Research and Testing on the Web

Researchers have just begun to exploit the Web to do medical and psychological research. It's not that easy to devise an experiment on the Web that can't be cheated or "freeped". A good example of an effective research area is tone-deafness. It's easy to devise a relatively cheat-proof test for that. The NIH has one here . Jake Mandell, a medical student at UMass has a more elaborate one here. Jake worked at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he developed this test to screen for the tonedeafness. Jake's test has been taken by 100,000 people and he's published his test results here.