Steve Jobs died today. I found out while I was on the bus as I came home from work.

He was a technology pioneer to be sure. Certainly one of the most effective CEOs to come around since the title was invented. Through his leadership a stream of amazing and beautiful devices were released to the public, turning Apple from a company on the verge of bankruptcy to one of the most profitable in the United States. From his early work on the Apple I to the wildly successful iPhone 4, he revolutionized the daily life of billions of people around the world.

I felt a strong feeling of loss when I heard that he had died. It came from the untimely departure of a man who I had never met, but nevertheless saw fit to draw personal inspiration from.

Why was I drawn to Steve Jobs? It was his idea that all details matter, even down to the individual pixel. It was the notion that even the intangible minutiae will impact our perception of an object, like the exact radius of a corner or the amount of friction on a piece of glass. It was the mandate that you aren’t finished until you pour a piece of your soul into your creation.

So many of my own greatest accomplishments have been done using tools that once existed only in his mind. Steve Jobs made me want to be a better creator, and a better person.

Before I heard the news I had spent the afternoon working through a book on Objective-C, the programming language used in the creation of Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications. I got an itch to do some OS X programming the night before, but I needed a refresher on the syntax of the language to get going again. In hindsight, I can think of no better tribute to the man than spending the day becoming a better programmer, honing my skills to one day create something insanely great.

While I was on the bus I downloaded his Stanford Commencement address and listened to it again with new perspective. One passage struck me in particular:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.- Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thanks Steve.

Above Image: My first computer, an Apple //c. I am pretty sure that Steve didn’t have a hand in how it looked.

Full text of the Stanford Commencement:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Read stories on the creation of the Macintosh:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=More_Like_A_Porsche.txt
http://folklore.org/

Andy Ihnatko’s remembrance:
http://ihnatko.com/2011/10/05/steve-jobs/

Walt Mossberg’s remembrance:
http://allthingsd.com/20111005/the-steve-jobs-i-knew/?mod=tweet
 

Research Participants Wanted

The Human Memory and Neuroimaging Lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at UCSB is seeking research participants for a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigating the relationship between various personality and cognitive factors and memory. The study will take place on two separate days and will last about two hours each day. Participants will respond to questionnaires, complete cognitive tests, and have their brain activity measured using fMRI. Participants will be compensated with $20/hour and will receive an image of their brain.

To be eligible, participants must:
• Be between the ages of 25 and 35
• Be native English-speakers
• Not be pregnant
• Not have any metal in their bodies that cannot be removed
• Not be claustrophobic

Please email ucsbmemorylab@gmail.com or call (805) 283-9603 for more info.

Click here to read a PDF of our recruiting flyer.

Lake Ontario Visionary Establishment Conference [LOVE]
February 11-12, Niagra Falls, NY Ontario, Canada

Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference [CNS]
April 17-20, Montreal, Canada

Association for Psychological Science Convention [APS]
May 27-30, Boston, MA

Organization for Human Brain Mapping Conference [HBM]
June 6-10, Barcelona, Spain

Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference [AHFE]
July 17-20, Miami, FL

Here is some of what I will be presenting:

[LOVE]
• Special topic talk: ‘Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: addressing the multiple comparisons problem in fMRI.’

[APS]
• Invited talk: ‘The development of interoceptive information processing across adolescence.’

[CNS] [HBM]
• Poster: ‘How reliable are the results from fMRI?’
Bennett CM, Guerin SA, Donovan CL, Miller MB

[HBM]
• Poster: ‘A device for simultaneous thermal and tactile stimulation in an MR environment.’
Bennett CM

It seems that late last week a few major neuroscience weblogs discovered the Salmon poster and decided to write up summaries. Those readers then posted to their weblogs, whose readers posted to their weblogs, and so on. By 10am Friday morning the prefrontal.org activity meter was pegged and my inbox was full.

A few important bits of info:
* The current status of the Salmon is that we are trying to publish it as an editorial in a major neuroimaging journal. We are very close to resubmitting, only needing to complete a survey on the prevalence of multiple comparisons correction in the previous neuroimaging literature. We hope that it will be released in the near future.
* If you would like to be sent a copy of the commentary if/when it becomes published just send me an email and I will put you on the list.
* Some sites have played up how difficult it has been for us to get the Salmon published. We have received some, well, interesting feedback by a few editors in the course of our submission. Still, it has not been more difficult than average to get the Salmon commentary published (so far).
* The goal of the Salmon poster was to encourage the minority of researchers who report uncorrected statistics to move forward and begin using basic multiple comparisons correction in their research. The Salmon doesn’t add anything to the technical discussion of how multiple comparisons correction is performed, it is simply a salient reminder of why proper correction is always necessary.
* None of the authors intended for the Salmon to go public in such a big way, especially before the commentary was reviewed and published. We were actually quite content to publish our editorial in a neuroimaging journal and be done with it. We feel that, fundamentally, this is an internal debate within the field of neuroimaging.

