Category: Behavior/Psychology Page 17 of 28

What Makes a Face? Art and Science Team Up to Find Out

On April 6, 2016

In Art, Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Neuroscience, Students, Visualization

From the man in the moon to the slots of an electrical outlet, people can spot faces just about everywhere.

As part of a larger Bass Connections project exploring how our brains make sense of faces, a Duke team of students and faculty is using state-of-the-art eye-tracking to examine how the presence of faces — from the purely representational to the highly abstract — influences our perception of art.

The Making Faces exhibit is on display in the Nasher Museum of Art’s Academic Focus Gallery through July 24th.

The artworks they examined are currently on display at the Nasher Museum of Art in an installation titled, “Making Faces: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience.”

“Faces really provide the most absorbing source of information for us as humans,” Duke junior Sophie Katz said during a gallery talk introducing the installation last week. “We are constantly attracted to faces and we see them everywhere. Artists have always had an obsession with faces, and recently scientists have also begun grappling with this obsession.”

Katz said our preoccupation with faces evolved because they provide us with key social cues, including information about another individual’s gender, identity, and emotional state. Studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) even indicate that we have a special area of the brain, called the fusiform face area, that is specifically dedicated to processing facial information.

The team used eye-tracking in the lab and newly developed eye-tracking glasses in the Nasher Museum as volunteers viewed artworks featuring both abstract and representational images of faces. They created “heat maps” from these data to illustrate where viewers gazed most on a piece of art to explore how our facial bias might influence our perception of art.

This interactive website created by the team lets you observe these eye-tracking patterns firsthand.

When looking at faces straight-on, most people direct their attention on the eyes and the mouth, forming a triangular pattern. Katz said the team was surprised to find that this pattern held even when the faces became very abstract.

“Even in a really abstract representation of a face, people still scan it like they would a face. They are looking for the same social information regardless of how abstract the work is,” said Katz.

A demonstration of the eye-tracking technology used to track viewers gaze at the Nasher Museum of Art. Credit: Shariq Iqbal, John Pearson Lab, Duke University.

Sophomore Anuhita Basavaraju pointed out how a Lonnie Holley piece titled “My Tear Becomes the Child,” in which three overlapping faces and a seated figure emerge from a few contoured lines, demonstrates how artists are able to play with our facial perception.

“There really are very few lines being used, but at the same time it’s so intricate, and generates the interesting conversation of how many lines are there, and which face you see first,” said Basavaraju. “That’s what’s so interesting about faces. Because human evolution has made us so drawn towards faces, artists are able to create them out of really very few contours in a really intricate way.”

Sophomore Anuhita Basavaraju discusses different interpretations of the face in Pablo Picasso’s “Head of a Woman.”

In addition to comparing ambiguous and representational faces, the team also examined how subtle changes to a face, like altering the color contrast or applying a mask, might influence our perception.

Sophomore Eduardo Salgado said that while features like eyes and a nose and mouth are the primary components that allow our brains to construct a face, masks may remove the subtler dimensions of facial expression that we rely on for social cues.

For instance, participants viewing a painting titled “Decompositioning” by artist Jeff Sonhouse, which features a masked man standing before an exploding piano, spent most of their time dwelling on the man’s covered face, despite the violent scene depicted on the rest of the canvas.

“When you cover a face, it’s hard to know what the person is thinking,” Salgado said. “You lack information, and that calls more attention to it. If he wasn’t masked, the focus on his face might have been less intense.”

In connection with the exhibition, Nasher MUSE, DIBS, and the Bass Connections team will host visiting illustrator Hanoch Piven this Thursday April 7^th and Friday April 8^th for a lunchtime conversation and hands-on workshop about his work creating portraits with found objects.

Making Faces will be on display in the Nasher Museum of Art’s Academic Focus Gallery through July 24^th.

Kara J. Manke, PhD

Post by Kara Manke

Why Testing Lemur Color Vision is Harder Than it Looks

By Robin Smith

On March 18, 2016

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Lemurs, Students

Elphaba the aye-aye is not an early riser. A nocturnal primate with oversized ears, bulging eyes and long, bony fingers, she looks like the bushy-tailed love child of a bat and an opossum.

She would much rather sleep in than participate in Duke alum Joe Sullivan’s early morning vision tests.

“I can’t blame her,” said Sullivan, who graduated from Duke in 2015.

