Virginia Hughes

(This goes into the “What nerds do in their free-time” file.)

Virgil Griffith, a Caltech grad student (computation and neural systems), wanted to find out if reading tastes correlate with intelligence. As he explains:

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, “Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.”? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality.

For every college listed on Facebook, Griffith first downloaded the ten most frequent “favorite books” chosen by students at that school. Then, he looked up the average SAT scores for the schools. Then he made a big, colorful chart showing which books were favorites at low-SAT schools, which were favorites at high-SAT schools, and which fell somewhere in the middle. His graph is clunky, but thorough and definitely worth seeing.

On the high end, SAT scores of about 1300 (remember, this is the school’s average…apparently not even Harvard has an average above 1300) correlate with Lolita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Crime and Punishment. He also sorts them by genre, which places erotica on the low end and philosophy and classics at the top.

Surprise, surprise, on the “dumb” side you get Dan Brown, Nicholas Sparks, and religious garbage—including the Holy Bible and The Purpose Driven Life. (Curiously, the “Holy Bible” correlates with a score of about 900, while the “Bible” correlates with 1050.)

“I don’t read” came in at 950.

(Hat tip: Randal)

In May, Fortune writer Nadira Hira wrote a feature about Gen-Y, the “me me me” generation of iPods, aiming high, and unashamedly living with our parents. Her idea of today’s typical twentysomething is summed up at the beginning of the piece:

At once a hipster and a climber, he is all nonchalance and expectation. He is new, he is annoying, and he and his female counterparts are invading corporate offices across America…

They’re ambitious, they’re demanding and they question everything, so if there isn’t a good reason for that long commute or late night, don’t expect them to do it. When it comes to loyalty, the companies they work for are last on their list - behind their families, their friends, their communities, their co-workers and, of course, themselves.

I was immediately defensive. We’re not smug, I thought. And certainly no more annoying than the 30-year-old yuppies supervising us. And since when is ambition a bad thing? My anger melted a bit at the end when, of course, you find out that Hira is one of us:

That felt all too familiar. And knowing that she wasn’t just a bitter baby boomer talking about a younger (hipper, more successful) generation, I reconsidered her thesis. Perhaps our egos are inflated?

A new study in Psychological Science says they’re not—or at least, no more so than previous generations. Psychologist Kali Trzesniewski of the University of Western Ontario measured levels of narcissism (which apparently included measures of arrogance, exhibitionism, and a sense of entitlement) in 25,000 college students from 1996 to 2007. She found that these levels did not significantly differ from narcissism levels of college kids of the 70s and 80s.

The paper’s not available online yet, so that’s all I could glean from the press release. I’ll be curious to find out more about her methods of quantitatively measuring “narcissism.” If she is right, then perhaps it’s ambition (or naivety…), and not ego, that differentiates Gen-Y from previous youngsters. Regardless, I’m happy to be ridiculous.

Wow, thank you Neurophilosopher, for making my Friday.

Just can’t get enough? Make sure to tune in for the PBS special, The Lobotomist, this Monday.

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I admittedly haven’t much followed the goings on of the 2008 presidential race. Back in May, I was pretty disgusted after watching three of the initial republican candidates raise their hands to affirm that they did not believe in evolution. Did you forget? Here’s the video:

So after that, I figured electing an intelligent and trustworthy president was hopeless, and basically tuned out. But today, in a piece from Reason Magazine thoroughly explaining each of the candidate’s stances on intelligent design, I finally found a candidate with some balls. When Mike Gravel, the democratic Senator from Alaska who’s barely surfaced in the polls, was asked by LiveScience if creationism should be taught in public schools, he said (while taking Jeebus’s name in vain, no less):

Finally. Too bad he’s only on the ballot in 19 states so far.

Here, by the way, is Reason’s summary of the major candidates’ stances on evolution:

(Hat tip: Razib)

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When people learn my name, Virginia Hughes, for the first time, they almost invariably respond with the same question: “Are you from Virginia?” (”No,” I respond, with all of the politeness I can muster. “Michigan.”) Their logic has always perplexed me, as Virginia is a prénom quite a bit more common than, say, Tallahassee, or Asia, or even Paris. But according to psych research on a phenomenon called the “name-letter effect,” their assumption might make a lot more sense than I thought.

Chris of Mixing Memory has a clear and thorough post on the history of the research. The first study, in 1985, showed that you prefer the letters that your first and last names start with over other letters. As Chris pointed out, this might not be super-surprising since we do write or say our names over and over again. More provocative is a 2002 study by University of Buffalo psychologist Brett Pelham and colleagues, titled, so so cleverly, “Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore.”

