For all those who are interested: you can download a copy of my presentation slides here.
Send me an email if you have any questions or comments. Thanks!

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

- Book: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, by Huettel, Song, and McCarthy. ~$75
I picked this up a few weeks ago since I heard it had a good section on signal and noise in fMRI. What I found was, far and away, the best single introduction to fMRI that I have run across. If I am ever fortunate enough to run my own lab then I will see to it that all new lab members are handed this book as soon as they step in the door. It’s that good.

- Plush: Neuron or set of Neurons. ~$12-$24
How much cute can a few dollars buy? Quite a bit, apparently. I have a set of plush neurons in my office. The best part is that they can slot into each other, forming neural networks! I love it.

- T-Shirt: I ♥ Brains. ~$20
Don’t hide your love, share it with the world. While there may be other organs in the body , the brain is where it’s at.

- Poster: Think Hard Print (Map of the brain’s surface). ~$18
The folks at Ork Posters are well-known for their city neighborhood posters. In this case they turned their creative talent to the neighborhoods of the brain, and created a great piece of art. It’s even anatomically correct.

- Book: This Is Your Brain on Music. ~$11
I purchased this book on a whim two years ago and was very pleasantly surprised at how good it is. Music (and dance) are a key part of the human condition. With this book you can learn more about what makes music so special within the brain.

- Book: The Human Brain Coloring Book. ~$15
What coloring books do your kids have? Disney? Pokemon? Upgrade them to something better – something that even med school students use to help learn neuroanatomy. I purchased my first brain coloring book when I was an undergrad. It was great then, and it remains great now.

- Tool: Atlas of the Human Brain. ~$180+
When you start getting serious about the brain then you are going to need a serious map to help guide you. My personal standby is the Atlas of the Human Brain by Mai, Paxinos, and Assheuer. It is a great reference book with excellent illustrations. As a bonus the atlas comes with a DVD containing PDFs of all the book material. Copy the DVD to your laptop and you will have your atlas with you everywhere you go.

- Tool: Somso Human Brain Model. ~$LOTS
One day someone will explain to me why plastic models of the human brain must cost hundreds of dollars. For now I am a bit lost regarding their exorbitant cost. Still, these models are incredibly handy to have around when discussing brain anatomy or function. The link goes to one example of a human brain model, but there are many variations on the theme available. It is not impossible to spend $1000+ on a really good version.

- Writing Tool: Moleskine notebooks and Copic Multiliner SP pens. ~$8-$15
There are times when academics are out there, on the front line. Lab meetings. Department presentations. Lunch with a collaborator. Conferences. In these battles you need the best weapons you can get. Don’t get caught with your pants down – always have solid instruments along with you. It has taken years of careful testing, but I have settled on Moleskine notebooks and the Copic Multiliner SP pen. Get the Moleskine with graph paper, and get the 0.35 mm tip Multiliner. Make sure to get the SP series, because you deserve a rugged aluminum body.

- Writing Tool: Any kitchen timer ~$15
Sometimes I long for a typewriter when I am writing a new manuscript. Part of the allure is the romance – feeding the paper in and hearing the click-clack of the hammers striking the page. The biggest advantage though? THERE IS NO INTERNET ON A TYPEWRITER. If you know someone who is as distractible as I am then drop the $15 and buy them a kitchen timer. Tell them to set it for twenty minutes and make sure to work for that length of time. Then, when time has elapsed, you get ten minutes to do whatever you want. This ‘dash’ method has saved my bacon, and it is well worth the small cost to give it a try. Learn more here.

- Presentation Tool: Kensington Wireless Clicker. ~$35
From the audience it can be a bit humorous when the speaker can’t seem to get their Powerpoint slides to advance. Conversely, it is hell when forty pairs of eyes are watching you fumble around at the podium. If you are presenting in the near future, get a clicker that you can trust. I have found this Kensington model to be worthy. You can get this clicker with a laser pointer built-in as well, but I prefer the standard model. Also, put new batteries in every time you give a talk – it is worth the three dollars.

- Book: PhD Comics, first, second, third, or fourth releases. ~$8-$14
Let’s get something squared away right off the bat: Jorge Cham saves lives. His creation, PhD comics, details the everyday insanity that every grad student must deal with. Take a few minutes and surf over to the website and read a few panels, just to get a feel for it. If you know anyone who has ever struggled with the soul-crushing madness of grad school then any one of these books will be a cathartic experience. Also check out the PhD Comics online store.