Elphaba is one of 14 aye-ayes at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina, where researchers like Sullivan have been trying to figure out if these rare lemurs can tell certain colors apart, particularly at night when aye-ayes are most active. But as their experiments show, testing an aye-aye’s eyesight is easier said than done.

Elphaba the aye-aye takes a vision test at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina. She’s getting encouragement from student researcher Joe Sullivan and technician Jennifer Templeton. Photo by David Haring.

Aye-ayes don’t see colors as well as humans do. While we have genes for three types of color-sensing proteins in our eyes, aye-ayes and most other mammals have two, one tuned to blue-violet light and another that responds to green.

In all animals, the eyes’ color-detecting machinery depends on medium to bright light. In a version of “use it or lose it,” the genes responsible for color vision in some nocturnal species have decayed over time, such that they see the world in black and white.

But in aye-ayes, research shows, the genes for seeing colors remain intact, and scientists at Duke and elsewhere are trying to understand why.

One possibility is the aye-aye’s color vision genes are mere leftovers, relics passed down from daylight-loving ancestors and no longer useful to aye-ayes today.

Or, the genes may have been preserved because color vision gives aye-ayes an edge. Wild aye-ayes live by eating fruit, nuts, nectar and grubs in the rainforests of Madagascar. Wouldn’t an animal that could distinguish the blue fruits of a favorite snack like the Traveler’s palm from the green of the surrounding foliage have an advantage?

Understanding what aye-ayes can see is no easy feat. One of the most common tests for colorblindness, the Ishihara, requires the subject to recognize and identify numbers hidden within a patch of colored dots of different sizes and brightness.

Aye-ayes don’t read numbers, so Sullivan tests for color vision using food and colored cards.

The first tests were simple enough. In a dimly lit enclosure, a trainer held up two cards: a white card and a black one.

Each time the aye-ayes chose the white card over the black one by reaching out and touching it with their hand, the animal got a peanut.

Even animals with no color vision can tell white from black, so Sullivan was confident they’d ace the test. But aye-ayes aren’t programmed to please. Just getting them to sit still, instead of running around their enclosure, was a challenge.

One aye-aye, 29-year-old Ozma who was born in the wild in Madagascar, never got the hang of even the most basic task, a warmup involving a single white card.

“That’s when I realized that aye-ayes don’t always play by my rules,” said Sullivan, who started working at the Duke Lemur Center as an undergraduate research intern in 2012.

After four months and 200 trials, all five of the aye-ayes in Sullivan’s study started picking the white card more often than not, with Merlin, Elphaba and Grendel passing the test at least 70 percent of the time.

Norman and Ardrey tended to reach for the card on their left, no matter what the color.

Sullivan isn’t giving up. Still working at the Duke Lemur Center post-graduation, now he’s trying to see if aye-ayes can distinguish a purplish card from a green one, in brighter light more similar to dawn or dusk.

So far, Merlin and Grendel are getting it right just over half the time, leaving Sullivan still unsure if the aye-ayes are choosing the cards by their colors or by some other cue.

“I came in thinking that the aye-ayes were going to play nice and do everything I wanted. That was so wrong,” Sullivan said. “Still, they’ve been very good sports.”

How do you give a lemur a vision test? Photo by David Haring, Duke Lemur Center.

Post by Robin A. Smith Robin Smith

In the Land of Fantasy, Inequality is Benign

By Karl Bates

On March 7, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Guest Post, Students

Cinderella went from scrubbing floors in tattered clothes to marrying her prince in a royal wedding.

Off they go to a hard day in the mines, whistling and smiling. (Except for Grumpy, but what do you expect?)

Off they go to a hard day in the mines, whistling and smiling. (Except for Grumpy, of course.)

Snow White’s seven dwarfs head off to the mines each day with a spring in their step and a song on their lips.

In Cars, an anthropomorphic Porsche named Sally finds her job as a lawyer too stressful so she moves to a working-class town where she finds an easier life.

Sally chucked it all, but she's still got a Porsche.

Sally chucked it all, but she’s still drives a Porsche.

These and other wildly popular movies that enchant children with magical tales of love, royalty, riches and happiness portray social class inequality in potentially harmful ways, a new Duke University study finds.