In one of their 10 experiments, Pelham et al. checked the 1990 census in the 40 largest American cities to find out the top 100 names that shared a minimum of their first three letters with any of these city names. For women, the two most common matches were Mildred-Milwaukee and Virginia-Virginia Beach; for men, it was Jack-Jacksonville and Philip-Philadelphia. Then they looked at the relative frequencies of the names. As Chris explained their results:

“There were more Mildred’s in Milwaukee than we would expect, but fewer than we would expect in Virginia Beach. On the other hand, there were more Virginia’s in Virginia Beach than we would expect, and fewer in Milwaukee. The same pattern occurred for the male names (Jack in Jacksonville and Philip in Philadelphia).”

But people don’t choose their first names, their parents do. So perhaps, you argue, these results are just showing that parents are more likely to choose names that begin with the same first letter, or first few letters, as the city in which they live (or, perhaps, that they’re naming their kids after the place in which they were conceived…) Nope. The researchers found a similar effect with last names.

In another few experiments, the same group found that people make similar preferences when choosing careers. A disproportionate number of dentists, for instance, were named Dennis or Denise.

CogDaily has a great post up today with details of a newer experiment regarding the name-letter effect. According to the study, baseball players with names starting with K strike out more often (because K is the symbol for strikeout). Moreover, they found that students with names starting with C or D get worse grades than others.

One of Dave’s readers commented with a point that I bet crosses the minds of many people who are unfamiliar with psychological research:

“It is hard to believe that serious scientists are actually doing this kind of research, much less getting funding for it. What is actually learned from it?”

First of all, these kind of studies are not very costly. Second, they do have value, if nothing else than for the sake of learning more about ourselves. I like Dave’s wry response:

“Based on what I can tell, the work was not supported by a grant. Is it worthless? I imagine a lot of businesses would be very interested to know about the subtle impact a person’s initials can have.”

(Indeed, as Chris also mentioned, a string of studies in 2005 showed that the name-letter effect has relevance in the advertising world: When thirsty subjects were offered a choice between two brands of soft drinks, they were more likely to choose the brand that began with the same letter as their first name.)

In the Pelham et al. series of experiments, the authors ultimately concluded (emphasis mine): “Implicit egotism appears to influence major life decisions. This idea stands in sharp contrast to many models of rational choice and attests to the importance of understanding implicit beliefs.”

Hmm…on one hand, I suppose, data is data. But I raise my eyebrows at just how “sharp” this contrast is. As a science writer in New York (or even medical journalist in the United States; communicator in North America; or blogger on the east coast), I’m clearly not fulfilling my naming destiny. With initials V and H, perhaps it’s time for a career change. Perhaps I should be a veterinarian in Virginia Beach? Or a hedge fund analyst in Halifax?

(My hat tips to one side for Chris, to the other for Dave)
(Image from Flickr, via Petur Gauti)

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I’m working now on a “real” post about the evolution of religion, but in the meantime I thought I’d showcase the latest cuteness in nerd fashion. These t-shirts (and more) are available from Questionable Content for about $20 (including shipping).

Definitely not as cool as the brain bags, though…

this is

annoying.

(Hat tip: Craig)

(First of all, props to me for including in the first post title of 2008 what the grammar nazis call an “ambiguous prepositional phrase attachment”—and what I call, simply, hilarious!)

The SETI Institute, whose mission since 1984 has been the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, works under the assumption that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, should they exist, emit lots of electromagnetic radiation into space. SETI scientists receive and analyze radio signals from many major telescopes, including the world’s largest in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. (Here’s more information—too complicated for me—about the needle(s) they’re searching for in these EM haystacks.) So far, they haven’t found any sure-fire signals from ET.

But they’re not discouraged. Now, more sensitive receivers on the 1,000-foot Arecibo telescope, as well as 40 times more frequency coverage, mean that SETI is collecting 500 times more data than it’s accustomed to. (That’s 100,000 gigabytes per year, or about the same amount of data that’s stored in the Library of Congress, according to project scientist Eric Korpela.) To help sort through all of this extra data, they’re calling for collective computing help from processors across the globe—even yours.

The SETI@home project lets anybody with an internet connection download and analyze radio signals from home (that is, while you’re wearing your pajamas, not, you know, inside of your pajamas). SETI@home started eight years ago and already enlisted 170,000 people on 320,000 computers. (They’ve also had 5 million “interested volunteers” sign up, whatever that means.)

Wanna put your machine to work? Click here to download the program. Or find out more about similar “distributed computing” science projects, like Stanford’s folding@home project that models protein folding, or the University of Illinois’s cosmology@home, which models possible universes.

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