Panda Bears and Flowers / Clever Hans

Yep, it happened again, I murdered another plush toy to make a cute bag out of it. Inappropriate-guilty-feelings aside, I am actually so happy with this panda bear backpack. And I bought him for $3 from an op shop (yes, it's a male panda bear), so at least there were no sentimental attachments there. If you missed it the first time around, I wrote up some instructions on how to make a DIY plush toy bag here. The only difference with this one is that I added two straps (thrifted belts) instead of one! My pretty floral blouse & red skirt are both from Sheinside! Many thanks to Sheinside for providing them to style! blouse - c/o Sheinside skirt - c/o Sheinside socks - Shop With Romi shoes - c/o Yes Walker bag - DIY hat - c/o Wholesale If you're a casual reader of science stories (or have joined IFLS on facebook) you may have heard people talking about "blinding", or that an experiment was not reliable because it wasn't "blinded" or even "double-blinded". You may have thought, what on earth does "blinding" mean and more importantly, how on earth does anyone know what's happening if no one can see what's going on?? Well "blinding" is one of the most important concepts to science. Human beings, clever as we may be, are unfortunately very susceptible to something called bias - that is, seeing what you want to believe. That's where the story of Clever Hans comes in. Clever Hans was the name of a horse who lived in the early 1900s. His owner claimed that Clever Hans could not only count, but could also do complex maths problems and understand German. His owner would ask him questions, and Clever Hans would answer by tapping his foot. His owner paraded his horse around Germany, showing off his apparent skills. Clever Hans performing in the 1900s in Germany. Also check out all them boater hats - I'd be so trendy if I were to go back to 1906 ;) (Image source) Clever Hans was investigated by veterinarians and teachers. They removed the audience to make sure Clever Hans wasn't getting cues from them, and they even used different questioners (other than the horse's owner) to rule out the possibility of fraud. Then they made a realisation - if the person asking the questions knew the answer to the questions, then Clever Hans would get the right answer 89% of the time. But if the person asking the questions didn't know the answers themselves, Clever Hans was only right 6% of the time. It seemed that Clever Hans was clever in a way, although he didn't know how to count or do maths - he had learnt to tap his foot whenever the questioner expected the horse to tap its foot. Take away the expectations of the questioner, and the horse had no idea. This was a very important observation for science and where the idea of "double blinding" comes from. Now scientists make sure, especially in fields where animals or humans are being measured, that not only does the participant not know what condition they are in, but the experimenter is also "blind" to the conditions of the experiment as well. Only at the end of the experiment, when all the tests have been done, are both the subject and experimenter allowed to know what was really going on. And that's your neat science fact of the day. p.s. I announced another giveaway earlier today! Enter here if you haven't already. Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Giveaway: Cichic - win an item of your choice! / CLOSED

Brand new online webstore cichic is generously donating an item of clothing to my blog for this giveaway! What you need to do to enter is (via rafflecopter): Register an account with cichic here (you don't need to put in your proper last name if you're worried about that, I never do hehe), "like" their facebook page and leave reviews on cichic.com on your two favourite items. Please use the rafflecopter widget below to enter! Details must be entered in the rafflecopter widget (as well as commenting below) or they won't count! a Rafflecopter giveaway There are two mandatory entries and four additional entries. Please make sure you do them properly, or your entry will be invalid (I do check!) [EDIT 7/04/2013] Please note that I made the giveaway easier since launching - but any entries you have already made will not be invalid and still count :) So if you've already entered, don't worry about the small change :D So what's the prize? Well, each winner will get to choose an item of their choice from cichic. If 100 people enter, there will be 1 winner. 200 entries = 2 winners, etc. So feel free to tweet about the giveaway, share it on your facebook wall, etc - the more people who enter, the more winners there will be! Open internationally until the 30th of April. Good luck! p.s. I'll also be having a 1-million pageviews giveaway soon! Thank you all so much for your love and support. p.p.s. if you're on a mad giveaway binge now and you don't want to stop, make sure you enter the other giveaway I also have running from TNK vintage! Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

