Social Mode

Wolfram Mathematica Home Edition is available. It’s a $295 fully functional version of Mathematica 7.

Everyone should consider getting a copy. No, really, everyone.

What mathematica can help you do is as useful as word processing. I know, that sounds crazy. How could scientific computing be for everyone?

Consider the amount of math, data mining and research one already does just to get through the day. Do you check the stock market? do you look up information in wikipedia? do you use the tools in your online bank site? Do you watch the weather report?

Much of this data is available in Mathematica and is immediately made interactive by Mathematica. Other examples
- Map the planets and dwarf planets of our solar system, along with stars, galaxies, and more
- Calculate expected returns for a stock or examinethe stock market’s performance over time
- Manipulate images in sophisticated ways
- Make science and math, from preschool through college and beyond, come alive
- Visualize worldwide weather patterns or see decades of tornado data
- Examine protein alignments or algae growth
- Play with map projections or record your travels
- Pursue your interests in number theory or visualizecomplex functions
- Design buildings and create art
- Decorate Easter eggs or draw a Valentine
- And much, much more
OK, still not convinced? Just do the math. Mathematica can replace Visio, your calculator (graphing calculator), excel, batch photo editor and most common programming environments.

If you a developer, even just a dabbler, you must get Mathematica. It’s easy to pick up and the more you learn the more amazing things you find. Beyond that though, Mathematica’s symbolic programming is a progressive approach. In a world of multi core, multi threaded apps OOP and Procedural programming is becoming increasingly complicated and bug prone. Mathematica’s approach avoids the pitfalls of lost threads and memory leaks because the paradigm itself doesn’t allow you to make those mistakes (for the most part).

I’ll let you in on another secret, that almost no literature covers. Mathematica has the best web parsers out there. It is insanely easy to bring data in from like 200 different file formats, including HTML. For anyone who has ever built a web service, a scraper, spider or crawler, you know how painful it is to build these in most languages, not to mention maintaining a scraper or crawler. Why no one promotes this feature is beyond me considering the mashup nature of the Web now. It’s super fun to mash the various APIs out there with some cool mathematica visualizations. (Oh, and for the search engine nutz out there, the linguistic engine in mathematica is insanely easy to use vs. raw wordnet and various spelling engines. you can creating a really neat search suggestion tool within in an hour.)

(e.g. I made a visual search engine of shoes and women’s tops that crushes like.com. it took me 1.5 hours. I used the image manipulation tools in Mathematica to analyze shapes and colors of products via the built in similarity algorithms. Post a comment if you want that code)

So, yes, web industry people/media workers, you can get way ahead with this software.

BI people. Give up that lame copy of SAS and SPSS. Seriously, those products are so expensive for somewhat limited use. I’ll still install R, because it’s FREE and extensible, but those other two gotta go if you are a stats and BI person. Get a home copy of mathematica, learn it, and then get a pro copy at work. Don’t trust me on this, just try it. Let me know if you really can’t kick your SPSS habit.

I really could go on forever. The scope of use for this software is pretty insane. Hell, the documentation alone is a great teaching aid. Sometimes I just browse the documentation to learn new math or programming or to explore the data. What few people know is that the documentation itself is interactive and computable. You don’t just get a book of examples, you can actually “run the program” within the documentation and see it live. For the home user, this means you can use the documentation to get going very quickly and start to modify the examples to suit your task.

Call me a FanBoy. That’s fine. You will be too if you invest $295 and 2 hours of your time. Methinks you’ll feel what I feel about this – how can I possibly be given this much power without paying 10x this much? There must be a catch! There isn’t. This is the best deal in software. (just think of how much you paid for MS Office and Photoshop… and those only do a handful of functions)
Wolfram Mathematica Home Edition

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Feb 7
SocialMode’s favorite late night past time, Blokus.

Play it online now!

Perhaps you want to strategize?

Maybe you’d rather the computer just do it for you… or just use some maths… GOOD LUCK.

Research the four color theorem, it helps understand why this game is so crazy fun (i.e. challenging but not so challenging that you don’t want to try!)

Blokus Strategy and Blokus Online

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Feb 6
Ah, TechCrunch. You whipped out the old Excel and made the industry famous Up And To The Right Chart.

There is no strong conclusion to draw from this very limited data set. The only piece of interesting data is: of the big 4 media companies presented here only Google has any sustained growth and makes up the majority of 4th quarter growth.

The Industry is NOT doing well at all. Time Warner and News Corp had major losses, and they have huge stakes in the internet. Yahoo, MSN, AOL all suffered major losses. Mid-tier Smaller publishers are getting crushed, and you won’t see that in any of this data or any emarketer reports.

