Thursday, March 31, 2011

MindBlog is on the road.

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This is just a note that my seasonal migration from Fort Lauderdale, FL., back to the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, WI., starts today as I ...

Blocking arthritis pain in the brain.

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Understanding how inflammation works is becoming increasingly urgent to aging persons (like myself) who view with alarm the increasing react...
10 comments:
Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Sleep deprivation biases economic risk-taking.

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Venkatraman et al. make these fascinating observations: A single night of sleep deprivation (SD) evoked a strategy shift during risky deci...
1 comment:
Tuesday, March 29, 2011

A revolution in evolution - cooperation

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Milinski reviews Martin Novak's new book "SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed," wri...
Monday, March 28, 2011

Experimental Philosophy addresses Free Will vs. Determinism

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Shaun Nichols has done an interesting essay on the problem of free will, and Tierney offers a summary . In all cultures people tend to reje...
2 comments:
Friday, March 25, 2011

Us vs. Them - what shapes the urge to harm rivals?

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Cikara et al. make some interesting observations on intergroup competition, using avid fans of sports teams as their experimental subjects:...
2 comments:
Thursday, March 24, 2011

The symphony of trading.

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Uzzi and colleagues have made an interesting observation. You might think that a gaggle of financial traders on a large exchange floor, who ...
4 comments:
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

A new view of early human social evolution

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I remember firmly taking away the message from Jared Diamond's first major book ("The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of...
1 comment:
Tuesday, March 22, 2011

How to grow a human mind...

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Tennenbaum et al. offer an utterly fascinating review of attempts to understand cognitive development by reverse engineering. They offer a ...
3 comments:
Monday, March 21, 2011

A new blog - David Brooks' psychology blog.

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I just got around to having a look at David Brooks' relatively new psychology blog , which has some good stuff. (I spend virtually no t...

Chaos and complexity in financial markets and nuclear meltdowns

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I trust that my friend and colleague John Young will not mind my passing on his email to the Chaos and Complexity Seminar group to which we ...
Friday, March 18, 2011

In Vino Veritas - Wine drinking and mortality

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As a prelude to your possible weekend libations, I thought I would note that in a recent issue of PNAS Francisco Ayala offers a brief histor...
Thursday, March 17, 2011

Women's underrepresentation in science

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Ceci and Williams offer an interesting perspective in an open access article . They conclude that women's underrepresentation in the sci...
Wednesday, March 16, 2011

All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate

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The executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, wrote a fascinating piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It sort of...
2 comments:
Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The madness of trivial decisions

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I'm sure you find yourself annoyed and paralyzed when you face the huge array of options for a single simple item that are offered on dr...
Monday, March 14, 2011

Predicting volition - Free will redux

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Fried et al. have now taken Libet's classic experiment (electodes on the surface of the head reporting activity in motor cortex in prepa...
3 comments:
Friday, March 11, 2011

Chimpanzees know that others make inferences

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Tomasello's group asks whether chimpanzees can determine that another chimpanzee is guiding its actions not on the basis of visual or a...
2 comments:
Thursday, March 10, 2011

Improving your cognitive toolkit - VI

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Continuation of my abstracting of a few of the answers to the annual question at edge.org, "What scientific concept would improve every...
Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Cats with thumbs...

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I had to pass this on (my daughter found it).
1 comment:

The beginning and middle of human history

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Nicholas Wade has done a fascinating article on Franis Fukayama and his new book "The Origins of Political Order." (Which I'v...