Some of the best/notable writeups that I have found:
* http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com
* http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
* http://lawandbiosciences.wordpress.com
* http://www.mindhacks.com
* http://www.wired.com
* http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience
* http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond
* http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/
* http://chronicle.com/
* http://slashdot.org

Some of the best comments that I have run across:

“The recorded signal is changing due to noise. The point of the experiment is that if you look at enough signals, the noise in one will match the timing of your experimental stimulus, purely out of chance. Another way of looking at it is this: if you choose a statistical threshold of p 0.05 then, statistically, you expect a result that is significant at that level purely out of chance once in every twenty experiments. When you’re analyzing images, or worse volumes, pixel by pixel, you’re doing a LOT of comparisons. If you don’t correct for that you WILL get false positives, no matter what you’re looking at.” – ceoyoyo

“But not everyone uses multiple comparisons correction. This is where the fish comes in – Bennett et al show that if you don’t use it, you can find “neural activation” even in the tiny brain of dead fish. Of course, with the appropriate correction, you don’t. There’s nothing original about this, except the colourful nature of the example – but many fMRI publications still report “uncorrected” results” – Neuroskeptic

“… it seems to me like that their point wasn’t that the fMRI wasn’t sensitive enough, or particular enough. Instead the problem seems to be a problem of statistically expected random noise. Their point seems to be that users of an fMRI should bear in mind that their marvelous magical machine can generate “real” errors, and that basic, common-sense multiple comparison habits should be developed, instead of a take a picture, slap a stat against it approach.” – Nemus

“The entire point the write up was to warn about the danger of false positives. Your attributing of brain activity to random, natural noise is exactly the danger they want to avoid.” – Anonymous

“The trouble is, most scientists are not mathematicians, and have no good theoretical understanding of statistics. Most people pushing buttons in SPSS or SAS (or what have you) are just doing “cargo cult” mathematics. Ask them to justify why their “very conservative” confidence interval for a given test is appropriate when dealing with eleventy billion variables, or why a particular post-hoc test is the proper one to use, and they’ll look at you like you just asked them to prove that the sky is blue.” – Anonymous

“Actually, the voodoo correlations paper is actually talking about performing correlations between the signals we get from fMRI scans (you can read the actual paper instead of the somewhat misleading article here [edvul.com]), and other measurements or scores. This doesn’t do that at all. This is about the danger of false positives in fMRI imaging, because of the large number of statistical tests that are done across the brain. The majority of peer reviewed published fMRI papers do some type of multiple comparisons correction to attempt to adjust for this problem.” – daenris

Some of the more terrible writeups that I have found:
By and large the comments have been quite good. However, there have been a few people arguing that the dead fish is actually still thinking or that we have observed evidence of the ethereal soul. I am not going to quote the comments here, but it has been a bit amusing to see this play out…

The funniest comments so far:

“Of course, Bennett’s group don’t mean to suggest that a post-mortem salmon is capable of perspective-taking. Cod forbid.”
- Kerri

No sir. What it proves is the existence of the sole.
-Jeremi

Yeah, the measurements were right off the scales.
- grcumb

Thank you… he’s here all week. Try the fish.
- theshowmecanuck

I’m wondering if the issue could be resolved if the salmon was smoked and served with cream cheese…
- G

No, what it proves is that while you can tune an fMRI, you can’t tuna fish.
- limekiller4

I would think that a salmon in an MRI would be thinking more along the lines of “HOLY FUCK! I CAN’T BREATHE!”
- geminidomino

Does the scientific method for biologists exclude barbeques?
- value_added

And I, for one, welcome our new zombie salmon overlords!!
- DarkOx

Why wasn’t this published? Maybe the reviewers considered the experiment a bit fishy …
- maxwell_demon

First, the fish wasn’t dead, it was just tenured.
- jesor

I demand that fMRI techniques get a fair herring!
- Bob O’H

Scream if you love the multiple comparisons problem! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!
- Jess

… compared with how Vul et al. handled a similar topic, this is a party with clowns and flowers
- powrogers

The joke possibilities are endless but I won’t bother. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
- Anonymous

A common mistake made in discussions of taxonomy is overlooking the issue of whether closely related species taste the same. In this case, you omitted the fact that all of them are great when grilled. With a slice of lemon on the side.
- value_added

HOWEVER a fish that has been caught, killed/gutted, frozen, shipped, sold by auction, shipped again, sold again, taken to a hospital and put in an MRI machine is a dead fish. He ain’t pining for human faces, he has passed on. This fish is no more. He has ceased to be. He’s expired and gone to meet his maker. He’s a stuff. Bereft of life, he rests in filets! If you hadn’t glued him to his tank he’d be pushing up the seaweed. Its brainactivity is now history. He’s out of the pond. He’s kicked the tank, he’s shuffled of his mortal coil, run down the river and joined the bleeding choir invisibisble. This is an EX-SALMON!
- Anonymous

Conclusion
I just want to say that it has been great to see the discussion the Salmon has generated in the last few days. Our hope for this work was that it would call new attention to the multiple comparisons problem. I think that we can safely say that it has. Thanks.

