Joan Baez

i got the proofs for our neuroimage paper a couple of days ago, and was slightly disgusted with the number of errors that remain in it even after the copy editor had (supposedly) done his job. i may not have mentioned this on here, but after i gave the thumbs-up to the final version, one of our co-authors (who shall remain unnamed) took it upon himself to make a few "improvements" just before making the submission. there's nothing egregious -- a few omitted and extraneous words, and some stylistic clunkers -- but it annoys me that i should still have to make those corrections at this late stage of the game. there should be a rule in collaborative writing where one, and only one person is the grammar guy, and that person gets to be the last guy to touch anything before the final version is locked down. and by 'one person', i mean not the native chinese speaker who doesn't believe in indefinite articles.

aargh

the aargh page

decisions

von's post yesterday reminded me a little of a talk i attended recently by brian knutson, who studies neuroeconomics and how decision-making is instantiated in the brain. through various studies over the last decade or so, we've shown pretty convincingly that there are certain areas in the reward pathway and frontal cortex that give us the power to predict decisions a person will make above and beyond their stated preferences. it also seems that the more difficult the decision is, the more incremental validity the neural information gives us. in other words, in cases where we have trouble a lot of making up our minds, it may be that having direct access to neuronal activity in these regions of interest may tell us what we "really" prefer (i.e. laceration, or broken phone). so, von, for $500 and a trip to philly, you can have your answer. i'll even throw in a couple drinks of scotch.

erdos number = 8

more than a year after first trying to figure out what my erdos number, is, or if i even have one, committee member geoff has come to the rescue by posting his on his lab profile. in 4 days, i'll officially have an in-press co-authored paper with dr. detre (hold your applause), which means the chain goes thusly:

Step 2: John Detre with Eric Zarahn: Aguirre GK, Detre JA, Zarahn E, Alsop DC. 2002. Experimental design and the relative sensitivity of BOLD and perfusion fMRI. Neuroimage. 2002 Mar;15(3):488-500.

Step 3: Eric Zarahn with Karl J. Friston: Friston KJ, Zarahn E, Josephs O, Henson RN, Dale AM. Stochastic designs in event-related fMRI. Neuroimage. 1999 Nov;10(5):607-19.

Step 4: Karl J. Friston with Michael Breakspear: Breakspear M, Terry JR, Friston KJ. Modulation of excitatory synaptic coupling facilitates synchronization and complex dynamics in a biophysical model of neuronal dynamics. Network. 2003 Nov;14(4):703-32.

Step 5: Michael Breakspear with Jalal M. Fadili: Bullmore E, Fadili, J, Breakspear M, Salvador R, Suckling J; Brammer M. Wavelets and statistical analysis of functional magnetic resonance images of the human brain. Stat Methods Med Res. 2003 Oct;12(5):375-99.

Step 6: Jalal M. Fadili with David L. Donoho: Bobin J, Starck JL, Fadili JM, Moudden Y, Donoho DL. Morphological component analysis: an adaptive thresholding strategy. IEEE Trans Image Process. 2007 Nov;16(11):2675-81.

Step 7: David L. Donoho with Charles Kam-tai Chui: Chui, Charles; Donoho, David Special issue on diffusion maps and wavelets. Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis. 21 (2006), no. 1, 1-2.

Step 8: Charles Kam-tai Chui with Paul Erdős: Borosh, I.; Chui, C. K.; Erdős, P. On changes of signs in infinite series. Anal. Math. 4 (1978), no. 1, 3-12.

Yes! One more thing to strike off the bucket list!

halloween. i sat on the stoop with wh (and assorted friends) at his house, and we gave out candy as the sky slowly turned dark. one of the girls had dressed up as an age-inappropriate word search, and had to conceal the word VAGINA circled in orange every time a kid of elhi age came past. the reese's pieces went first, and the stragglers got horrible tootsie rolls and mini lollipops that tasted like codeine, and then we went inside and had cheese, and pot pie, and roasted brussel sprouts, and a quite-fantastic chocolate torte, and finished off a languishing bottle of clos du bois. it started raining, and the phillies lost game 2 of the world series, but it's ok because no matter what people say to me i still hate baseball. there may be riots this week, though, so stay indoors if you're in the city.

trier

lately, I've been helping another team in our lab administer the trier test, a standardized stress induction procedure that involves subjects giving a video-recorded speech, then counting backwards by 13 for 5 minutes. it's pretty terrible for the participants (who of course don't know that it's a stress test); what I failed to realize before I actually had to administer them was how awkward it is for the experimenters. the instructions prohibit smiling, nodding, or giving any kind of positive reinforcement while the subject is in the room, which is bad enough, but the worst part of the procedure by far is having to allow 20 seconds of complete silence to elapse at the conclusion of the subject's speech before asking a question. it doesn't sound like it, but those 20 seconds last eternity when you're actually in the room. also, while the subject gets to squirm physically, you're there fighting all your deepest social instincts on the inside and you don't even get to show it.

of course, the test was invented in germany. only the people who gave us the word 'schadenfreude' could have thought it up.

