| Ice Cream is good |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|09:00 pm] |
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In honour of this fact we bought a load of ice cream and ice cream sundae things. Come visit tomorrow at about 2:00 to have some :) |
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| Ancient Tomes |
[Nov. 23rd, 2009|06:28 pm] |
"The mouldy tome dissolves as you touch it"
...
This just happened to my second ed monster manual.
Seems an appropriate way for it to go somehow. |
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| If you're guilty, be unambiguously guilty |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|12:01 pm] |
Just a quick quote from an abstract that I thought might be interesting to some of the lawyers who read this blog:
"Dissonance reduction in jurors' post-verdict decisions was investigated using a mock juror paradigm. Participants were expected to experience dissonance after making a difficult verdict decision in a rape trial . As predicted, those who read an ambiguous crime scenario and then voted "guilty" tried to reduce their dissonance by adding consonant cognitions (i.e., convincing themselves they made the right decision); they rated the crime as more severe and recommended harsher sentences than participants who read a clearly guilty control scenario"
Remember that it's out of context and taking legal advice from an entertainment blog is lunacy. Also it's out of context and doesn't include the exceptions over the next few lines. Anyone fancy taking a stab at what they are?
I'm not going to read the paper though, I need to find ones that are actually relevant to what I'm looking into (which at the moment is dissonance so I'm not too far off track yet) |
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| Risks |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|03:32 pm] |
Which is better (or less bad)
A 0.1% chance of losing £10,000
A 100% chance of losing £11
Mathematically we know the answer, but if you actually had to pick which would you do?
Is there any constant that the money values could be multipled by that would change your answer?
What if you make it 1% chance of £1,000 or 10% chance of £100 does that change your answer?
( Last two questions when you've thought about those ) |
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| Science Fail? |
[Sep. 21st, 2009|11:21 am] |
Failblog posted this image:
I think they're being too harsh on it. If that's what it takes to get kids thinking in a "hypothesis -> data -> analysis" kind of way I'm all for it. |
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| ESSA 2009 |
[Sep. 18th, 2009|11:40 am] |
This is going to be my most impenetrable post ever. It'll be about the ESSA conference that I just came back from. It'll be filled with academic details that half of you don't care about and personal details which the other half of you don't care about. If anyone reads the whole thing, they deserve a medal, but I need to put my thoughts in order and it's my blog so I can post whatever I want :P
( This is probably going to need a cut ) |
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| Logic |
[Sep. 3rd, 2009|11:32 pm] |
When debating the merits of chocolate vs sex the following conclusion was drawn:
chocolate u sex > chocolate n sex
Can someone write me a proof? |
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| It's because it's a funny name |
[Sep. 1st, 2009|01:03 pm] |
At the moment I'm looking at the latest ABM papers in psychology and this ones introdcution meanders in the direction of the prisoners dilemna this way:
"Predator inspection by guppies (Dugatkin, 1991; Milinski, 1987), food sharing between vampire
bats (Wilkinson, 1984), mutual grooming between impala (Hart & Hart, 1992), restraint of conflict between tree swallows (Lombardo, 1985), the “dear-enemy” effect between hooded warblers (Godard, 1993), and reciprocal help between olive baboons (Packer, 1977) are examples of cooperative behavior in spite of obvious individual benefits not to do so."
Once I finish this paper I've got two options. The first is to continue my strategy of looking at the ovid autoupdates to see what other papers that are relevant to my area of study, the second is to read about hooded warblers.
If I don't get around to reading about argument based learning socieities today it'll be because of those damn warblers. |
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| No back door :( |
[Aug. 27th, 2009|08:39 am] |
Now there's a post title that sounds dirtier than it is.
Last night the back door of my house fell onto one of my friends and injured him. This after I emailed the landlords maintance email to say it didn't fit the frame, also after their landlords inspection which not only failed to note the damage on the door - but failed to note the door at all. Oh dear.
In other news I finally put unecassarily esoteric roleplaying related knowlege into practice by building a device to make a helluvracket should anyone have tried to come in through the hole in the wall last night. Seperate your recycling kids, you never know when you might need a bunch of empty cans. |
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| Technoptimism |
[Aug. 26th, 2009|02:14 pm] |
"Emerging software, however, will soon allow individuals interacting through a text-based environment to receive messages in their own language even though those messages were created in another."
