Gender and development...

The BBC have examined a really interesting case study of a boy who was brought up as a girl.

It is often difficult to distinguish between genetic/biological and environmental influences, but the child had a twin brother - possibly the best control participant ever!

Statistical happiness???

With the government announcing that it will start to measure the nation's happiness and wellbeing, the latest Go Figure article by Michael Blastland looks at some of the problems with this analysis. Obviously the "correlation does not imply causation" mantra returns...

Real time world statistics...

Worldometers is a great site showing real time changes in global statistics to do with world population, society and media, food, health, energy and a lot more. Very interesting, quite mesmerising, but slightly scary in places.

Psychological Medicine...

The journal Psychological Medicine is celebrating its 40th birthday. As part of this they are making the most read paper from each year freely available until the end of this year.

There really is a wide range of papers discussing many psychological disorders. It's particularly interesting to see how views and perspectives have changed since 1970.

The psychology of rollercoaster rides...

Apparently the worlds fastest rollercoaster is about to open up in Abu Dhabi's Ferrari World.

This BBC article gives some interesting insights into the psychology of why people enjoy, and can become addicted to, rollercoasters.

World statistics day...

Yes - the most exciting day of the year is upon us - World statistics day!!!

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...