30 Days of Dressing Up: April 2013

Featured accessories: Oasap Tights | Lady Ties | Pocketwatch Necklaces | Boater Hat | Shop with Romi Socks | Claire's Headbands I hope you all enjoyed my April 2013 "Dressing Up" challenge! Hopefully this will help inspire your wardrobes for this transitional month (we're heading into winter here, but for most of you reading this, you're probably right in the middle of Spring!) You can get a lot of different outfits out of only 12 items. Also, check out March's "31 Days" here. What's your favourite combination? Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Yep, that means small ad spaces are only $1 each (small now sold out - sorry!). You can buy an ad by clicking here. Just put in the promo code "HappyEaster" for $5 off all ad spaces. If you're looking to promote your blog or your brand to 1000+ unique readers per day, then this is for you ^_^ Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

A Colourful Mermaid

This is a very colourful outfit that I have been planning in my mind for quite a long time - I just had to wait for all of the pieces to come to me in the mail (all the way to Australia, so it's been a while!) I'm very happy because it turned out exactly as I imagined. I'm going to save this outfit for an overcast, rainy day. blouse - c/o Oasap tights - c/o Oasap shoes - c/o YesWalker skirt - c/o Faith & Lola necklace - c/o I Love Crafty Some days, I just want to post pretty outfits on my blog. The science I'm really focusing on at the moment at uni is all about eukaryotic transcriptional and translational regulation and how cells regulate their mRNAs, eIFs and other proteins to control gene expression. While I am finding it very fascinating, it's not the easiest thing for communicating here (in fact I showed it to Luci, who just said "yeah... that was all gobbledegook. Like, I got some words were in English, but that was all I understood.") So I hope you all don't get mad at me for missing out on a science fact today. Alright... a little science fact then. Many of you were interested by my Synaesthesia post the other day, and said that you also strongly associate colours with numbers or letters, but don't actually see them. Have a look at Ideasthesia. Probably, the majority of people have some form of this (just look at the "Kiki and Bouba" effect, for instance. Why would most people associate a spiky shape with the word "kiki" and a rounded shape with "bouba"? Do we all have a predisposition to synaesthetic-like-qualities?). Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr

Synaesthesia

Beige, stripes and a bow-tie! These are some amazingly cool new stockings from my sponsor Oasap. Though pricey, I'm happy to recommend these ones because they are thick and don't seem like they'll ladder easily (I've also worn them for a few days, and they're all good so far!) There's also a black & white version instead of the so-called "nude" version for anyone with darker skin - I've always though it's pretty unfair that standard "nude" colour always actually means "nude white person" colour, because there's a heck of a lot more skin types out there than this so called "nude". Anyway. They're still cool tights. blouse - c/o Choies skirt - Wholesale tights - c/o Oasap shoes - Chicory (Japan) hat - c/o Wholesale bag - Vintage After talking about colour perception in my last few posts, a number of people brought up synaesthesia.  Synaesthesia is one of the first things to get me interested in neuroscience and the study of human perception, and it's an incredibly wonderful and weird phenomenon! Synaesthesia is a rare neurological trait, leading to the crossing over of perceptual information: that means people with it can "see colours" in numbers or letters, "taste" words, "smell" days of the week, or "feel" that certain words or numbers have distinct personalities. It can involve any of the senses. Someone talking, for example, can simultaneously be perceived as sounds and as a taste on the tongue by someone with synaesthesia. The most common form is what is called "grapheme colour synaesthesia", where individual letters and numbers are associated strongly with different colours. This type can often help synesthetes with memory tasks where long strings of words, letters or numbers need to be remembered. It's unclear which parts of the brain are involved in synaesthesia, although a leading theory is that it's due to "cross-wiring" in the brain: neurons (brain cells that can conduct electricity) that are meant to be in sensory system cross over into another sensory system. There is also a theory that all babies are born with "cross-wired" brains, which as we grow, are "pruned back", and that synaesthesia is a failure of the brain to do this properly. (Though the word "failure" puts synaesthesia in a negative light, which I don't think it should be at all. I think it would be a pretty cool thing to have - although experiencing the taste of  mouldy detergent every time you heard a particular person's voice wouldn't be so awesome). The wikipedia page on Synesthesia provides some pretty sweet reading. Hoping you're all feelin' fine, Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr