Posts

April 05, 2013

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11:13 PM | what do you get when you put 1,000 psychologists together in one journal?

I’m working on a TOP SEKKRIT* project involving large-scale data mining of the psychology literature. I don’t have anything to say about the TOP SEKKRIT* project just yet, but I will say that in the process of extracting certain information I needed in order to do certain things I won’t talk about, I ended up [...]

March 13, 2013

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3:23 AM | the truth is not optional: five bad reasons (and one mediocre one) for defending the status quo

You could be forgiven for thinking that academic psychologists have all suddenly turned into professional whistleblowers. Everywhere you look, interesting new papers are cropping up purporting to describe this or that common-yet-shady methodological practice, and telling us what we can collectively do to solve the problem and improve the quality of the published literature. In [...]

March 02, 2013

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10:54 PM | the seedy underbelly

This is fiction. Science will return shortly. Cornelius Kipling doesn’t take No for an answer. He usually takes several of them–several No’s strung together in rapid sequence, each one louder and more adamant than the last one. “No,” I told him over dinner at the Rhubarb Club one foggy evening. “No, no, no. I won’t [...]

February 24, 2013

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7:10 PM | the Neurosynth viewer goes modular and open source

If you’ve visited the Neurosynth website lately, you may have noticed that it looks… the same way it’s always looked. It hasn’t really changed in the last ~20 months, despite the vague promise on the front page that in the next few months, we’re going to do X, Y, Z to improve the functionality. The [...]

February 15, 2013

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7:33 AM | several half-truths, and one blatant, unrepenting lie about my recent whereabouts

Apparently time does a thing that is much like flying. Seems like just yesterday I was sitting here in this chair, sipping on martinis, and pleasantly humming old show tunes while cranking out several high-quality blog posts an hour a mediocre blog post every week or two. But then! Then I got distracted! And blinked! [...]

June 12, 2012

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4:35 AM | unconference in Leipzig! no bathroom breaks!

Many (most?) regular readers of this blog have probably been to at least one academic conference. Some of you even have the misfortune of attending conferences regularly. And a still-smaller fraction of you scholarly deviants might conceivably even enjoy the freakish experience. You know, that whole thing where you get to roam around the streets [...]

June 08, 2012

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6:30 AM | R, the master troll of statistical languages

Warning: what follows is a somewhat technical discussion of my love-hate relationship with the R statistical language, in which I somehow manage to waste 2,400 words talking about a single line of code. Reader discretion is advised. I’ve been using R to do most of my statistical analysis for about 7 or 8 years now–ever [...]

May 30, 2012

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5:19 AM | what I’ve learned from a failed job search

For the last few months, I’ve been getting a steady stream of emails in my inbox that go something like this: Dear Dr. Yarkoni, We recently concluded our search for the position of Assistant Grand Poobah of Academic Sciences in the Area of Multidisciplinary Widget Theory. We received over seventy-five thousand applications, most of them [...]

May 27, 2012

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5:13 AM | Big Pitch or Big Lottery? The unenviable task of evaluating the grant review system

This week’s issue of Science has an interesting article on The Big Pitch–a pilot NSF initiative to determine whether anonymizing proposals and dramatically cutting down their length (from 15 pages to 2) has a substantial impact on the results of the review process. The answer appears to be an unequivocal yes. From the article: What [...]

April 25, 2012

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11:50 PM | A very classy reply from Karl Friston

After writing my last post critiquing Karl Friston’s commentary in NeuroImage, I emailed him the link, figuring he might want the opportunity to respond, and also to make sure he knew my commentary wasn’t intended as a personal attack (I have enormous respect for his seminal contributions to the field of neuroimaging). Here’s his very [...]

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4:45 PM | Sixteen is not magic: Comment on Friston (2012)

In a “comments and controversies” piece published in NeuroImage last week, Karl Friston describes “Ten ironic rules for non-statistical reviewers”. As the title suggests, the piece is presented ironically; Friston frames it as a series of guidelines reviewers can follow in order to ensure successful rejection of any neuroimaging paper. But of course, Friston’s real [...]

Friston, K. (2012). Ten ironic rules for non-statistical reviewers, NeuroImage, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.04.018

Citation

April 12, 2012

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5:49 AM | in which I apologize for my laziness, but not really

I got back from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting last week. I was planning to write a post-CNS wrap-up thing like I did last year, but I seem to have misplaced the energy that’s supposed to fuel such an exercise. So instead I’ll just say I had a great time and leave it at that. [...]

April 11, 2012

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6:43 AM | on writing: some anecdotal observations, in no particular order

Early on in graduate school, I invested in the book “How to Write a Lot“. I enjoyed reading it–mostly because I (mistakenly) enjoyed thinking to myself, “hey, I bet as soon as I finish this book, I’m going to start being super productive!” But I can save you the $9 and tell you there’s really [...]

March 03, 2012

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3:00 AM | bio-, chemo-, neuro-, eco-informatics… why no psycho-?

The latest issue of the APS Observer features a special section on methods. I contributed a piece discussing the need for a full-fledged discipline of psychoinformatics: Scientific progress depends on our ability to harness and apply modern information technology. Many advances in the biological and social sciences now emerge directly from advances in the large-scale acquisition, [...]

February 19, 2012

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6:16 AM | deconstructing the turducken

This is fiction. Which means it’s entirely made up, and definitely not at all based on any real people or events. Cornelius Kipling came over to our house for Thanksgiving. I didn’t invite him; I would never, ever invite him. He was guaranteed to show up slightly drunk and very belligerent, carrying a two-thirds empty [...]

