Children aged 7–8 years endorsed the norm of an equal split as fair, predicted that they and another child would behave in accordance with that norm, and actually did share equally with another child. Children aged 3–6 years also asserted that the resource should be divided equally, whether by themselves or by another child and they predicted that another child would adhere to that norm. Yet they predicted that they themselves would fall short of the norm, and actually did fall short. Age-related increases in inhibitory control failed to account for this closing of the judgment-behavior gap with increasing age. On the other hand, the extent to which children invoked fairness norms when reflecting on their actual sharing did explain the matching of behavior to standards that emerged among older children. The younger children focused on their own desires when explaining their predicted and actual sharing, whereas the older children talked spontaneously and explicitly about issues of fairness. The results provide some support for traditional accounts of moral development by showing that, in the course of development, children’s sharing is increasingly consistent with the norm of fairness that they endorse from an early age.

stress either causes worry or amps up performance. worriers have higher IQ, warriors test better.
SAT problem seems to be high-stakes testing.
can get better results by telling test-takers, as they start the test, that worry the night before leads to better performance.
better is to compete when there are inherent rewards for participating, practice managing stress
experience with situations helps worriers outperform warriors (eg jetpilots)

psychology priming reproducibility problems

the science of explorers: genes, tools, culture.

"There have been many metabolic studies that have shown that caffeine, in the short term, increases your blood glucose levels and increases insulin resistance," Shilpa Bhupathiraju, a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health's Department of Nutrition and the study's lead author, told me. But "those findings really didn't translate into an increased risk for diabetes long-term." During the over 20 years of follow-up, and controlling for all major lifestyle and dietary risk factors, coffee consumption, regardless of caffeine content, was associated with an 8 percent decrease in the risk of type 2 diabetes in women. In men, the reduction was 4 percent for regular coffee and 7 percent for decaf.

great link bait, but there's no actual RESEARCH published on the UTMB web site.

Best Evidence Synthesis

Roger's categories are:
Innovators (2.5 %)
Early Adopters (13.5 %)
Early Majority (34 %)
Late Majority (34 %)
Laggards (16 %)

The initial impulse is still to intervene and fix the problem, or critique the actions of the teacher who
made the mistake. It also often leads students to frame their own
research around educational success stories. The idea is to pick an
intervention that promises to improve education—a new teaching
technique, curriculum approach, instructional technology, reform
effort, or administrative structure—and study it in practice. The
desired outcome is that the intervention works rather well, and
the function of the study is to document this and suggest how
the approach could be improved in the future. This often leads
to an approach to scholarship (and eventually to a kind of scholarly literature) that is relentlessly, unrealistically, sometimes
comically optimistic—one that suggests that there is an implementable answer to every educational problem and that help is always on the way

Why do social groups fracture? A mathematical model from Cornell University may shed some light on the reasons

paper showing problems and how they were overcome: Priority Inbox ranks mail at a rate far exceeding the capacity of a single machine. It is also difficult to predict the data center that will handle a user’s Gmail account, so we must be able to score any user from any data center, without delaying mail deliver

confidence trumps clue

Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be?

three peaceful bystanders calm down a confrontation, but it takes three

Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'.

some economics research experiments showing causes of bubbles: the possibility of making money from people who are ignorant of "true value", momentum investors, repeated plays show decreasing cycle lengths so bubbles pop sooner, until a fearful equilibrium is established. Not ignorance of bubble happening, but ppl think they can get out first.

"primed" subjects by having them explore words that were either clumpy or diffuse, encouraging either "stay and mine" or "discard and explore" behaviours. Then when allowed to trade tiles at Scrabble, the players traded according to how they'd been primed.

wikipedia requires RNA Biology authors to write Wikipedia articles on their research, otherwise no cite for you!

user-generated content for galaxy classification. It reminds me of the original star classifiers, women (because they were cheap and dependable) who studied photographs. Some of those women, the original computers, went on to become professional astronomers (one was heavily awarded) ... what will the users behind Galaxy Zoo go on to?

Interesting examples of how we can learn to hear distorted speech.

VUW Researchers building an autonomous bot that is programmed for frustration and anger.

history and future of Public Library of Science, the open journal

Hypothesis: dopamine = desire, opioids = pleasure. The cells behind your eyes encode like and dislike. Possibly.

Fascinating article about Intellectual Ventures. A friend's wife just started work there. I described it to my friend as "intellectually heaven, morally hell".

