it?

A picture is worth a thousand words—or is it? How does a pulley work? What about a block and tackle? According to Wikipedia, “A pulley is a wheel on an axle that is designed to support movement and change of direction of a cable or belt along its circumference.” When multiple pulleys are combined together “so […]

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High quality MTurk data

In 2005 Amazon launched the Mechanical Turk platform (MTurk), a marketplace where requesters can pay “workers” from all over the world to complete tasks over the internet.  MTurk is used to crowdsource many tasks that are still best completed by aggregate human intelligence (as opposed to machine intelligence), such as rating the relevance of search […]

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