Some neat links from the past few weeks:
- You Are No So Smart: A celebration of self-delusion. An excellent blog by journalist David McCraney that deconstructs common myths about the way the mind works.
- NPR has a great story by Jon Hamilton about the famous saga of Einstein’s brain and what it’s helped teach us about brain function. [via Carl Zimmer]
- The Neuroskeptic has a characteristically excellent 1,000 word explanation of how fMRI works.
- David Rock has an interesting post on some recent work from Baumeister’s group purportedly showing that it’s good to believe in free will (whether or not it exists). My own feeling about this is that Baumeister’s not really studying people’s philosophical views about free will, but rather a construct closely related to self-efficacy and locus of control. But it’s certainly an interesting line of research.
- The Prodigal Academic is a great new blog about all things academic. I’ve found it particularly interesting since several of the posts so far have been about job searches and job-seeking–something I’ll be experiencing my fill of over the next few months.
- Prof-like Substance has a great 5-part series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) on how blogging helps him as an academic. My own (much less eloquent) thoughts on that are here.
- Cameron Neylon makes a nice case for the development of social webs for data mining.
- Speaking of data mining, Michael Driscoll of Dataspora has an interesting pair of posts extolling the virtues of Big Data.
- And just to balance things out, there’s this article in the New York Times by John Allen Paulos that offers some cautionary words about the challenges of using empirical data to support policy decisions.
- On a totally science-less note, some nifty drawings (or is that photos?) by Ben Heine (via Crooked Brains):