another quibble

i like that "from whence" has been referred to as "a vicious mode of speech". not only is it correct, it's also much classier to drop the "from", especially if doing so elicits stares.

a puzzle

ok, here's one for you.

a psychologist sits you down and tells you that you're going to play a guessing game for some money. he pulls out a deck of (playing) cards and allows you to take a cursory look at them; only long enough to ascertain that there are indeed red and black cards in the deck. he shuffles the cards. the game is this: he turns the cards up one by one. before he turns each card up, you guess whether the card is red or black. if you're right, you win $x. if you're wrong, you lose $x. the object of the game is to win as much money as you can.

once you finish playing that game, the psychologist pulls out another deck, explaining that for this second game, the rules are exactly the same, but this time the card faces only show either a solid red, or a solid black rectangle (they have normal playing-card backings). you play the game again.

so:
1) what's your strategy for the first game, and why? if at some point you notice a duplication of cards (e.g. you see the 9 of diamonds appear twice in a row), does this change how you play?
2) what's your strategy for the second game, and why?

they've played this theme out on house over and over again, but every time they give house lines like "you don't get what you deserve. you get what you get." i know that it's true, and i think hugh laurie knows that it's true too, and then i get very sad and go and drink wine.

i find that i'm enjoying my clinic days these year more than the last. for one thing, assessment suits me much more than therapy because i actually feel like i know what i'm doing sometimes, but also, patients this year all seem to come in thinking that they're going to see a real doctor, and i do nothing to disabuse them of the notion. after all, i feel like i'm entitled to at least one day a week when i don't have to feel like i'm the lowest form of life in the universe.

i'm now sure how one is supposed to stop being a perfectionist when one has advisers and mentors who expect ones work to be perfect. to all extents and purposes anyway: one can quibble about infinitesimals, but the fact of the matter is that once you reach the 95th percentile you're so far along the exponent that you may as well call the standard perfection. you read all these articles about how to get anxiety under control, that a thesis that's good enough is good enough, and so on, but none of those things seem to apply to me, or to other people i know who are getting phds worth a whit. the real test for us seems to be how to live with the disappointment.

open access

one of the big issues in academia nowadays is the question of whether open access journals are going to supplant traditional publication venues and cause a sea change in the way research as a whole is conducted and reported. a lot of the best academic journals nowadays are commercial, having been bought over by various monstercorps of the kind that take over the galaxy (think k-mart for universities). unlike k-mart, however, these entities typically make you pay out the wazoo for subscriptions and individual articles, all in the name of ensuring that you get the best possible science, i.e. facts you can trust. open access journals, of course, make use of the magic of the interw3b to bring all that stuff to you free of charge, so that any hillbilly with a 56k modem can logon and learn about the cytotoxicity of timosaponin AIII.

proponents of open access cite the argument that information wants to be free, and not just that -- academics have a responsibility to make the information they generate free, so as to encourage greater accountability and availability, and the more rapid progress of research as a whole. there is, in fact, some evidence that open access boosts citations, although i'd take that with a grain of salt until more and better data start rolling in.

now, i really do buy these arguments, and i feel that those against open access are generally old fogies who don't understand that video always kills the radio star, you can't stop the beat etc. now that i'm on the cusp of actually submitting something to an open access journal however, i do feel a little twinge of unhappiness about it, and for the very ignoble reason that it just doesn't feel as good. it feels something like editing an article on wikipedia, except that instead of 20 minutes it's taken me 20 months. there's very little nervous anticipation -- as long as you've done real science your paper's going to be accepted. there's no smug satisfaction in engaging in the dick-measuring contest of who-has-papers-in-journals-with-higher-impact-factors. it's platonic. it's how science should be reported, and it's utterly joyless.

at least there are rating systems and opportunities for peer commentary. trust that i'll be logging on every day to see if anyone's said anything new about the article. for that matter i have an idea: SCHOLARLY HOT OR NOT. every day, a new paper on the main page, scale of 1 to 10. is it HOT or NOT?

From The Alchemaster's Apprentice, Walter Moers:

One evening -- the two of them were standing in front of a kitchen cupboard -- Ghoolion suddenly laid aside the egg he was peeling. Unlocking the door, he invited Echo to look inside the cupboard and tell him what it contained. Echo did as he was bidden, but all he could see was a dusty jumble of unidentifiable kitchen utensils.

'No idea,' said Echo. 'Just junk of some kind.'

'That,' Ghoolion said in a voice quivering with rage, 'is my dungeon for useless kitchen utensils. There's one such in every kitchen worthy of the name. Its inmates are kept there like especially dangerous patients in a mental institution.'

He reached into the cupboard and brought out an odd-looking implement.

'What cook,' he cried, 'does not possess such a gadget, which can sculpt a radish into a miniature rose? I acquire it at a fair in one of those moments of mental derangement when life without a miniature rose-cutting-gadget seems unimaginable.'

He hurled the thing back into the darkness and brought out another.

'Or this here, which enables one to cut potatoes into spirals five yards long! Or this, a press for juicing turnips! Or this, a frying pan for producing rectangular omelettes!'

Ghoolion took gadget after gadget from the cupboard and held them under Echo's nose, glaring at them angrily.