Profile of Luis von Ahm and the ESP Game

Groeling’s work is one of the few studies to quantify partisan bias in the media, a subject notoriously difficult for social scientists to research and discuss. These scientists work with theories such as the socalled hostile media effect to predict that ardent supporters of a cause will view media as slanted for the other side, and they have conducted hundreds of studies that have revealed imbalances in the ways journalists frame news on topics ranging from AIDS to the war in Iraq.

this is how you demolish an academic paper. Wow.

2M Euro research project to build robots that ensure no accidents can ensure.

Foundational finding. The real question: if the neurons fire a second or two before we realize we have remembered ... what's happening in that second or two?

"our survey of charitable giving lends additional support to the hypothesis that economists are more likely than others to free ride."

Suggestion that cognitive neuroscience should focus the scientific method on studying people in the wild, rather than rushing to lab experiments to reproduce the hypothetical isolated factor

"The root of the problem is that the context-awareness exhibited by people is of a radically different order than that of computational systems. People notice a vast range of cues, both obvious and subtle, and interpret them in light of their previous experience to define their contexts. Thus, when at the theatre, we know when to talk, when to listen, when to clap, and when to leave. In contrast, context-aware systems detect a very small set of cues, typically quantitative variations of the few dimensions for which they have sensors."

"Mary Smyth at Lancaster University ... compared psychology and biology textbooks and found that psychology appears to have comparatively few taken-for-granted facts. Instead, numerous experiments are described in detail, lending scientific credence to any factual claims being made. ... there’s that ever-present pressure to demonstrate that psychological findings are more than mere common sense. Benjamin Harris says that historians have described psychology as putting a scientific gloss on the accepted social wisdom of the day."

fleshmap data was obtained using Amazon Mechanical Turk

"The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses." I don't know what to make of this, having been struggling with determinism myself.

In a paper just published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, two Canadian scientists have concluded that one's predisposition to aggression is signalled by the ratio of width to height of the male face, whose proportions are shaped in puberty by the (among other things) aggression-inducing testosterone. This works for men (tested in hockey players and undergraduates) but not women (undergraduates). Other findings not in this paper: women can predict a man's interest in children from his face, and both trustworthiness and dominance also show up.

"Moriarty" + "digital matter". Something's afoot, Watson!

watch electrical outlets, detect when abnormal use, triggering messages

mexican welfare applicants lied, not only claiming they didn't have cars when they really did, but also claiming they had tap water when they didn't. lies of reputation. Australian doctors self-report handwashing at 73%, observed at 9%

wonderful article on hypocrisy, with presidential candidates as motivating examples but research studies for insight

hunt for the connectome of the brain

God and Google can have the same mental states

biomarkers for coastal pollution monitoring

predators nip at the feet, not just the siphon

do they float in the water stream?

"These predictions are tested by describing the spatial patterns found for a range of scales (5 to 33 cm and 33 cm to 6 m)... to incorporate environmental variation, patterns were studied at 2 sites of different sediment grain size and hydrodynamic ..."

comprehensive list of studies that show file sharers are big music spenders

academic conference for historians using GIS

"God of data-rich research", as Jane McGonigal described him

PDF of Stanford paper on implementing 10 machine learning algorithms on map-reduce. No code.

Evangeline Haughney from Adobe Systems used Comic Creator software to present her research results in comic book form. Smart! And something my 8 year old is learning to do at school.

Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal, (mumble) Consalvo

hey, maybe all those ads showing skinny happy supermodels prancing around ARE showing me an achievable reality!

overview of research into the rates around false paternity

history of battery technology. Highlight for me: name of UTexas researcher inventing new battery material: Dr Goodenough. (bet he pronounces it "good-uh-no")

self-healing composites

"IMEC, a Belgian research group [...] building tiny electric wires that can stretch to twice their length without breaking. This work is part of a collaborative project, called STELLA (Stretchable Electronics for Large Area Applications)."

"This wiki contains information about the software & hardware related to multitouch and multi-model input systems. Also you will be able to find out general information about our community here."

"a smart video goggle system that records everything the wearer looks at, recognizes and assigns names to objects that appear in the video, and creates an easily searchable database of the recorded footage."

semi-transparent device you interact with by touching the back of the screen (you can see your fingers through it, very weird). From Microsoft Research.

finding the dark horse in netflix

toolkit to hide the HMM model. you build the models, give it examples of gestures, train it up, and can get 93% accuracy. not sure if i want 1 in 10 of my interactions misunderstood, though.

World Bank report on tech in developing nations.

National Academy of Engineering's grand chall

This paper is the survey paper dealing with the survey of hand posture and gesture recognition techniques used in the literature.