Author: Lloyd Morgan
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Ebook Readers and Auto-Correcting Books
With the growing prevalence of ebook readers that can be updated remotely–such as Amazon’s Kindle–could the time of the book riddled with errors be coming to an end? Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been…
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Unconscious Plagiarism
Cryptomnesia, according to Wikipedia, is “a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else”. Newsweek has an article discussing this phenomenon; including what appear to be genuine cases of cryptomnesia and the novel tests being conducted by…
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18 Factors of Risk Perception
In Dan Gardner’s excellent Risk, he lists psychologist Paul Slovic‘s list of 18 factors that influence how we judge the severity of risk: Catastrophic Potential If fatalities would occur in large numbers in a single event — instead of in small numbers dispersed over time — our perception of risk rises. Familiarity Unfamiliar or novel risks…
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Guest Posts (2) – Thanks
Still on vacation, Dan Zambonini has been your host here on Lone Gunman for the past week. While here, Dan published six items: Image Compression and the Origins Of Life Modern America: Designed by a Frenchman My GeoPolitical Memberships Want to be a millionaire pop star? You’re better off buying £64 of lottery tickets than entering…
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Guest Posts (2)
I’m away on vacation, and last week Alex J. Mann took over Lone Gunman for the week and produced five thoughtful posts: To Invest is to Aim Seeing with Tongues In Defense of Sampling: Why Stealing is Inspiring New Literacy Strategies Your Job as an Artist This coming week, your host is Dan Zambonini—a true…
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Guest Posts (1)
Right now I’m in Japan. I’ll be staying here for another couple of weeks before heading to southeast Australia for another few weeks. While I’m away your occasional Lone Gunman fix will come from a selection of fine guest writers. For the coming week your host is Alex J. Mann. Alex has his own tag…
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The Inefficiencies of Multitasking
Those who regularly multitask are the worst at multitasking: In [a test] designed to measure how well [students] could filter out extraneous stimuli from the environment, the subjects had to look for changes in red rectangles while ignoring blue rectangles displayed on a computer monitor. Infrequent multitaskers scored well on the test, but habitual multitaskers…
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The Neuroscience of Driving
Elderly drivers are the most dangerous on the road, we are often led to believe thanks to the news highlighting accidents involving the aged. This is not necessarily the case, research is showing, but it’s partly true due to the decline of many cognitive functions. In a comprehensive article looking at the neuroscience of driving,…
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Paper Towels vs. Hand Driers
Fully accepting his bias, Paul Revere looks at the evidence in the long-standing paper towel–hand drier debate and finds in favour of the humble paper towel. There were four parts to the study: Part A looked at the drying efficiency of hand drying method; Part B involved counting the number of different types of bacteria…