Shadow

Dr. Purves will give a talk this Friday at PBS. I’ve known his work for a few years and am intrigued by his approach. Nevertheless, what triggered this post was his website, designed by Pyramis Studios, Inc. (www.pyramis-studios.com). This is a beautifully and functionally designed website based on Macromedia Flash.
Pyramis has been doing […]

More science behind the Passive Dynamic Walker.

Passive
Dynamic Walking

A passive dynamic walker
Introduction
People have been trying to make machines walk for a very
long time. As early as 1888 people were building toys that could
mechanically walk down a inclined slope with no motors. A good example
is a toy solder with […]

I should start asking more exciting questions — like what would
reading be like if we had 3 eyes. If dynamic modeling works for the knees,
why not the eyes? But before I get an answer to that, I am curious why you
(don’t take it personally) can walk with 1, 2, and 4 knees — in […]

No comment.

New-look passports
Feb 17th 2005
From The Economist print edition

KOBAL COLLECTION

High-tech passports are not working

IN
OLDEN days (before the first world war, that is) the traveller simply
pulled his boots on and went. The idea that he might need a piece of
paper to prove to foreigners who he was would not have crossed his
mind. Alas, […]

They’ve nailed it, the cause of global warming. And now, "[T]he debate
is not … what we are going to do about it.” Or is it?
While I agree that global warming is unnatural, neither is the last sentnece quoted below (TimesOnLine, Feb, 20, 2005). I was, and
still am, completely confused by the unconventional […]

A fascinating 2-piece article on the evolution of the eye, by a scientist writer who Laputan Logic claims has the best blog out there. Now what about eye movements?

from The Loom by Carl Zimmer
February 16, 2005
Eyes, Part Two: Fleas, Fish, and the Careful Art of Deconstruction
In my last post,
I went back in […]

Via a link form the Incoming Signals.

Chapter
3 - Paper Tigers and People’s Kangaroos
In which a bear of very little brain discovers that one family, one
child really is […]

Google Suggest didn’t get the fanfair as Google Video or Google Scholar did. But for those who take Ghits as a subject of scholarly inquiry, it may be valuable.
Technically it’s interesting, too. The main page calls a javascript AC.js. Rather than storing all keywords statically, it uses the XMLHTTP protocal (Google WebAPI) […]

A search of my name turned out something like this: "… Peter Gordon
got first place, with Gary Feng in 2nd place…" I was curious what
race it was. It turns out to be…

The syntax of numbers?
Never heard of that, and I think it’s a misnomer. Syntax is set of
rules governing how you put words into a sentence. You don’t say the syntax of words,
because that implies morphology. Numbers are the elements here. You may
need a syntax to put them together into an equation, but not […]

(DPreview forbids me to link to their photos).
"Face-Priority AF" has zero Ghit
as of today. Click to see how many now. They could have gone 1 step
further, and develop an "eye-priority AF", using IBM’s trick to find
eyes using alternating infrared lights. Admittedly, this would fail if
the subject is not looking straight at the lens […]

Haven’t read this paper, but looking from the abstract, it has all the elements of a statistical disaster.

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology

Volume 26, Issue 2
,
March-April 2005,
Pages 133-148
doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2004.12.003
Effects of shared parent–infant book reading on early language […]

Worth it for $199? I don’t know. It will make maintance impossible, if people do not sign off at the end of the day.

What is PCExpanion?
PCExpanion is the world’s first
terminal unit that does not require a CPU, hard-drive, or […]

I think I posted something about historical changes in names some
months ago, but cannot find it. This one, though, is a far better
visual presentation. In fact, the dynamic interface appears to be a
wonderful graphical analysis tool. One would think that one could use it in psychology studies.

NameVoyager

Explore the sea of
names, letter […]

Listened to it last Fall, and glad to ran into it again. I’ve seen the
video, and I did exactly the same thing — failing to see the woman in
the bear outfit (did I say bear?).

The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
The 2004 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday
[…]

This is what attentional blink is, and this is why dyslexics are less
effected by it, or at least this is the just-so story the authors told.
Lacroix, G. L., Constantinescu, I., Cousineau, D., de Almeida, R. G.,
Segalowitz, N., & Grunau, M. v. (2005). Attentional blink
differences between adolescent dyslexic and normal readers. Brain and
Cognition, 57, […]

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20031220/bob9.asp
Indignified Science
Jennifer L. Slocumb, a struggling mother of three and freelance spot
welder, sues Mensa in 2010 when the high-IQ society rejects her
membership application after she scores only 148 on a revamped IQ test.
"There’s people in Mensa right […]

Dr. Susan Nittrouer

Susan Nittrouer is currently the
Director
of Exemplary Services, which houses two research grants from […]

This is an intriguing study, although the recommendations will surely raise some eyebrows. And rightly so.
To say the least, the "suggestion" in the Conclusion part (see below)
is a classical example of jumping from a correlational finding to a
causal recommendation. The Stressor model is … I just don’t like it.

Vandewater, E. […]