“You guys know an awful lot that could really benefit the public”—this is the motto of Lasting Learning (http://www.lastinglearning.com/), a start-up company run by Cameron Broumand, a former real estate man whom I interviewed recently about his vision for how Psychonomic knowledge can feature in a commercial enterprise. Cameron’s story starts with his experience as a […]
Legend has it that in Texas, and perhaps other jurisdictions where the value of pi is determined by political vote, sharpshooters market their skills by first firing a shotgun at a barn door and then painting a bull’s eye around their preferred hole. There has been much concern recently that parts of science are not immune […]
You are deep in the Amazonian rain forest and there is a rustle behind you that’s coming closer. Guess what your brain is doing at that moment? It’s planning your escape. We plan our escape the moment we hear an approaching sound but we ignore a crisis that has been looming for decades until it […]
Living in a world suffused with news about violent conflict around the world, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that humans are, by and large, averse to harming others. Even in war, the reluctance of soldiers to fire at their opponents is legendary, and overcoming this reluctance is a cornerstone of military training. […]
Towards the end of last year, submissions from Psychonomics authors who expressed an interest in a post on their article began to outpace the ability of our team—that is me, Anna, Cassie, Gary, Melissa, and Steve—to keep up with reporting all of this interesting science to a broader audience. To deal with the growing backlog, the Psychonomic Society thankfully approved […]
We are born with the neural circuitry required to detect the emotion in facial expressions. By the age of 7 months, human infants clearly distinguish between faces that are angry and others that are happy or neutral. At the same age, effects of parenting are also beginning to emerge, with infants of parents who are particularly sensitive […]
In yesterday’s post, I showed that conventional frequentist confidence intervals are far from straightforward and often do not permit the inference one wants to make. Typically, we would like to use confidence intervals to infer something about a population parameter: if we have a 95% confidence interval, we would like to conclude that there is a […]
What could be more straightforward than the confidence interval? I compute the mean shoe size of a random sample of first-graders and surround it by whiskers that are roughly twice the standard error of that mean. Presumably I can now have 95% confidence that the “true” value of first-graders’ shoe size, in the population at […]
The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Chicago drew to a close on Sunday. Our Twitter feed provides a record of the meeting with the hashtag #Psynom15. As always, the meeting included a number of poster sessions, and on the Saturday evening Cassie Jacobs and I approached a number of student authors at their posters at random (technically […]
The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society will go under way in about 99 hours, give or take 12 hours depending on your time zone. The program has been available for some time, and here I only briefly review the digital aspects of the meeting. Microblogging Quite a few of the digital team will be in attendance […]