If companies in the media industry want to actually survive, get real. The existing ad model stinks and this recession just nailed the coffin shut. Don’t take my word for it, run your own analysis. (Just for fun, go look at the ads running on Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, MySpace, Video game sites… let me know if you see a direct sold campaign. Let me know if you find a non adnetwork ad tag…) Hurry and do it, because this is one short runway and there ain’t no Hudson river nearby.

The biggest advertisers in the game (financial services, computer companies, and auto makers) all took huge hits and continue to falter. The ad budgets have been slashed and they aren’t moving product. With that mix, media companies can’t do anything about their ad revenue streams if they don’t find other ways of making money.

No, I’m not doom and gloom. This is all about reinvention and change and exploration. The old model stinks and now we get to find out what to do next that is better for the user and the advertiser. This is good. It is also painful. It is not Up and To The Right, despite the fact that excel seems to only spit out charts of that type.

Techcrunch Lies, Damned Lies – Up and To the Right????

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Feb 5
“To put a trillion dollars in context, if you spend a million dollars every day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn’t have spent a trillion,” McConnell said.

This comes from a CNN editorial on our perspective on the number 1 trillion.

You know nothing makes a number seem big and important like putting a reference to the birth of Jesus. This is the worst comparison between units I’ve ever seen.

a) when was jesus born? you might say 2009 years ago.

b) what’s 1 million times 2009 years x 365 days in the year (don’t forget leap years!)? right a little under 733,285,000,000 billion.

c) providing the context of religion and dollars and time eternal makes this far confusing than it needs to be (the intention, i know!)

This is important stuff, ya know.

religion and philosophy

Strangest Jesus Reference I’ve Seen

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Feb 4
What? How could that be?… Here are some more dazzling examples of “putz-on-a-page” concerning fMRI and neuroscience:

First, here’s the good news…

Brain’s blood surge doesn’t match activity
- Based on the 28 January 2009 article by the same name by David Robson
- All [….. ] are comments and edits of jhb
CONTRARY to popular belief, a rush of blood to a certain brain region [as seen in an fMRI study] is not always linked to neural activity there, a finding that may guide future brain scan experiments.

Functional MRI scans measure blood flow in the brain. Neuroscientists interpret this as a sign that neurons are firing, usually as someone performs a task, [observes or senses the environment in some way] or experiences an emotion [implied due to reports and periphery recordings]. This enables them to link the emotion to the brain region where there was [a change in the area’s] blood flow.

Now, Aniruddha Das from Columbia University in New York and colleagues have shown that blood flow can occur without accompanying neural activity. Das used separate techniques to measure blood flow and neural activity in the visual cortex of two macaques trained to carry out a visual task.

Sitting in darkness except for a light that switched on at regular intervals, the monkeys were trained to look away if it was red, and fix their gaze on the light if it shone green.

When the timing [interval] of the pauses between the light flashes [were] changed, blood flow still increased when the macaque expected [would have normally received the timed] flash, but [without a colored light cue] there was no [‘escape’ or orientation movement] or subsequent increase in electrical activity from firing neurons [in those neural areas that were shown to be involved] (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature07664). Das suspects that the brain sent the rush of blood in anticipation of the neurons’ firing.

Christian Keysers from the BCN Neuroimaging Centre in Groningen, the Netherlands, does not believe the result is relevant to the design of previous fMRI experiments and so is unlikely to have an impact on their results. But Das says care needs to be taken in future to ensure that this misinterpretation does not lead to errors.

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The Journal of Neuroscience, December 31, 2008, 28(53)

BOLD (blood oxygenationlevel-dependent) Signals Do Not Always Reflect Neural Activity

Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive (see pages 14347–14357)

Anna Devor, Elizabeth M. C. Hillman, Peifang Tian, ChristianWaeber, Ivan C. Teng, Lana Ruvinskaya, Mark H. Shalinsky, HaihaoZhu, Robert H. Haslinger, Suresh N. Narayanan, Istvan Ulbert,Andrew K. Dunn, Eng H. Lo, Bruce R. Rosen, Anders M. Dale, DavidKleinfeld, and David A. Boas

Each year, thousands of publications present functional magneticresonance imaging (fMRI) data that suggest that a particularbrain region is active during a particular cognitive task. Casualreaders ^{[casual readers and some less casual readers}] of such papers might forget [presume or not attend to the fact] that this technique doesnot actually measure neural activity, but rather blood oxygenationlevel-dependent (BOLD) contrasts.