'What induced me to buy all these? what can one do with potato spirals long enough to decorate a banqueting hall? What demented voice convinced me in a whisper that I might some day be visited by guests with an insatiable hankering for turnip juice, rectangular omelettes and potatoes five yards long?'

He hurled the gadgets back into their dungeon with a look of disgust. Dust went billowing into the air and Echo sneezed involuntarily.

'Why, I ask myself, don't I simply chuck them all on to the rubbish dump? I'll tell you that too. I keep them for one reason alone: revenge! I keep them just as medieval princes kept their enemies on starvation rations. A quick death on a rubbish dump would be too merciful. No, let them languish in a gloomy dungeon, condemned to everlasting inactivity. That's the only condign punishment for a rectangular omelette pan!'

So saying, Ghoolion slammed the cupboard door and turned the key three times in the lock. Then he went on cooking as if nothing had happened.

From that day on, Echo regarded the kitchen cupboard -- and the bottommost compartment in particular -- with new eyes. No longer a cupboard, it was a medieval fortress whose dungeon harboured a terrible secret. He often slunk past it, and when all was quiet he would put his ear to the door and listen. And he sometimes fancied he could actually hear Ghoolion's pitiful captives whimpering for mercy -- pleading to be allowed to rust away on a rubbish dump.

the annual potluck in our estate was held today, and there was the usual assortment of tasty delights, and kids running everywhere and skinning their knees, and the first hints of fall in the slightly chilly air. at the end of the meal, the brother and the housemate and i mused over the fact that some of the dishes had been completely cleaned out, while there was still food in several others. the Theory was this: that for dishes pre-cut into discrete portions, people feel less shy about taking the last piece than for dishes that are not. because: without pre-slicing, a form of zeno's paradox operates, where increasingly smaller pieces can get cut off from the remainder of the dish without a person feeling like they've been the greedy bastard who took the last portion. supporting evidence: pre-sliced lasagna (finished), unsliced shepherd's pie (unfinished), pre-sliced chocolate cake (finished), various salads (unfinished), etc. experiments need to be run.

not that profound, but intensely true

from this NYT op-ed

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.

there was quizzo at the bar last night, which we did horribly at, and only partially because of hockey. i've come to the tentative conclusion that being good at trivia games is less to do with what you actually know and more to do with having heard of everything at least once, and forming a vast network of weak associations*. to elaborate, i feel that my level of confidence upon generating an answer is only weakly correlated with whether the answer turns out to eventually be correct: the fatal questions are those where nothing at all comes to mind. more sporcle!

in other news, the sam adams oktoberfest is not half bad this year.

* speaking of which, i have 2 of the 4 corners of funny farm done, my major accomplishment of the year so far.

semester the 7th

4th year is the easiest year. 4th year is the year where they can't really fail you out of the program any more, but where you need to take a nice deep breath, and figure out what in tarnation to do with the shiny, but quite possibly useless three letters that are soon to be appended to the end of your name.

boston, ma

8/29 to 9/2 to settle the other brother into boston college, which on the one hand was terribly exciting, but on the other means that it's been 8 years since i was a freshman. as burt ward famously, said: "holy senescence, batman" (ok, maybe not). photos imminent here*. BC actually has a much nicer campus than i'd pictured, and would be perfect if not for the fact that it's built on the steepest hill in new england.

the good
1. i only got mistaken as being the father twice.
2. von! it's been too long. my records say jan 2nd, 2007, so 2.5 years. too, too long. i hold you to visiting philly. there will be *ahem* tincture.
3. toscanini's. i fully understand why the boston people have blogged about it like 8 million times.

the bad
1. chastised for getting a hotel in lechmere and dragging von all the way out there to see me. (a) he offered (b) it's his town (c) i'd been to cambridge 2 days ago. note to everyone: if you're passing through here for 2 days, i will travel all over creation for you, promise.
2. took the overnight train to boston with the intention of sleeping all the way. hours of sleep = 0.
3. undergrads are yukky. it doesn't matter that they're not my undergrads; i've just been spoiled for life.

the ugly (but slightly awesome)
ran into one (1) s******rean dad who spent like an hour talking about himself and his pull with the government and how he's going to get his son out of NS and into harvard yale stanford princeton and how the super amazingness of his business acumen has made him the best and wisest and most wonderful person in the universe. this is addressed mostly to the mother as i concentrate very hard on eating a chocolate-chip cookie, and when he finally pauses for breath (the mother has literally not been able to get a word in edgewise for minutes), she looks at him, and says just one word: "Yah", in the MOST PERFECT WITHERING TONE, and i have to dive into her bag pretending to look for something so that he can't see that i'm cracking up all over the place.

* stupidly forgot to bring my camera. you would think that by now i'd have figured out how to pack a suitcase, but no.

pa

was tweaking a few figures in my MS and took a "short" break, during which i found funny farm. guess what happened the rest of the afternoon.

also of interest, the MIT mystery hunt. von: shall we form a team?

oh, and re: tincture, the seven are or, argent, azure, gules, purpure, sable and verte. if this makes no sense to you, just move right along.