- Software: Papers, the personal research library (Mac OS X). ~$42
I have several thousand PDF files on my computer. Now, suppose I need to find ONE of them. In the bad old days I would have the PDFs organized by topic in a series of folders on my computer. To find the right one I would have to remember what topic it might be under, or else face the time-sucking wrath of the Finder’s search tool. Now, enter Papers, the iTunes of PDF articles. It will properly store and organize all your academic PDF files. Want to see all the articles for a specific author? Done. Want to see all articles you have from a specific journal? Done. Need to build a list of articles that will be useful for your next paper? Done and done. A simple and beautiful program. Try it out for 30 days and decide if it works for you. They even give an academic discount!

- Reading Gadget: Amazon Kindle DX Reader. ~$500
When the Kindle first came out I quickly dismissed it as a device with a lot of promise, but limited by various hardware and software shortcomings. No longer. With the Kindle DX things start getting really interesting for academics. The device natively support the PDF file format, which means that all of the journal articles we have downloaded can be opened. Further, the screen is large enough to be able to read those articles pretty comfortably. The Kindle might be a unique solution if you are looking to go all-digital.

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].

All in all I am quite pleased that the Salmon seems to be generating a fresh discussion of multiple comparisons correction in neuroimaging.But, how did it all begin? I mean, really, why would anybody want to scan a fish? This was one of the top five questions I was asked during the HBM poster session. It it a story that deserves to be told, and a weblog post is perhaps the ideal medium to tell it. So, for all readers who are curious, I have written up the story of the Salmon.

The story begins during my first year in graduate school at Dartmouth College. I was working with Abigail Baird on fMRI studies investigating the maturation of decision-making and we were developing a large number of new MRI protocols to use with adolescents and adults. Not wanting to waste valuable magnet time imaging and reimaging a MRI phantom, we instead challenged ourselves to scan the most curious objects we could find at the local grocery store.

For our first attempt we scanned a pumpkin. One result of this endeavor can be seen here. This is a pretty standard fruit to scan, as just about every imaging center around the country obtains a T1-weighted image of them in late October. Still, it was exciting to us. During the next pilot testing session Abby brought in a Cornish game hen to be scanned. This really upped the ante, as we had now put a dead bird into the head coil. When pondering our next step the comment was made: “we should scan a whole fish”.

I picked up the salmon from our local supermarket early on an early Saturday morning in spring of 2005. The clerk behind the counter was a little shocked to be selling a full-length Atlantic salmon at 6:30 AM, especially when I told her what was about it happen to it. About an hour later we were in the imaging center with the fish wrapped in plastic and securely placed within the head coil. We proceeded to test our entire protocol with the salmon in the magnet. In total, we did an anatomical localizer scan, four functional runs, a T1-weighted anatomical scan, and a diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scan.

After transferring the data off of the scanner we first took a look at the high resolution anatomical image. It was simply incredible. Slice the fish along the sagittal plane and you could see the fish split right down the middle. Slice the fish coronally and you could see what looked like salmon steaks on the viewer. By far it was our crowning achievement in terms of ridiculous objects to scan. Then, our curiosity satisfied, I socked the salmon data away for the next three years.

In early 2008 I was working with my co-adviser George Wolford on a presentation he was giving regarding the multiple comparisons problem in fMRI. We were discussing false positives in MRI phantom data and I brought up the idea of processing the salmon fMRI data to look for some ‘active’ voxels. I ran the fish data through my SPM processing pipelines and couldn’t believe what I saw. Sure, there were some false positives. Just about any volume with 65,000 voxels is going to have some false positives with uncorrected statistics. Rather, it was where the false positives occurred that really floored me. A cluster of three significant voxels were arranged together right along the midline of the salmon’s brain. If they would have been anywhere else the salmon would have been just a curious anecdote, but now we had a story.

George presented the salmon data at our local fMRI methods group, but nothing much happened for a while after that. George was convinced that we could/should publish the data and that it was an excellent example of the multiple comparisons problem. I was less convinced, remarking about how silly that would be and how terrible it would be for a young postdoc to become known as ‘the fish guy’. For the next year we went back and forth about the issue, until one day in January, 2009. George was out in Los Angeles and came up to UCSB to visit. Over lunch he said that it was time to ‘get the fish out’. I relented, and agreed to start writing the paper.