Synaptic transmissions requirelarge energy expenditures, and increased energy metabolism hasbeen hypothesized to act directly on blood vessels to increaseblood flow and alter BOLD signals.

This week (Feb-09), however, Devoret al. report that this hypothesis is not always the correct one. [One can only imagain that new neural pathways being laid down show somewhat different blood flow than neural activity from repetitive or redundant activities as measured by neural activity.]

Asexpected, stimulating the forepaw of rats increased blood oxygenation,vessel diameter, glucose uptake, spiking, and synaptic releasein the contralateral primary somatosensory cortex [associated with sense reception on the forepaw]. In the ipsilateralcortex, however, neural activity and glucose uptake increased,but blood oxygenation and blood flow did not.

These resultsindicate that blood flow is not directly tied to metabolism,and BOLD signals do not always reflect neural activity as recorded by various fMRI devices.

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Conditioning works even if you don’t know about it…

The brain, as a physical organ, has shown classical conditioning without an agent, autonomous man or the need for an interpreted purpose.

Some other experiments have shown that monkeys fire “anticipation” neurons in different areas before they perform a movement itself. There must be some neural circuits that cause vasodilation in these areas of the brain in anticipation of the light. Reducing things down to cell membrane transport to find the ‘cause’ starts to get a little like trying to find the soul or the personality when those things are mere metaphors that allow us to communicate and, after use and misuse, come to be personified and be the thing we are trying to understand rather than the behavior of the organism.

All in all this type of reduction approach has led us to some strange interpretations for headlines in magazines and pop science-shizzle articles to attract readers but not many have the cohunes of NewScientist, a normally damn good resource who boldly stated on their recent cover: Darwin Was Wrong!

More examples of “putz-on-a-page” concerning fMRI and neuroscience:

http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/04/10/bad-brain-science-boobs-caused-subprime-crisis/

http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/06/11/wired-for-belief/

To Trust or Not to Trust: Ask Oxytocin

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan 49 participants who were given…
July 15, 2008 – Mind Matters – By Mauricio Delgado

Monkey Mating Requires Lots of Brainpower

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze the brains of male marmoset…
February 02, 2004 – News – By Sarah Graham

Is Your Brain Thinking on its Feet?

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor their subjects’ brain…
November 09, 2000 – News – By Harald Franzen

Escape from the Insipid: Our Brains May Be Wired for Daydreaming

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). While the subjects were not performing…
January 18, 2007 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

Why the Brain Follows the Rules

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to see what parts of the brain…
June 10, 2008 – Mind Matters – By Caroline Zink

Scientists Identify Brain Region Responsible for Calculating Risk versus Reward

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how 14 healthy subjects…
June 15, 2006 – News – By David Biello

Right Brain May Be Wrong

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As a first step, psychologist Markus…
March 24, 2005 – Scientific American Mind – By Steve J. Ayan

MRI Study Shows Lying Brains Look Different

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of volunteers…
November 14, 2001 – News – By Sarah Graham

Politically Correct: Why Great (and Not So Great) Minds Think Alike

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Researchers focused their examination…
March 19, 2008 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

The Dope on Dopamine’s Central Role in the Brain’s Motivation and Reward

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to examine the normal human brain…
September 15, 2008 – News – By Tabitha M. Powledge

The Political Brain

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows where in the brain the…
June 26, 2006 – Scientific American Magazine – By Michael Shermer

Can You Believe Your Shifty Eyes?

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), if the behavior she had observed was…
April 19, 2007 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

Your iBrain: How Technology Changes the Way We Think

…placed. To make sure that the fMRI scanner was measuring the neural…
October 08, 2008 – Scientific American Mind – By Gary Small, Gigi Vorgan

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Thinking about Morality

…a hypothesis stemming from previous fMRI investigations into the neural…
July 29, 2008 – Mind Matters – By Adina Roskies, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Searching for God in the Brain

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Beauregard seeks to pinpoint the brain…
October 03, 2007 – Scientific American Mind – By David Biello

Neuroscientists Take Important Step toward Mind Reading

…on functional MRI data. By analyzing fMRI scans of viewers as they looked…
May 29, 2008 – Scientific American Mind – By Christopher Intagliata

Saying no to yourself: The neural mechanisms of self-control

…button press). On each trial of the fMRI study, subjects were given three…
September 11, 2007 – 60-Second Science Blog

Five Ways Brain Scans Mislead Us

…at the capabilities and operation of fMRI, perhaps the most commonly…
November 05, 2008 – Scientific American Mind – By Michael Shermer

Brain-Scan Cell Mystery Solved

…until now the mechanism underlying fMRI’s robust success has been a…
October 06, 2008 – Scientific American Mind – By Nikhil Swaminathan

BRAIN TERRAIN

…resonance imaging (fMRI). Unlike other imaging methods, fMRI allows…
March 21, 2000 – Scientific American Magazine – By Carol Ezzell

Fact or Phrenology?