February 08, 2012

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7:07 AM | a human and a monkey walk into an fMRI scanner…

Tor Wager and I have a “news and views” piece in Nature Methods this week; we discuss a paper by Mantini and colleagues (in the same issue) introducing a new method for identifying functional brain homologies across different species–essentially, identifying brain regions in humans and monkeys that seem to do roughly the same thing even if they’re [...]

Mantini D, Hasson U, Betti V, Perrucci MG, Romani GL, Corbetta M, Orban GA & Vanduffel W (2012). Interspecies activity correlations reveal functional correspondence between monkey and human brain areas., Nature methods, PMID: 22306809

Wager, T. & Yarkoni, T. (2012). Establishing homology between monkey and human brains, Nature Methods, DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.1869

Citation

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6:35 AM | no free lunch in statistics

Simon and Tibshirani recently posted a short comment on the Reshef et al MIC data mining paper I blogged about a while back: The proposal of Reshef et. al. (“MIC”) is an interesting new approach for discovering non-linear dependencies among pairs of measurements in exploratory data mining. However, it has a potentially serious drawback. The authors laud [...]

January 27, 2012

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6:58 AM | the neuroinformatics of Neopets

In the process of writing a short piece for the APS Observer, I was fiddling around with Google Correlate earlier this evening. It’s a very neat toy, but if you think neuroimaging or genetics have a big multiple comparisons problem, playing with Google Correlate for a few minutes will put things in perspective. Here’s a [...]

January 07, 2012

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3:13 PM | Attention publishers: the data in your tables want to be free! Free!

The Neurosynth database is getting an upgrade over the next couple of weeks; it’s going to go from 4,393 neuroimaging studies to around 5,800. Unfortunately, updating the database is kind of a pain, because academic publishers like to change the format of their full-text HTML articles, which has a nasty habit of breaking the publisher-specific [...]

January 05, 2012

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5:49 AM | in which Discover Card decides that my wife is also my daughter

Ever since I opted out of receiving preapproved credit card offers, I’ve stopped getting credit card spam in the mail (yay!). But companies I have an existing relationship with still have the right to send me various offers and updates, and there’s nothing I can do about that (except throw said offers in the trash [...]

December 19, 2011

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12:00 PM | what Ben Parker wants you to know about neuroimaging

I have a short opinion piece in the latest issue of The European Health Psychologist that discusses some of the caveats and limits of functional MRI. It’s a short and (I think) pretty readable piece; I touch on a couple of issues I’ve discussed frequently in other papers as well as here on the blog–namely, [...]

December 18, 2011

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4:22 AM | large-scale data exploration, MIC-style

Real-world data are messy. Relationships between two variables can take on an infinite number of forms, and while one doesn’t see, say, umbrella-shaped data very often, strange things can happen. When scientists talk about correlations or associations between variables, they’re usually referring to one very specific form of relationship–namely, a linear one. The assumption is [...]

November 23, 2011

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2:05 AM | tracking replication attempts in psychology–for real this time

I’ve written a few posts on this blog about how the development of better online infrastructure could help address and even solve many of the problems psychologists and other scientists face (e.g., the low reliability of peer review, the ‘fudge factor’ in statistical reporting, the sheer size of the scientific literature, etc.). Actually, that general [...]

November 09, 2011

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7:47 AM | naked dense bodies provoke depression (and other tall scientific tales)

I’ve been using Mendeley for about a year now, and while there are plenty of kinks left for the developers iron out (mostly related to the Word plug-in), I have to say I like it a lot overall. I could say more about why I like it a lot, but I won’t, because this isn’t [...]

November 01, 2011

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5:44 AM | see me flub my powerpoint slides on NIF tv!

This is kind of late notice and probably of interest to few people, but I’m giving the NIF webinar tomorrow (or today, depending on your time zone–either way, we’re talking about November 1st). I’ll be talking about Neurosynth, and focusing in particular on the methods and data, since that’s what NIF (which stands for Neuroscience [...]

October 26, 2011

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5:52 AM | The reviewer’s dilemma, or why you shouldn’t get too meta when you’re supposed to be writing a review that’s already overdue

When I review papers for journals, I often find myself facing something of a tension between two competing motives. On the one hand, I’d like to evaluate each manuscript as an independent contribution to the scientific literature–i.e., without having to worry about how the manuscript stacks up against other potential manuscripts I could be reading. [...]

October 14, 2011

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3:44 AM | more on the ADHD-200 competition results

Several people left enlightening comments on my last post about the ADHD-200 Global Competition results, so I thought I’d bump some of them up and save you the trip back there (though the others are worth reading too!), since they’re salient to some of the issues raised in the last post. Matthew Brown, the project [...]

October 12, 2011

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6:25 PM | brain-based prediction of ADHD–now with 100% fewer brains!

The ADHD-200 Global Competition, announced earlier this year, was designed to encourage researchers to develop better tools for diagnosing mental health disorders on the basis of neuroimaging data: The competition invited participants to develop diagnostic classification tools for ADHD diagnosis based on functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain. Applying their tools, [...]

October 06, 2011

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6:00 AM | aftermath of the NYT / Lindstrom debacle

Over the last few days the commotion over Martin Lindstrom’s terrible New York Times iPhone loving Op-Ed, which I wrote about in my last post, seems to have spread far and wide. Highlights include excellent posts by David Dobbs and the Neurocritic, but really there are too many to list at this point. And the [...]

October 01, 2011

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7:14 PM | the New York Times blows it big time on brain imaging

The New York Times has a terrible, terrible Op-Ed piece today by Martin Lindstrom (who I’m not going to link to, because I don’t want to throw any more bones his way). If you believe Lindstrom, you don’t just like your iPhone a lot; you love it. Literally. And the reason you love it, shockingly, [...]