When the imaginative little boy was asked in school to give an example of how heat makes things expand and cold causes them to contract, he authoritatively stated that in the summertime the days...
I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb...
According to manufacturers, 8 million or so humidifiers are sold in the United States every year. In Canada, it has been reported that nearly half of all households use a humidifier, perhaps owing...
There’s an intriguing phenomenon called the IKEA effect and the scientific paper that named it begins with a related story. When instant cake mixes appeared on the market in the 1950s, housewives...
Pfizer and BioNTech’s Ï㽶ÊÓƵ vaccine against COVID-19 has just been authorized by Health Canada. There will be many Internet whispers, half-truths and lies about how it works and how safe it is, so...
As we sift through more information than ever before, I would argue it’s becoming easier to commit an error in thinking known as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Imagine the stereotype of a Texan...
People have been asking about a video by anti-vaxxer Del Bigtree who claims that the COVID-19 vaccines have not been properly tested, made animals deathly ill in trials, and are ineffective and...
Public health measures during a pandemic (like lockdowns and mask mandates) can make some people uneasy. One argument that seems to underlie this anxiety is “masks now, government surveillance via...