Sociologist Jessi Streib and two undergraduate students, Miryea Ayala and Colleen Wixted, watched all 36 G-rated movies that have grossed more than $100 million as of January 1, 2014, studying the characters in each to see what social class they represent and whether they scale the social ladder or fall off it. Many were Disney or Pixar movies from the last decade or so, while a few, like Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, are considered generational classics.

The study found that the movies presented a less-than-nuanced view of social class, often focusing on up-from-the-bootstraps characters who reap huge social and economic rewards largely from hard work, moral fortitude, and playing by the rules.

Jessi Streib is an assistant professor of sociology.

“The big theme is that inequality is benign,” said Streib, an assistant professor of sociology. “Being poor isn’t a big deal. Being working class makes you happy. Anyone who wants to get ahead, and is ambitious and is a good person, can do so. And the rich happily provide for everyone else. Obviously, that’s not exactly how the world works.”

The study was published last month in the Journal of Poverty.

The study found a series of children’s characters who were economically top heavy. Of 67 main characters, 38 would be considered upper- or upper-middle class. Just 11 would be considered working class, and just three primary characters – or 4 percent of the total, would be considered poor by contemporary standards.

To compare, roughly 25 percent of American children live in poverty. And in real life, less than one-tenth of people in the lowest economic bracket rise to the top.

“In Disney movies, of course,” Streib noted, “They all do.”

The study also found that movies often minimize economic hardships. One example noted is Aladdin, the story of a young, homeless boy who befriends a princess named Jasmine. The two trade ‘horror’ stories, suggesting that Aladdin’s life on the streets is roughly equivalent to Jasmine’s struggles because servants tell her “where to go and how to dress.”

Streib’s paper excerpted this bit of Aladdin dialogue:

Aladdin: “The palace looks pretty amazing, huh?”
Jasmine, disappointed, responding about the palace where she lives: “It’s wonderful.”
Aladdin: “I wonder what it’d be like to live there, and have servants and valets.”
Jasmine: “Oh, sure. People who tell you where to go and how to dress.”
Aladdin: “That’s better than here. You’re always scraping for food and ducking the guards.”
Jasmine: “You’re not free to make your own choices.”
Aladdin: “Sometimes you feel so …”
Jasmine: “You’re just …”
Aladdin and Jasmine, simultaneously: “Trapped.”

Though these movies are fictional, their popularity does raise concerns about perpetuating myths related to inequality and the struggles lower-class people have climbing the ladder, Streib said.

“But would people really want to watch an honest movie?” she concedes? “Probably not.”

Guest Post by Eric Ferreri, News and Communications

"Debugging the Gender Gap" in Tech

By Olivia Zhu

On March 4, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Science Communication & Education, Students

Lenna “Why isn’t Lenna wearing any clothes?” I implored my friend, shocked at seeing the shoulders-up nude photo of a woman on a mundane Monday in the Duke library. I had been going through a MATLAB tutorial on computer vision, and the sample image was, surprisingly, a naked lady. Apparently, when the USC developers behind a computer vision algorithm needed a sample face in 1973, someone just happened to walk into the lab with a Playboy magazine. The face of the woman on the centerfold, Lenna, has since become the default data for computer vision classes around the world. Because, of course, it’s totally normal to walk into an academic setting waving around a copy of Playboy, which would naturally be the first place one would go looking for a face.

Unfortunately, seeing female objectification in professional programming environments isn’t exactly an isolated incident. With the advent of the “brogrammer” culture, women have reported being exposed to workplaces in which male programmers share porn over open communication channels, according to CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap. When they’ve asked their male coworkers to stop, they were told, “Stop being such a girl.”

A showing of CODE was put on by RENCI, the Renaissance Computing Institute, and the

The percentage of women earning degrees in computer science has been decreasing, rather than increasing, since the 1980s.

Carolina Women’s Center, on February 29 at UNC. RENCI, while addressing issues of staffing diversity within its own organization, was inspired to bring the issue to light in the greater UNC community. By 2020, we expect to see more than one million unfilled software engineering jobs. As of now, only 23% of technical jobs nationwide are filled by women, leaving a huge gap to fill in this important workspace.

