This story reports that pregnant women are less likely to go into spontaneous labor on a negatively toned holiday (Halloween). Similarly, they are more likely to do so on a positively toned holiday (Valentine's Day). Here's a quote from the New York Times story: In a study published this month, however, researchers at the Yale …
Month: October 2011
Testosterone levels in Dads
Journalists have been covering a recent empirical article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study in question is a quasi-experiment; it tracked the testosterone levels of a probability sample of men in the Philippines. The main result was that compared to men of the same age who'd never had children, …
Prenatal folic acid and child speech development
A journalist's headline has reported, "Folic acid tied to better toddler talk". a. What kind of claim is this? Frequency, association, or cause? Here is a summary of the main finding: Women who took folic acid supplements in the first two months of pregnancy were less likely to have kids with severe language delays in …
Continue reading Prenatal folic acid and child speech development
Can makeup change the way women are perceived?
Recently, researchers tested how makeup affects people's impressions of women. Here is how the story was covered by ABC News--the story includes a video. In the study, a set of female targets posed for photos in which they were wearing no makeup, some makeup, professional makeup, or full, "glamour" makeup. Then the photos were rated …
Continue reading Can makeup change the way women are perceived?
Tracking happiness on Twitter
A recent study used Twitter text to track people's moods throughout the day. Here's how the study was covered by wired.com. The journalist explained that: Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a text analysis program that quantifies the emotional content of statements, Golder and co-author Michael Macy analyzed a total of 509 million tweets generated …