Mother Jones has a short piece about the effects of “negative consequences of vituperative online comments for the public understanding of science” (aka comment trolling):
The researchers were trying to find out what effect exposure to such rudeness had on public perceptions of nanotech risks. They found that it wasn’t a good one. Rather, it polarized the audience: Those who already thought nanorisks were low tended to become more sure of themselves when exposed to name-calling, while those who thought nanorisks are high were more likely to move in their own favored direction. In other words, it appeared that pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs.
Because I can’t really let anything get away without being some sort of McLuhan reference, the conclusion pretty clearly lays out the fact that the medium is shaping the message we receive:
The upshot of this research? This is not your father’s media environment any longer. In the golden oldie days of media, newspaper articles were consumed in the context of…other newspaper articles. But now, adds Scheufele, it’s like “reading the news article in the middle of the town square, with people screaming in my ear what I should believe about it.”
commentsinternetmediascienceyoutubeJanuary 12, 2013
Apparently electrical outlets give off an inaudible hum, which isn’t all that interesting in and of itself. Except that that hum changes frequency in minute ways constantly based on the supply and demand of electricity. Scientists in the UK have discovered that the hum is unique, which means it can be used to timestamp recordings. The gist:
Recordings made close to electrical power sources pick up a hum. Comparing the unique pattern of the frequencies on an audio recording with a database that has been logging these changes for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year provides a digital watermark: a date and time stamp on the recording. Philip Harrison, from JP French Associates, another forensic audio laboratory that has been logging the hum for several years, says: “Even if [the hum] is picked up at a very low level that you cannot hear, we can extract this information.”
Science is pretty crazy sometimes.
crimescienceDecember 12, 2012
A little Friday fun: The long answer to what would happen if everyone on the planet jumped at the same time. XKCD has a special take and chooses Rhode Island as the location:
A cell phone comes out of a pocket. Within seconds, the rest of the world’s five billion phones follow. All of them—even those compatible with the region’s towers—are displaying some version of “NO SIGNAL”. The cell networks have all collapsed under the unprecedented load.
Outside Rhode Island, abandoned machinery begins grinding to a halt.
I’ll let you read the rest.
FUNNYrhode islandscienceSeptember 7, 2012
A little bit of distraction might be good for you:
The study adds to research suggesting that small doses of distraction — including hard-to-read fonts — prompt the mind to work at a more abstract level, which is also a more creative level. (The possibility that sound energized people was considered but rejected: Participants’ heart rates did rise when they first encountered noise, but soon subsided.) The effect of noise is inverted-U-shaped, this study suggested: There’s a sweet spot between silence and din.
I wonder how much of this is about the noise versus the environment. I find that in an airport I tend to get a lot of work done. I think it just has to do with the change of scenery and the specific amount of time I’m there.
[Via Barking Up The Wrong Tree]
DistractionscienceFebruary 26, 2012
Facebook did a big study on how we find information and, not entirely surprisingly, our weak ties tend to give us stuff we wouldn’t otherwise run across. Nothing really shocking there, but, as Slate notes, the scale of the study was:
The other crucial thing about this study is that it is almost unthinkably enormous. At the time of the experiment, there were 500 million active users on Facebook. Bakshy’s experiment included 253 million of them and more than 75 million shared URLs, meaning that in total, the study observed nearly 1.2 billion instances in which someone was or was not presented with a certain link. This scale is unheard of in academic sociological studies, which usually involve hundreds or, at most, thousands of people communicating in ways that are far less trackable.
facebooknetworksresearchscienceFebruary 6, 2012
Hardly shocking, but it turns out people are much better at predicting the behavior of others than themselves:
Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own psyches is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly factor in the influence of the circumstances. This means that we’re instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we’re poor self-psychologists.
It’s interesting to think about what puts us in social-psychologist mode and whether we can switch that on for ourselves. Obviously it’s not natural, but it’s got to be possible, right?
[Via Barking Up The Wrong Tree]
psychologyresearchscienceJanuary 9, 2012
I like coffee quite a bit (I have three coffee preparation devices on my kitchen counter) and I’ve always been under the impression that freezing coffee was a bad idea. Turns out, according to this incredibly detailed experiment, it pretty hard to tell the difference if frozen for less than two months after roasting:
When the results were examined according to the three scored parameters, the overall preference, the crema, and the intensity of the taste and aroma, no statistically significant differences were noted among the coffees studied or the other variables of the study. What this means is that none of the tasters could consistently differentiate among the shots made with previously frozen or never frozen coffee. Similarly, none of the tasters could consistently tell the difference based upon whether the shots came out of the newer rotary pump driven or the older vibratory pump driven espresso machine, nor between the two grinders, one of which had brand new burrs and the other with more heavily used burrs.
In case you were worried this wasn’t taken seriously enough, here are the storage instructions:
If you are concerned about what sort of container you should use for freezing coffee, it obviously needs to be something that is relatively airtight and that can tolerate the conditions present in a freezer, and the temperature stress in going from room temperature to very cold and back again to room temperature. I generally use Mason type canning jars or recycled jars from grocery products that will close with a tight seal; I fill them up as full as possible to minimize the remaining air that is present. I have also used certain types of commercial plastic coffee bags that can be sealed and if valves are present I tape over them. If you purchase coffee that is already packaged in a sturdy valve bag you could simply tape over the valve and toss it directly into the freezer. I would however suggest that whatever container you choose, it be sized to allow you to consume all of the contents within a reasonable period, say 1 week, without having to open the bag and return some of the contents to the freezer; doing so risks condensation on the beans which could theoretically cause damage.
This all came via an excellent Lifehacker post busting food myths. Also, if you’re still reading, I’ll assume you like coffee and suggest you check out the cold-brewed iced coffee recipe I posted last year.
coffeeexperimentsfoodfreezermythsscienceNovember 6, 2011
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