Twas the night before Christmas
I am aware of how cliché it is to parody this poem. Still, in the wee hours this Christmas morning I was too weak to resist the temptation.
Please to enjoy…
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‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house,
Everyone was sleeping, as I left-clicked my mouse.
The data was organized hierarchically with care,
In hopes that significance soon would be there.
The design matrices were placed and I silently pled,
While beta estimation proceeded and sped.
I sat there and watched with a cat in my lap,
Wishing I could lay down for a well-deserved nap.
When in the background there arose a great clatter,
I quickly switched desktops to see what was the matter.
Tabbing through windows I flew like a flash,
Praying that MATLAB would not have crashed.
While I saw that the process continued to slow,
I was still encouraged that it continued to go.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a modal dialog, “Preprocessing is clear”.
With my mouse pointer moving so lively and quick,
I started a group model with just a few clicks.
More rapid than eagles the images came,
I whistled, I shouted, and called my subjects by name.
“Now AW! Now SL! Now ME and CG!
On CK! On JS! On DC and MC!
Let’s roll the dice, wherever they may fall,
Now estimate, estimate, estimate all!”
Another click made the processor fly,
The progress bar slowly rose up to the sky.
Out of my chair to the kitchen I flew,
You can’t ever argue with your internal milieu.
As I ate Christmas cookies I played all aloof,
Pretending to not care if there might be a goof.
I was working on my dissertation this time around,
And my hopes of graduating were nowhere to be found.
I returned to the computer and massaged my foot,
Thinking only of brimstone, ashes, fire, and soot.
I needed results to prove I had a knack,
Results my committee would find hard to attack.
My eyes, how they twinkled! My dimples how merry!
I smiled so wide, my results were just cherry.
Previous experiments had filled me completely with woe,
but incredible results I would be able to show.
A pencil I held all tight in my teeth,
As I saw active regions arrayed as a wreath.
I chortled and shook throughout my belly,
Though not like Saint Nick, with his bowlful of jelly.
I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it myself,
I pulled down my atlas from off of the top shelf.
Primary motor, secondary somatosensory, and on around the head,
Through frontal and temporal areas I was lead.
I shrugged to myself and began my work,
From region to region my mouse moved with a jerk.
I made my notes as through the brain I rose,
“The data is the data”, and this time it shows.
When all was done I gave a quick whistle,
I shut things down and was off like a missile.
I left the office and turned out the light.
“Happy Christmas to all, my dissertation’s alright!”
http://prefrontal.org
Quote of the Week – Adams
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. – Douglas Adams, “Last Chance to See”
Data Collection Complete!
I just wrapped up data collection for my dissertation. It has been a long road, taking 8 months to recruit and scan 80 participants. Scanning was completed in two waves of adults and adolescents across four fMRI experiments. Along the way we also picked up some excellent T1 anatomical images and diffusion tensor (DTI) data. Everything looks great!
Special thanks to all the local adults and Woodstock Middle School students who participated in the studies. Also, extra-special thanks to everyone who helped me out by being a scanner buddy or giving assistance with recruiting. I could never have done it alone – thank you.
Now, to just finish writing the dissertation…
Quote of the Week – Russell
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trapping of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. – Bertrand Russell
I am a tour de force
The boss (Abigail Baird) was very kind in her recent interview for the Association for Psychological Science:
Also, my paper was her favorite. That is like your mother calling you her favorite child. ;)
Political Pseudoscience
Marco Iacoboni, Joshua Freedman and Jonas Kaplan recently authored an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “This Is Your Brain on Politics”. The authors describe a new study where they put 20 swing voters through an fMRI session designed to reveal their true thoughts and feelings regarding the current field of political candidates. They argue that revealing the unbiased opinion of individuals through fMRI will give an indication of how people will finally vote.
Their results are, well, their results. Do you have increased activity in the anterior cingulate? That must mean that you have mixed feelings about a candidate. Do you have increased activity in areas known to possess mirror neurons? Then you must have an increased amount of empathy for a candidate. Suffice it to say, the greater scientific community has responded with much derision and gnashing of teeth to their methods, results, message, and choice of publication.
I would recommend that you take a few minutes to read Martha Farah’s guest post at the Neuroethics and Law blog. It is about as close to an unbiased review of the op-ed article as I have found. The last sentence is the clincher – fMRI data is all about effective interpretation. Good examination of the results will be objective, reliable, and scientific. Poor examination of the results is no better than tea leaves.
I am inclined to go with tea leaves over the Iacoboni et al. results.
Perhaps in the future we will have effective methods to scientifically study political opinion with fMRI. For now I think we are doomed to several more years of terrible articles like this from the Iacoboni Lab. See you next January – that is when the next press release will be coming out…
Quote of the Week – Shakespeare
“I would that there were no age between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest. For there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing and fighting” – Shakespeare, “Winter’s Tale”, 1565
I have a postdoc lined up
This has been a done deal for several weeks, but I have been waiting for the official letter to arrive before talking about it. The big news is this: when January arrives my wife Sarah and I will be packing up our things and moving our little family (cats included) out to Santa Barbara, California. I will be starting a new job as a postdoctoral researcher in the Mike Miller Lab at UCSB. It is an incredible opportunity and I can’t wait to begin.
The downside is the amount of work still to do on the dissertation – more subjects to run, more data to analyze, and much more writing to finish. Still, knowing I don’t have to worry about employment is a huge load off my shoulders. It is going to be a long December, but we will be starting 2008 in a warm, beautiful new city with all kids of new scientific adventures!
Statistical Laws
I was clearing out some old files in my office this weekend when I came across a collection of notes from my early years in grad school. One set was from a graduate statistics course taught by my current advisor, George Wolford. On the last day of the course his goal was to give us a set of key principles to guide our future endeavors. He listed eight statments by Robert Abelson, author of Statistics as Principled Argument, and also listed the eight statements that he lives by. I replicate the text below, as they continue to be valid and useful.
Robert Abelson’s Laws:
1. Chance is lumpy
2. Overconfidence abhors uncertainty
3. Never flout a convention just once
4. Don’t talk greek if you don’t know the english translation
5. If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything
6. There is no free hunch
7. You can’t see the dust if you don’t move the couch
8. Criticism is the mother of methodology
George Wolford’s Laws:
1. Chance is lumpy
2. Think about the dependent measure
3. Fit the design and analysis to the question
4. Look at the raw data
5. Use error bars and measures of effect size
6. State hypothesis a priori and test as such
7. Protect Type I error in every way possible
8. Do simplest appropriate test
Quote of the Week – Tulving
“…the single most critical piece of equipment is still the researcher’s own brain. All the equipment in the world will not help us if we do not know how to use it properly, which requires more than just knowing how to operate it. Aristotle would not necessarily have been more profound had he owned a laptop and known how to program. What is badly needed now, with all these scanners whirring away, is an understanding of exactly what we are observing, and seeing, and measuring, and wondering about.” – Endel Tulving