The response of the largely female audience to the film was overwhelmingly positive. Lilly, a first-year math student at UNC, noted that the issues the film addressed were “obvious,” both in academic settings and in the online blogosphere. She appreciated the positive messages, such as in this GoldieBlox superbowl ad, that counter expectations of young girls to study more “social” subjects and encourage them to pursue science, technology, engineering and math. Addy, a first-year computer science student, noted that a supportive group of women in her CS401 class at UNC makes the dearth of women less noticeable.

Olivia, Tabatha, and Addy with a collage of "Why We Love Tech"

Olivia, Tabatha, and Megan with a collage of “Why We Love Tech”

Tabatha, a first-year computer science student at UNC, said that she feels intimidated in introductory computer science classes, where male students often have years of background knowledge that she doesn’t. She hesitates to show men her code until it is perfect, since she feels that as a woman, she has to prove that she is just as good as a man. This additional pressure and worry, CODE observed, often causes women to perform worse in quantitative classes. Tabatha, Megan, and Olivia attended the screening as part of a Women’s Studies class. Megan echoed Tabatha’s sentiment, relating that as a beginning programmer, she felt behind during HackNC, where most men already knew how to build apps.

Clearly, issues of female representation in tech persist into the university and industry level. However, CODE insists that we must remedy the problem during childhood, when girls receive societal messages that deter them from studying science and tech subjects.

If we’re going to be “changing/saving the world,” “making a better version of you,” and deciding how to “do the right thing,” (all rhetoric from the tech industry), we should probably have all genders and races represented in those responsible for effecting the change that will supposedly impact all of humanity.

For more information on CODE, check out shescoding.org.

By Olivia Zhu

Bigger Church = Less Engaged Parishioners

By Karl Bates

On February 3, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Guest Post

The larger the church, the less likely its members will attend weekly services, a new Duke University study finds.

Joel Osteen's stadium-sized Lakewood Church. That's him on the jumbotron.

Joel Osteen’s stadium-sized Lakewood Church. If you skipped a service like this, would anybody notice?

“People have an increasing detachment from religious organizations, and, somewhat counter intuitively, mega-churches are a reflection of that,” said David Eagle, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke’s Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research.

“These churches are really large – with more than 2,000 people in attendance. By nature they are more anonymous places – your comings and goings aren’t noticed from week to week and you may not face the same encouragement — or pressure — to attend as in a smaller church,” Eagle said.

The study has just appeared in Socius – a journal of the American Sociological Association.

Across the religious spectrum, Eagle’s study found a reverse correlation between church size and attendance of its members. For example: about 40 percent of members of white, mainline Protestant churches with a membership of 50 people attended services each week. But at a far larger white, mainline Protestant church of 10,000 members, just about 25 percent attend weekly services.

Probability that a person will attend church and church size, controlling for age, gender, and class (shaded regions indicate the range of statistically possible values)

From the study: probability that a person will attend church and church size, controlling for age, gender, and class (shaded regions indicate the range of statistically possible values)

Small, black Protestant churches of 50 members reported a 50 percent rate of weekly attendance, the study found. But at a far larger church of 10,000 members, just 40 percent of members attended weekly.

There are other factors at work as well, Eagle said. Families with little free time are more apt to attend large churches where they can pick and choose their involvements without feeling obligated to take a leadership role, he said.

Eagle’s study, which examines mainline Protestant, black Protestant, evangelical and Roman Catholic churches with as few as 20 members and as many as 25,000, analyzes data from the U.S. General Social Survey and the National Congregations Study, the latter led by Mark Chaves, a Duke professor of sociology, religion and divinity.

During political election cycles, many wonder about the political influence that megachurch pastors might exercise from the pulpit. But those pastors may struggle to reach their members, given the tendency for attendees of those larger churches to attend only sporadically. And in larger churches clergy often shy away from expressing extreme political stands from the pulpit, Eagle said.

“If you have 10,000 people in your pews, it’s less likely that everyone is of one political persuasion.”

Guest post by Eric Ferreri, News and Communications

Making Sense of Noise: Stephen Lisberger

By Olivia Zhu

On January 28, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Neuroscience

Imagine catching a ball thrown at you out of mid-air. Your response seems almost instinctive, like a reflex. However, this seemingly simple movement contains complex components: one must judge the ball’s arc to decide where it will intersect a particular height, and how fast one must move his hand to catch the accelerating ball.