…magnetic resonance imaging–or fMRI–has made quite a splash since its…
March 24, 2005 – Scientific American Mind – By David Dobbs

Freeing a Locked-In Mind

…with the advent of functional MRI (fMRI) scans, it became possible to…
April 04, 2007 – Scientific American Mind – By Karen Schrock

Are You a Liar? Ask Your Brain

…Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technology to determine whether someone…
November 15, 2007 – News – By Larry Greenemeier

Hypnosis, Memory and the Brain

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They carefully selected 25 people to…
October 07, 2008 – Mind Matters – By Amanda J. Barnier, Rochelle E. Cox, Greg Savage

Can brain scans read our minds?

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze changes in the flow of blood…
December 12, 2008 – 60-Second Science Blog

Does fMRI See the Future?

…magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to chronicle the brain in action….
January 22, 2009 – 60-Second Science

Can fMRI Really Tell If You’re Lying?

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) purports to detect mendacity by seeing…
August 13, 2008 – Scientific American Magazine – By Gary Stix

The Brain Is Not Modular: What fMRI Really Tells Us

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We have all seen scans with…
May 13, 2008 – Scientific American Magazine – By Michael Shermer

The Sound Track of Our Minds

…headphones while lying in an fMRI machine; each of the musical tapestries…
August 03, 2007 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

Brain Images Make Inaccurate Science News Trustworthy

…magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI)—the tool that creates a…
April 07, 2008 – 60-Second Psych

Partial Recall: Why Memory Fades with Age

…imaging magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine whether those…
December 05, 2007 – News – By Nikhil Swaminathan

When Craving Is Better Than Getting

In a recent article about brain cells, Joshua Freedman a U.C.L.A. neuroscientist, noted that a monkey feels maximal reward not when he eats a grape but rather when he gets it in his possession, anticipating he can eat it. Reward anticipation is very strong and can have a negative impact, (think: addiction), according to researchers from Rutgers and New York universities. They studied the effect of cognitive therapy on the physiological reactions to anticipating positive reward, and the results are published in Nature Neuroscience this week. To get a handle on these cravings, researchers presented human subjects with cues for a monetary gift. For each presentation, they were asked to either think of the reward or think of something calming that was the same color as the cue (which was blue). The calming strategy cut the physiological arousal (measured by skin conductance response) nearly in half. Additionally, they found marked reductions in the activity of the left and …
June 30, 2008 – 60-Second Psych

Magnetic Revelations

…magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become the leading research tool…
October 16, 2001 – Scientific American Magazine
Brain science says boobs caused subprime crisis… AND MORE!

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Feb 3
Getting the python mysql connector working is a truly painful experience. Alas, I can safe you a ton of time.

First thing to do. Update the Python install on Mac OS X. The default is 2.5.1. For whatever reason this default install has all sorts of trouble when trying to compile MySQLdb. I have no idea what or why and you won’t find this hint ANYWHERE.

To update, just get whatever 2.5.1+ version you want here.

Then, if you want Django to integrate with the install of XAMPP, follow this post. It links to another post that takes you through the steps of getting MySQLdb compiled. If you want to use MAMP, you just change the source of the symbolic links mentioned in the post (telling the compiler where to get mysql headers).

Oh, yes, you’ll need to get either the XAMPP or MAMP sources. Both projects provide the sources of their packages. You’ll need to get the ‘include’ directory from both and drop it into your MySQL directory.

Google for “xampp source” or “mamp source” and you’ll get to the latest versions. I’d link to them here but you might read this post at a later time and get confused by my links.

No doubt you will have Google’d your eyeballs out trying to find fixes to this process.

here’s what doesn’t matter:
- the discussion of 64bit mysql vs python 32 bit (when dealing with XAMPP or MAMP, those are both 32 bit mysql)
- messing with the types.h file on your OS x
- using macports or any exotic way of installing mysql
Now, the trickiest part is getting Django integrated in the XAMPP build of apache. (The Django dev web server works fine if you’re just playing around). I would NOT try to recompile XAMPP. Instead, get the Django Stack from Bitnami, which is Apache, MySQL, Django and Python. Yes, dev on your django dev and then port to this bitnami stack. This entire stack can be moved if you need to, which is nice.

