Stories tagged Harvard

Last fall I attended a talk by one of the other students at my university (Harvard). He was discussing recent results from a perception experiment he had posted online. He said he had over a thousand subjects. "How long have you had this experiment online," I asked him. "Just over a week," he responded.

"Holy crap!" I thought. There are many experiments I would love to do except they require hundreds or thousands of subjects -- something that just isn't feasible in a traditional laboratory setting. So I started the Visual Cognition Online Laboratory. I am getting respectable traffic after one week, but it's going to take a while before I am getting 1,000 participants per week, which is what I need.

Most experiments, I should say, are surveys. What this grad student and I are doing is putting up actual perception experiments, which are always done in the lab. Most researchers believe you need strong controls in timing, display, etc., in order to do perception experiments. For some, this is true, but there are many you can do online given how much bandwidth there is now. Also, if you have enough subjects, that extra noise will wash out.

If you are interested in trying out one of my experiments, they typically take 5 minutes or less.

Tags : scientific method, Life Science, Scientific Inquiry, Harvard

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In January, Harvard President Lawrence Summers created quite a stir when he suggested that one reason why there are fewer women than men working in math and science is that there are inherent differences between male and female brains. (Summer's full speech can be found here.

The comments created quite a controversy. Enter "Summers Harvard women math speech" into Google and you'll get about 28 thousand hits. Many people are reluctant to accept the idea that men and women are inherently different.

Tags : sex, math, women, gender, men, Harvard, controversy

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