Haven’t done a Randomness in awhile.  This one is courtesy of Syeda in the Beeman lab: Facebook Friend Count Linked to Brain Density (mashable.com reporting from Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences) The write-up even nicely opens with the correlation/causation problem — do brain differences cause more friends or do more friends cause brain […]

I’m not claiming this video is accurate, because the author is apparently a Professor of Funk. In either case, it’s interesting and speaks to pseudo-effects.

Saw this linked via a gaming site: SkillCraft.ca: A SC2 Expertise Study It’s a study being run by Mark Blair at Simon Frasier Univ using Starcraft2 as a domain for looking at the development of expertise. Nice idea. I wonder what the approach is.

Apparently there’s a new research study out suggesting that people don’t remember things as well if they know they can look the information up later on Google. This set off a spate of media reports on the predictable theme that technology is bad for our brains, e.g.: http://techland.time.com/2011/07/15/is-google-really-wrecking-our-memory/. I got an email from a reporter, […]

Apparently I mis-remembered; the study was done by Newsweek, not a fancy academic research institution. http://www.newsweek.com/content/newsweek/2011/06/19/the-real-minimum-wage.html

Not only is this mad science, but the head researchers are from schools in Southern California (USC) and Winston-Salem (Wake Forest)! A cortical neural prosthesis for restoring and enhancing memory http://iopscience.iop.org/1741-2552/8/4/046017

I haven’t posted an expertise in gaming video in awhile, but a link to this appeared on twitter earlier today.  I’m unfamiliar with the game, but it appears to be a 7button + wheel (8 operator) rhythm game.  The 7 keys are arranged white/black above/below as a piano would be.  I think this is a […]