This calculation requires an entire concert of neural signals, firing in a manner so precise that it produces an accurate estimate of the speed and direction of the ball’s trajectory. Add to this complicated model the fact that each individual neuron produces a certain amount of noise — that is, across various trials, the same neurons produce different firing responses to the same stimuli. These multiple layers of convolution would frustrate most, but Dr. Stephen Lisberger thrives upon it.

Screen Shot 2016-01-27 at 12.47.43 PM Lisberger, the Chair of Neurobiology at Duke School of Medicine, emphasizes that while a single noisy neuron cannot produce an accurate estimate of speed and direction, the key lies in populations of neurons. On January 25, Lisberger presented his research to a diverse crowd of Duke scientists.

Lisberger and his team have performed multiple trials in which a monkey tracked a visual stimulus with his eye, thus activating certain neurons. They found that the noise persisted even in neural populations.

Lisberger, rather than being discouraged, turns this noise into an asset. He reasons that variation is something which the brain must handle; therefore, he can use variation to learn about the brain.

When a monkey follows a visual stimulus with his eye, he integrates the sensory system with a motor region of the brain called MT. Lisberger isolated the source of the noise to the sensory system, rather than MT. He found that other movements originating from MT did not display the same noise; thus, the noise in eye tracking must have come from the sensory system.

The noise from the sensory system propagates down to MT, and Lisberger follows in his analysis.

One of his colleagues proposed that the random noise over a large population of neurons should cancel itself out. Lisberger contradicts this idea, noting that the variation is correlated among neurons in MT. Variations in pairs of neurons fluctuate up and down together. Thus, some of the “noise” is actually signal. This shared noise is transmitted through the circuit, while independent noise averages itself away.

Ultimately, Lisberger models neural responses over multiple trials to statistically estimate the direction and speed indicated by a particular response. The brain though, has not the luxury of simultaneously integrating and analyzing such large pools of data in its fraction-of-a-second estimate. Instead, the brain makes do with what it has, which, as Lisberger points out, is enough.

By Olivia Zhu

Pace of Aging Story Makes Top Ten

By Karl Bates

On January 11, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Field Research, Genetics/Genomics, Guest Post

A study led by Center for Child and Family faculty fellows Daniel Belsky and Terrie Moffitt which found that some people grow old significantly faster than others, was named the No. 4 news story of 2015 by Science News.

The paper, published the week of July 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared a panel of 18 biological measures that may be combined to determine whether people are aging faster or slower than their peers.

Dan Belsky

The data comes from the Dunedin Study, a landmark longitudinal study that has tracked more than a thousand people born in the same town between 1972-73. Health measures like blood pressure and liver function have been taken regularly, along with interviews and other assessments.

“We set out to measure aging in these relatively young people,” said first author Belsky, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine. “Most studies of aging look at seniors, but if we want to be able to prevent age-related disease, we’re going to have to start studying aging in young people.”

Belsky said the progress of aging shows in human organs just as it does in eyes, joints and hair, but sooner. So, as part of their regular reassessment of the study population at age 38 in 2011, the team measured the functions of kidneys, liver, lungs, metabolic and immune systems. They also measured HDL cholesterol, cardiorespiratory fitness and the length of the telomeres—protective caps at the end of chromosomes that have been found to shorten with age.

Based on a subset of these biomarkers, the research team set a “biological age” for each participant, which ranged from under 30 to nearly 60 in the 38-year-olds.

According to Science News, “The finding tapped into a mystery that has long captivated scientists and the public alike…”

Where Memory Meets Imagination

By Karl Bates

On January 2, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Guest Post, Neuroscience

Imagine two scenarios. In the first, one of your close friends is driving down the road when, from behind, they hear the sound of wailing sirens. They pull off onto a sidestreet and ten minutes later they’re back on the road, holding a fresh speeding ticket. In the second, imagine the exact same scenario, but this time it’s not a close friend, it’s a random person who you know nothing about.

Felipe DeBrigard is an assistant professor of philosophy and a member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. (Les Todd, Duke Photo)

This is the kind of scenario philosophy professor Felipe De Brigard might put someone through for his research. But while asking these questions, he would also be using an MRI machine to measure bloodflow in the brain and using the resulting data to think about philosophy.

De Brigard’s research is mostly concerned with this kind of thinking, the imagination of possibilities which never happened, but which could have happened. How many times have you wished you could change something about yourself? “Oh, if only I were two inches taller!?”