About a week later the HBM conference poster deadline came around and we decided to submit the salmon as an abstract. We genuinely wanted it to be a part of the conference, but we really doubted that it would be approved. How right we were. Through some sources close to the matter I have learned that the salmon poster was indeed rejected by every reviewer who saw the abstract. Just about everyone thought it was a joke – some rogue student who was playing a prank on the OHBM. It was only when the rejected abstract went before the OHBM Program Committee that it was given approval to stay as part of the conference. I hear that even that vote was contentious.

While the abstract reviewers were busy rejecting the salmon poster my co-authors and I were diligently writing a full-on salmon manuscript. The overall outline of the paper had been in our heads for some time and the writing went rather quickly. By April we had a polished manuscript ready for review and we sent it off to a major neuroimaging journal. Within a week we heard back that it was being rejected on an editorial basis. We heard that there were several major discussions within the journal staff regarding whether to even review the piece. In the end they decided to pass the responsibility, and the trouble, on to another journal.

That brings us to today. The ‘Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon’ was a strong success at the OHBM conference. It is also under review at a second major neuroimaging journal. The more I think about the affair the more I believe that the fish has the chance to impact the field of neuroimaging in a very positive way. Predefined significance thresholds with a specified cluster extent are a weak control to the problem of false positives in imaging data. Statisticians and methods researchers have argued about the need for multiple comparisons correction for some time. In just one figure the salmon data illustrates exactly why we need stronger controls for the false positive problem in fMRI. I hope it finds a good home in an open-minded journal.

You can find a copy of the ‘Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon’ poster at this link:

http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/06/human-brain-mapping-2009-presentations/

SalmonMRI.zip

Load it up in SPM, take a screenshot, and presto, you have a fancy new desktop picture. If you want to have even more fun then load it up into OsiriX and do a 3D volume rendering, like these:

Salmon-3D-VR.mov
Salmon-3D-MIP.mov

Those QuicktimeVR files are pretty big, weighing in at around 20MB. As a result it might take thirty seconds or so to fully download before they display. Enjoy!

Warning: FINITE is obsolete and will be removed in future versions. Use ISFINITE instead.

Here is the line of code to turn those warnings off:

warning off MATLAB:FINITE:obsoleteFunction

Peace, serenity, and a clean terminal window to you my neuroimaging friend.

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

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]

Reason #318 why Santa Barbara is such an awesome place to live is the fact that we are 90 minutes away from Vandenberg Air Force Base.  Vandenberg is a major spaceport in the United States for commercial and military space operations.  They don’t always post their launch schedule, but enthusiasts from around the world pool their collective knowledge to assemble a rough idea of when rockets will be blasting off. In my case I had luck on my side, as a local television station was covering the countdown of a target launch vehicle from Vandenberg last Tuesday. I hopped up off the couch and got in the car.

The mission was related to the NFIRE (Near Field InfraRed Experiment) satellite, which was designed to gather data on the orbital observation of rocket exhaust plumes. To calibrate the sensors on the satellite they needed a, well, rocket exhaust plume.  The target launch vehicle was a modified Minotaur ballistic missile, which was meant to simulate a ballistic missile launch for the NFIRE satellite.

My wife and I headed up into the hills of Santa Barbara to see if we could witness the launch.  Online Vandenberg observation FAQs indicated that it should definitely be visible. There was a two hour launch window that corresponded to two overhead passes of the NFIRE satellite (see above picture).  We barely made it in time – as the satellite made its first pass, but we saw nothing but a few shooting stars.  By looking at the orbital data for the NFIRE sat online (yea iPhone!) I knew the next satellite pass would begin at 11:57pm.  Sure enough, at 11:58 we saw a bright orange light coming up from the horizon and blazing up into the night.  Compared to your Fourth of July fireworks it wasn’t very special, but the knowledge that it was leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was about the coolest thing I have seen in a while.

Cheers to spaceflight everybody.

Writing is one of the most difficult things that I have to do as a scientist. The problem is that writing is a necessary part of both grant applications and article publication, meaning that we really do live and die by the impact our words have on people. That fact is rarely lost on me as I stare at the laptop screen silently begging my mind to, please, let me have one more great mediocre sentence.

Fortunately I have been able to find several tools that help the writing process along. A good outline of the project before I begin writing is probably the biggest step I have taken in making the final product more coherent. I will write about OmniOutliner sometime in the near future. Also helpful has been the habit of keeping all of my experiment notes in a single notebook, putting relevant information at my fingertips when the act of writing begins. Probably the single most beneficial tool I have found is the writing project management software Scrivener. Having this one program that I can live in while I write has made a gigantic impact on my productivity.

