Welcome to the statsART blog!

Welcome to the statsART blog where we highlight recent research, mainly work that has been discussed in the media.
Please note that the views expressed here only represent the views of the statsART blogger.
To vist or return to our website: www.statsART.com

Monday, 18 October 2010

Visual illusions...

There is a nice piece today in the BBC magazine on visual illusions.

Tonight, this will be the topic for Horizon, on at 9pm (Mon 18th Oct 2010).

Enjoy! It really is amazing how much our perception of the world is put together by our brains...

Friday, 15 October 2010

Ig nobel prize...

Following on from the announcement of the Nobel prizes, the even more exciting Ig Nobel awards have also recently been announced...

I think the peace prize may be my favourite for overall winner :)

Thursday, 30 September 2010

Science is vital...

A campaign has been set up in protest about the cuts in science research funding. Often the output from research seems very academic and unrelated to real life, but there are many benefits to maintaining our strong scientific research community in the UK. The points are explained very clearly on the website, so I won't reiterate them here.

Please take a few minutes to look at this website: http://scienceisvital.org.uk/

Friday, 24 September 2010

The psychology of face processing...

There have been a couple of interesting pieces in the news about face processing recently.

The BBC have given a fair amount of coverage to the cabbage head e-fit and have an article about why it is difficult to create an accurate e-fit of a person.

In the Daily Mail, Prof Dave Perrett, on of the leading experts on face processing, has written a great article on facial attractiveness.

Alternatively - there is this wonderful book on face processing ;)

Friday, 13 August 2010

New website...

Sorry for the lack of recent blogging activity.

We've just uploaded our newly redesigned website. Check it out at www.statsART.com

Let us know what you think of it!

Thursday, 8 July 2010

Once again, correlation does not imply causation...

An interesting piece of research has been reported on by the BBC today.

The research looked at the relationship between inactivity and obesity. Most previous research has either assumed or shown the inactivity leads to obesity.

In contrast, this new research suggests that the direction of the relationship is the other way around - obesity leads to inactivity.

This is a nice example of the "correlation does not imply causation" mantra and presents a nice chicken and egg situation.

The original study can be found here.

Wednesday, 7 July 2010

How big is big?

Another great article on the BBC website by Michael Blastland in the Go Figure series.

In this feature he talk about how was assess how "big" a number is.