The way the brain does this, and what it means, are exactly what De Brigard is thinking about. For the example of speeding tickets, he’s found that in the first scenario, in which, your friend gets a ticket, the imagination activates parts of the brain which are also connected to autobiographical memory. It’s almost like you’re remembering something that happened to yourself.

But in the second scenario, the one with the stranger, he’s found something very different. The imagination activates parts of the brain which are connected to “semantic memory,” the memory of hard facts and data. This process is far more logical, he says.

What does this mean? That’s where the philosophy comes in. He says that memory is not a perfect window into the past, but instead “really good at allowing you to recall what could have been.”

The question which he’s asking now is how similar memory and imagination are and how they interact. It’s opening up new and exciting avenues for research. Research which can only be investigated using De Brigard’s bold, interdisciplinary approach to the mind.

Guest Post by Joe Wiswell, a senior at the North Carolina School of Science and Math

Middle Schoolers Ask: What's it Like to be a Scientist?

By Robin Smith

On December 16, 2015

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Environment/Sustainability, Physics, Science Communication & Education, Students

When a group of local middle schoolers asked four Duke postdocs what it’s like to be a scientist, the answers they got surprised them.

For toxicologist Laura Maurer, it means finding out if the tiny silver particles used to keep socks and running shirts from getting smelly might be harmful to your health.

For physics researcher Andres Aragoneses, it means using lasers to stop hackers and make telecommunications more secure.

And for evolutionary anthropologist Noah Snyder-Mackler, it means handling a lot of monkey poop.

The end result is a series of short video interviews filmed and edited by 5th-8th graders in Durham, North Carolina. Read more about the project and the people behind it at http://sites.duke.edu/pdocs/, or watch the videos below:

Five Duke Papers Crack the Altmetric 100

By Karl Bates

On December 14, 2015

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Medicine

The numbers are in, and five papers with Duke authors cracked the Top 100 Altmetric scores for 2015.

Example of an Altmetric analysis.

Yeah, it all seems a little gimmicky and meta, but the scores can be useful. Altmetric (to which Duke has an institutional membership) combines multiple counts of news stories, social media chatter and professional citations on an academic paper to give it a single score. Obviously, the system’s greatest strength is comparing this to other Altmetric scores, but it’s actually a lot of fun.

Duke’s biggest score – a very impressive Altmetric 2294 – came in at #5 on the list. “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” attracted a lot of attention in Science, spawning 74 news stories and nearly 2,000 tweets. Postdoctoral researcher Nina Strohminger of the Kenan Institute for Ethics is one of the authors from 125 institutions on the paper that suggests psychology has some housekeeping to do.

At number 28 with an Altmetric of 1,279, came “Global, regional and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 301 acute and chronic diseases and injuries in 188 countries, 1990-2013 (here comes the colon!): a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013.” This Lancet paper, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is every bit as massive and important as its title. Among its thousands of authors is our own Terrie Moffitt. It garnered 39 news stories and 1400 tweets and has already been incorporated into nine Wikipedia entries.

A companion paper with another big title for another big study, “Global, regional, and national age-sex specific all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 240 causes of death, 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013,” came in at #36 on the list with an Altmetric of 1180. Its authors might be jealous of #28, but it’s mostly the same folks! Eighty people saw fit to post this one on Facebook and 60 on Google+.

Two papers out of the now-defunct NSF think-tank the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) rounded out our top 100 at #72 and #87.

What are the largest ocean giants?

Craig McClain of NESCent and Duke Biology led “Sizing Ocean Giants,” an analysis that tries to get the right dimensions on a bunch of intimidating ocean creatures including the giant clam and the colossal squid (which turns out to be only a third the size of the less impressively named giant squid). The paper’s Altmetric of 954 was led by 24 news stories, 24 blog posts and almost 900 tweets. McClain also leads a very popular marine science blog “Deep Sea News” which probably aided the story’s social presence.

Number 87 was “Synthesis of phylogeny and taxonomy into a comprehensive tree of life,” which included Karen Cranston of NESCent and Duke Biology. This hugely ambitious effort to draw a tree of life for the whole planet at once earned an Altmetric of 895 by garnering 21 news stories, 12 blogs and nearly 900 tweets. And it too has been incorporated into Wikimedia – once so far.

It’s a brave new world out there in academic publishing.

Post by Karl Leif Bates