If you are unfamiliar with programs like Scrivener allow me to set the stage. There has been a small revolution in the writing software community in the last several years regarding the ‘bigger is better’ mentality of applications. A perfect example of a ‘bigger’ app is the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. It does everything: page layout, tables, change tracking, you name it. A central thesis of many new writing programs is that these tools are a bit much when you need to be productive and should be reserved for the final stage of production. For every 10 minutes that you spend futzing with the font size of your text you have now lost 10 minutes of writing time.

I have been through several writing programs in the last three years looking for the one I was most at home in. I completed my PhD specialist examination (quals) working in Ulysses, which was a gigantic step forward in terms of organization and output. About a year after that I was seduced by the full screen editing ability of WriteRoom. The psychological impact of eliminating background clutter and temptation was a godsend for an ADD bloke such as myself. Still, I kept searching for something just a bit better – a program that worked the way I expected and really anticipated my needs.

In hindsight I am not sure how I stumbled upon Scrivener. Odds are such that I probably found a link to it at lifehacker.com or www.tuaw.com. Since that time I have come to feel that it is my secret weapon in the battle of words. It has just the right balance of tools and features to keep me happy without going overboard into frivolity. Here are some of my favorite parts of the program:

* Text availability. Sometimes when I am working on a discussion section I will remember something that needs to go in the methods of a paper. In Scrivener these sections are set up as separate text files, which gives me instant access to their contents. I can flip back and forth between the sections in a way that has very little impact on my concentration, which is important. I can flip over, make the edit, and return to where I left off without rebooting my thought process, if that makes sense.

* Binders. Having other research files readily available dramatically helps the process along. I can have outlines, text snippets, alternative versions of paper sections, figures, tables, and photos all just a click away. What was the p-value of that insula region? Click. What stimulus words did I use in the 4th block? Click. What did I think I should be saying in this section?? Click. This is one of the more powerful features of Scrivener, but also one that is the most simple: you never have to leave it. Once your Scrivener document is preset with the items you will need access to you never have to stray out of its window.

* Full screen editing. I don’t always need this feature, as I will usually just maximize the document window to take up the whole screen, but there always comes a point in my sessions when I realize that I am spending more time wandering about in Firefox than writing or editing. When I catch myself I will take a few minutes to stretch, get a glass of water, and then return to Scrivener in full screen mode. Distractions out, productivity in.

* Snapshots. Sometimes I get the great idea to delete entire paragraphs of text so I can start over with a better foundation. This often works well, but when it doesn’t I can always go back to an earlier snapshot of a document for a little cut and paste action. This feature combined with Apple’s Time Machine are lifesavers.

* Progress measurement and status labels. Writing can be a very difficult endeavor. I need to know that I am making progress toward my goals to have the motivation to finish. Like every other editing program Scrivener gives you the word count of each of your text sections, but it also allows you to set word count goals, or session word count goals. I can have my end goal for a paper be 5,500 words, but tonight I just need to write 800 of those. I also appreciate that I can set the status of each document as a reminder of what stage it is at. Files can be first/revised/final drafts, still to do, or I can invent my own status label. I have been known to label a document as ‘needs a miracle’.

Scrivener is a powerful piece of software, and I know in the end I am only scratching the surface of all it can do. Still, compared to the likes of Word and InDesign it is a targeted app that aims to do one thing really well: getting that final draft out the door. I have been working with it for about nine months now and I can honestly say that it is the only writing application I have ever been excited to launch, every time. My dissertation definitely would have gotten done without it, but I like to think that Scrivener made my life that much better while I was knee-deep in it. That is about the highest compliment I can give to a piece of software. Give it a try: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

It might not seem immediately obvious, but the above picture is off-the-scale awesome.

The two white blobs in the photo represent the Phoenix Mars lander and its parachute as it was descending into the martian atmosphere. But, wait, where did the photo come from? Well, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter just happened to be passing by at 30,000 miles per hour and angled its HiRISE camera over to sneak a few pics. Now that is engineering. It is amazing in its own right that we had a successful landing on Mars after traversing 423 million miles. It is icing on the cake though to have calculations accurate enough to enable this ‘action shot’ of the landing.

I mean, come on, that was the most clutch three-point shot I have ever seen in my life.