Misc

Having been on the hunt for a new CD player (yes some people still listen to CDs!), I did the usual browse of hi-fi magazines and websites to help guide me towards what might be an improvement over my 18 year old Rotel . That said, it is becoming increasingly difficult to trust any review when some magazines describe a £300 HDMI cable as sounding ' controlled and composed '. This is a cable that carries a digital signal - digital meaning 1's and 0's. By that logic, a more expensive ethernet cable linking your personal computer to a network should also result in a more ' controlled and composed ' internet experience. It won't. In the digital domain, the correct information is either received or it isn't. I have been unable to find any scientific evidence suggesting that a difference in picture quality can be detected between an HDMI cable costing £20 or £200. What I have found is a lot of anecdotal evidence from people who have invested in these ...

I recently attempted to take some exercise at my local gym and failed miserably. Not through injury or lack of motivation, but simply because I have not yet completed a gym induction programme. Prevented from using the treadmill, I was instead allowed to go for a swim (without any armbands)! The previous day I was also permitted to play squash in the same sports centre without any induction. So what carries more risk - squash or a treadmill? A quick literature search found one paper* that looked at hospital admissions relating to squash injuries in Victoria, Australia between 2000 and 2001. The authors found an overall injury rate of 35.5 injured players per 100,000. Over 90% of these patients were not admitted to the hospital and were discharged the same day. As for running on a treadmill, I couldn't find any meaningful numbers relating to hospital admissions based on running inside or outside. Using some common sense, running inside ...

Wimbledon, Euro 2012, The Olympics. The Great British summer of sport has already arrived, but I am sad to say that my sport of choice will not be represented in any of these events. I can't do anything about that, but what I can do is attempt to see where my own game could use some improvement. I regularly play games against my friend Josh (@bain_josh) and most of the time, these games are pretty close. My own gut feeling is that when I win a match, I am overreliant on gaining points when serving. When Josh wins, this doesn't seem to happen. I should add at this stage that you  do not  need to hold serve to score a point in squash. Points are awarded based on who wins a rally. The winner of that rally then goes onto start the next and so on. Basically, I think amongst the many things we could both improve on, one of those is our return of serve. After filming two games - I set out to try and answer how important this ...

Most of my life at the moment consists of writing my thesis, which is fine. I am quite envious of people who can focus on one task for hours on end, but that is rarely me so my writing tends to be quite sporadic. I frequently jump between chapters and keep telling myself that this allows me to get a better feeling for the thesis as a whole. All other written output has suffered, but it won't be forever. I am still semi-engaged with that thing that has become an escape route for batches of 140 characters that are unlikely to ever become something more meaningful. Twitter. But how far would all my Tweets get me in terms of a thesis?   I have produced 1,350 Tweets over the last 2 years. Assuming they were all 140 characters long, this would equate to 1350*140 = 189,000 characters. Lets say the average word length is around 5 characters so 189000/5 = 37,800 words. Not bad. To find out a bit more about your own tweets, try  tweetstats.com . ...

When studying for exams, I was given three bits of advice: (1) Get plenty of sleep (2) Exercise (3) Eat plenty of fruit and veg. This advice should seem fairly obvious. All of the above has been shown time and time again to to maximize cognitive function. Yet what actually happens is the complete opposite - even amongst psychology students who should know better! The library has begun to fill with a large number of people who spend all day everyday glued to their books. The gym has emptied. Healthy food is usually off the menu. I have a theory, which remains totally untested! As an exam gets closer, anxiety levels rise accordingly. For many, this anxiety will increase when they remove themselves from their standard studying environment. This becomes a reinforcer and as studying becomes habitual, little time is made for anything else. Once the deadline or exam passes, life returns to normal. This may apply to other stressful deadlines throughout life, ...

Daniel Bor's latest blog entry  discusses problems with weak statistics in neuroimaging papers, but the issues raised are relevant to any area of research that relies on inferential statistics. For example, as behavioural scientists move towards collecting larger data sets, the risk of finding false-positives increases accordingly. Statistics also play an important role in any psychology degree. Gaps in statistical knowledge quickly become apparent when students are asked to critically review other's work or carry out their own research. One wonders if these early misconceptions could contribute to poor research practices further down the line.  In my somewhat limited experience, psychology students generally know what numbers they need to report, but often fail to understand what goes into making those numbers a reality. This common misunderstanding can be split into three distinctive areas where undergraduates may benefit from additional ...

Out of 28,000 teachers who qualified in 2010, just three individuals had a computer-related degree . This makes me wonder just how tech-savvy a lot of 10 to 15 year olds really are. When I was 10 in 1996, my parents purchased our first ever home computer. It had the latest Intel Pentium processor that clocked in at a whopping 120Mhz. To put that in perspective, most iPhones today run at ten times this speed.  Things were tricky at first. Windows 95 took awhile to get used to and most video game developers still preferred MS-DOS as a platform because it provided a more stable environment. Direct X was in its infancy and the Xbox was over a decade away. Microsoft's idea of Plug and Play technology rarely applied and/or worked.  Fifa 96 was a Christmas present that year, but due to MS-DOS being unable to correctly identify the computers CD-ROM drive or sound card, I didn't get to play it until February 1997.  When attempting to run the game, inste...