~ Craig [Prefrontal].

[1] Human Brain Mapping 2009 – Presentations
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/06/human-brain-mapping-2009-presentations/

[2] Atlantic Salmon – MRI Data
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/07/atlantic-salmon-mri-data/

[3] The Story Behind the Atlantic Salmon
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/09/the-story-behind-the-atlantic-salmon/

[4] The Internet Found the Atlantic Salmon
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/09/the-internet-found-the-atlantic-salmon/

~Craig

Just got word that I was given a travel award for the Human Brain Mapping conference in June:
http://ric.uthscsa.edu:9000/TravelAwards/awardees.html

This year’s HBM conference is shaping up to be rather epic. I have two abstracts accepted for poster presentations, one of which was chosen for an oral presentation later that weekend. Now they are even giving me a few bucks to show up!

I have said it before, but HBM is by far my favorite conference of the year. I can’t wait.

Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference [CNS]
March 21-24, San Francisco, California

New Horizons in Human Brain Imaging: A Focus on the Pacific Rim
April 13-15, Waikoloa, Hawaii

Organization for Human Brain Mapping Conference [HBM]
June 18-22, San Francisco, California

Conference on Neurocognitive Development
July 12-14, Berkeley, CA

Here are the titles of the posters I will be presenting:

[CNS]
• The impact of experimental design on the detection of individual variability in fMRI
Bennett CM, Guerin SA, Miller MB

[HBM]
• The processing of internally-generated interoceptive sensation (oral presentation)
Bennett CM, Baird AA

• Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: an argument for multiple comparisons correction
Bennett CM, Miller MB, Wolford GL

[1] Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience:
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/01/voodoo-correlations-in-social-neuroscience/

[2] The ‘Voodoo Correlations’ debate heats up
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/01/the-voodoo-correlations-debate-heats-up/

[3] The ‘Voodoo Correlations’ saga continues
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/01/the-voodoo-correlations-saga-continues/

[4] The Dangers of Double Dipping (Voodoo IV)
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/04/the-dangers-of-double-dipping-voodoo-iv/

[5] Voodoo Perspectives on Psychological Science
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/06/voodoo-perspectives-on-psychological-science/

~Craig

Politics on a weblog is like picking up a stick of old, wet dynamite.  You might grab it and absolutely nothing happens, or it might very well explode in your face.  It is for this reason that I try to avoid political discussion on prefrontal.org.  Every weblog must have a focus, and there are more than enough political blogs to go around.  Still, I am compelled to write just one post after the recent presidential election.  One post to say how much I have been desperately hoping for a new direction in our political system.  One post to tell you how much of that hope I have invested in one man.  One post to announce that I worked hard to help that man be successful.  One post, to tell you that he was in fact successful.

Congratulations, President-elect Barack Obama.

[Photo from Joe Raedle/Getty Images]

What is the goal for the second year? My primary goal is to post more often (2-3 times per week) and to aim for in-depth posts that take a bit more time to prepare. This will give the readers of this site additional material to peruse and gives me even more writing practice. The secondary goal is to continue filling in the quiet parts of the site, such as the ‘About’ and ‘Research’ pages. Who knows where this plan will take use 12 months from now, but if we can duplicate the success of the first year I will be more than happy.

Thanks for reading.

For most of July I have been in Lawrence, Kansas as an instructor for the KU Educational Talent Search summer camp ‘Discover Technology’. Talent Search is an educational opportunity program whose main goal is to shepherd students from underrepresented backgrounds though high school and encourage them to engage in post-secondary education. The Discover Technology summer camp is just one part of this year-round program.

I have been an instructor for Discover Technology for almost 10 years now. What brings me back year after year? Well, they pay me for my time, which is a plus. The biggest motivator though is that the course genuinely impacts the lives of the students. The graduation rate of most Kansas City, Kansas high schools is around 50% – Talent Search gets over 95% of their students through to their graduation. That is huge, and definitely worth a little time and effort on my part.

“The Integration of Higher Cognition and Internal State Across Development”
Bennett, CM. Doctoral Dissertation, Dartmouth College, 2008.
Bennett-Dissertation-2008.pdf

It is a large PDF file due to the numerous figures and tables included in the text. Keep in mind that the results and conclusions are still in a state of flux pending journal publication. Things may change quite a bit as each runs the gauntlet of the review process. Enjoy!