From a paper arguing for an increased role for the internet in reducing prejudice. How are you AI boys doing on that one then? ;) The rest of the paper is making a pretty interesting case though :)
Next post won't be about psychology, promise, I'm just using these to break up reading papers. |
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| A question for doktorate types |
[Aug. 26th, 2009|11:43 am] |
When you read a sentence of the form "This could be criticised for [reason] but that's not appropriate because [polite phrasing of thats an awful criticism]" do you mentally apend "You stupid reviewer!"
It can't be just me. |
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| Makes you want to cry |
[Aug. 25th, 2009|06:02 pm] |
I've just found a study looking into whether exposure to characters in minorities on television reduces prejudice. Not a bad thing to look at in its own right, people have assumed it for years, which is generally a good sign someone should check to see if it's actually true. (This is the cause of 98.4% of all ludicrous study titles along the lines of "Does cheese taste like cheese" they are needed because of the times that the answer turns out to be no)
So they decided to survey a bunch of university students and find out their attitudes towards homosexuality, the number of gay friends they had and (wait for it) how often they watched Will & Grace. If I ever get made to watch that show at a conference I will take immediate and bloody vengance upon the perpetrator.
Their finding is that increased viewing frequency is correlated with lower levels of sexual prejudice. It comes as no suprise to me that sexualy prejudiced people would be less likely to watch that show, but they seem to want to imply the causation was the other way around. Tricky. A gold star to whoever can suggest a better way to study this phenomenon
Terms and Conditions
1) This is an entertainment blog, for actual science catch me at work, the author does not claim a serious psychologist would evaluate the paper first. The author is only serious about it at work, to be serious all of the time would be cripplingly depressing.
2) "Immediate" may refer to the first point at which the crime is relatively concealable.
3) Star may not actually be gold. Star will be gold to the best judgement of the author, but he is colourblind.
4) Value of star nominally 0.0001p |
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| Moyashimon Evolution (NSFW) |
[Aug. 21st, 2009|03:14 pm] |
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Fair warning: This image is not safe for work (and probably comes from the least safe for work site I've ever linked to, I'm not looking around the rest of that site and you shouldn't either) I've ever linked to and most of you won't get it, but for those of you that do you'll giggle for 10 minutes. Or try to scrub your brain. Or both. ( Clicky )Okay, now I've got that out of my system, back to poster design. |
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| Customer Service |
[Aug. 15th, 2009|09:47 am] |
Q) Can you delete my old account? I can't access it and it's messing with my new account
A) Please access your old account, if you can't, then email us.
Q) Isn't that what I just did? |
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| Books |
[Jul. 28th, 2009|10:58 am] |
Megans books are little pieces of history. I just got to the end of Heinleins "Between Planets" and found an order form at the back for other books in the collection, advertising most of his other books being available for between 6/- and 12/- which I gather is the notation for shillings.
Also there's a fine example of subltey in that the books are ordered by category, science fiction, war, western, whatever followed by "general". This sounds like a catch all category for books that didn't fit into the others, tell me if you can think of a grouping category for these books:
Erotic edwardian fairy tales
The second sex
Sex manners for men
Sex manners for advanced learners
Sex manners for the younger generation
Sex without guilt
An ABZ of love
A happier sex life (illustrated)
Women
Mistresses
Sexualis '95
The first time
Sex manners for single girls
The french art of sex manners
Four of those are written by PhDs. We just don't do it like they used to ;) |
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| Public Service Announcement |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|09:16 am] |
The frequency for distressed aircraft is 121.5, not 141.5
I hope nobody has died in an obscure air accident during the period in which I misremembered this bit of trivia.
Apparently 141.5 would've got an MoD channel. |
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| Prison |
[Jul. 12th, 2009|04:55 pm] |
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On the third of July there were 79,313 men and 4,298 women in UK prisons. |
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| Monkey Island |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|11:40 am] |
From the trailer of the new monkey island game:
"Would you mind releasing my wife? She gets cranky if she's tied up for more than an hour or so."
Also if you've not heard of monkey island go and get scumm and play the series up to this point. It's the second best game I've ever seen. |
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