11–20 of 23 posts
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobel...
I've recently made the argument that science publications should include code and data. See comment history e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11606278 Glad to see that concrete good is coming from such efforts: > The researchers took advantage of a recent trend toward making data open for anyone to use or analyze. They were able to download hundreds of fMRI scans used in other studies to perform their analysi…
I'm confident that we will see cloud-based systems for scientific data analysis in the near future though, especially for data which is uniform and for which good standards exists. For some areas like genomics we already see this, and I'm sure others will follow suit.
I also predict that being able to try out analysis algorithms on peta- or exabyte datasets will be a huge game changer for many areas of science, and will invalidate many current findings that are based on smaller datasets, while hopefully producing many new ones as well.
I spent a few years in the late 90's and early 00's working on fMRI and I've been stunned by many of the claims that appear to arise from it's use. What's being measured relates to blood flow changes that correlate with an input block paradigm, typically from a visual stimulus. This isn't brain activity in the electrical sense but rather which areas of the brain appear to regulate their blood flow in relation to the…
The measure is not blood flow, but the change in oxygenation of the blood, is it not? This does have issues but I think it's different from the issues you raised.
I spent a few years in the late 90's and early 00's working on fMRI and I've been stunned by many of the claims that appear to arise from it's use. What's being measured relates to blood flow changes that correlate with an input block paradigm, typically from a visual stimulus. This isn't brain activity in the electrical sense but rather which areas of the brain appear to regulate their blood flow in relation to the…
I spent a few years in the late 90's and early 00's working on fMRI and I've been stunned by many of the claims that appear to arise from it's use. What's being measured relates to blood flow changes that correlate with an input block paradigm, typically from a visual stimulus. This isn't brain activity in the electrical sense but rather which areas of the brain appear to regulate their blood flow in relation to the…
I think you're missing a key thing when talking about the activation estimation. The measure is not blood flow, but the change in oxygenation of the blood, is it not? This does have issues but I think it's different from the issues you raised.
So, none of the results are truly invalid in the way of a hypothetical software bug, since we know what modeling assumptions were used in the previous studies. Personally, I don't see a major problem, since most fMRI papers are exploratory, and we should be reproducing the major findings anyway. We should certainly start using nonparametric tests from here on out though!
I've recently made the argument that science publications should include code and data. See comment history e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11606278 Glad to see that concrete good is coming from such efforts: > The researchers took advantage of a recent trend toward making data open for anyone to use or analyze. They were able to download hundreds of fMRI scans used in other studies to perform their analysi…
I spent a few years in the late 90's and early 00's working on fMRI and I've been stunned by many of the claims that appear to arise from it's use. What's being measured relates to blood flow changes that correlate with an input block paradigm, typically from a visual stimulus. This isn't brain activity in the electrical sense but rather which areas of the brain appear to regulate their blood flow in relation to the…
I guess that if we're measuring bloodflow instead of neuron activity, then perhaps our knowledge of where in the brain something is happening might be off, but the results are not per se invalid. Things might only get tricky if more than one vessel feeds the same neuron.