If you’re like me, coding is more fun that configuring. I believe the above will get you coding and deploying faster than all the other recompile and bizarre options Linux gurus dish out. I’d say for production/hard core sites, do the best compile you can. For hacking up python, mysql and django, do the prepackaged stuff.

This method above has the advantage that everything is upgradeable without massive recompiles. XAMPP provides an upgrade package when they do new builds.

Anyhoo… hope this saves you some time. Hack away.
MySQLdb, Django, XAMPP, MAMP on Mac OS X 10.5

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Feb 1
IGNORE RUSH LIMBAUGH…

Don’t use his name in public – unless you value that…

Don’t listen to his radio or TV bytes – unless you value that…

He represents the piranha in journalism like Joe Pyne and others before him…

He and others – you know the ones that have all the answers – get more out of your getting upset than you can know.

Haven’t we seen enough of him and the rest of the ‘Bullies of the Beltway” including the one’s you dislike?

They win when you get mad or watch or listen.

War Games had it right…”Stange game. The only way to win is to not play.“

Follow the Consequences… No Rush

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Jan 29
Reproduced with permission from a private e-mail from Mahesh Johari

Some quick commentary only today. The stimulus bill that just passed the House contains a “Buy American” clause, which forces materials purchased using funds from the stimulus package to come from American manufacturers.

Intuitively, this sounds both logical and appealing. If we’re spending our taxpayer dollars, obviously we want those dollars to be spread throughout our economy. It makes no sense to pass an economic stimulus package that sends our money to China. So why not mandate that?

Unfortunately it’s not that simple. The “Buy American” clause has great political appeal but will do nothing but defer job losses and prolong the overall process of adjustment that we are experiencing.

Here’s why: Let’s imagine (for example) a steel manufacturer in the U.S. The manufacturer is unable to compete globally because their cost structure is too high. They are facing the prospect of downsizing, of shuttering excess capacity, of laying off workers. But wait! Here comes the stimulus package to save the day!

Now this uncompetitive sloth of a firm has a new lifeline. They can sell their overpriced product to the stimulus package. They can delay downsizing, cost cuts, and layoffs. So as long as the stimulus package is around, they can keep being inefficient. Meanwhile their international competitors are becoming ever more efficient, adjusting themselves to true market conditions. The competitors are getting better.

When the stimulus package expires, the firm will be right back where it began: uncompetitive and burdened with an unsustainable cost structure. Then what? Of course the layoffs will come, the downsizing, etc. Everything that should have happened will happen, just a year or two later. The part of the stimulus used to overpay for those American materials will essentially have been used for zero long term benefit. The overall economic adjustment process will be prolonged.

This type of waste why we have to be very careful when it comes to government spending. Government spending packages tend to waste a lot of money. Resources that are wasted produce no long term economic benefit.

So what should we do? We don’t want companies to willy-nilly send our stimulus dollars to China. Well, at least not when they can get the same stuff in the United States.

As long as we are creating websites and transparency, let’s go all the way! We could require any purchases of commodity materials from international vendors to be subject to a domestic competitive bid first. For example, if Caterpillar feels their most economical source for steel is based in Australia, let’s require them to accept competitive bids from American firms BEFORE they are allowed to place the order to the Australian firm. If we keep the process open and transparent, it will bring the best American firms out to compete at peak efficiency – a very desirable outcome.

We have to be very careful here. Subsidizing inefficiency is not the path to prosperity.

Related Blog/News Posts (add by Russ not email author, just for further reading):

CNN on Limbaugh and Obama Package

Perfect Storm?

Retailers on the Ropes

The Stimulus “Buy American” Clause

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Jan 29
A study attacking use of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) in social neuroscience as flawed and an overselling their results by scientists printed in Nature under the above name and authored by Alison Abbott has touched a nerve in science. [Yes, it is a double entendre…] Social neuroscience is the study of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying social behavior.

The field frequently uses fMRI to reveal which brain areas are activated while a subject is exposed to specific social interactions or socially relevant content — e.g., situations that may evoke anger, jealousy, spirituality or guilt.

But a lengthy and no-holds-barred paper accepted for publication in Perspectives on Psychological Science and already circulating widely on the Internet, claims that many studies misused the statistics, measurement and methodology to make points and support positions what were not supported by the data assessed by a very large team of researchers that understand both the technology and the statistical logic used in almost all science fields.

Some of the papers authored responded with dismay, anger and guile. One is reported to have stated, “This is not the way that scientific discourse should take place.”

This is indeed the way scientific discourse needs to take place. I am amazed that Ed Vul and his colleagues had the stones to delve into what others suspected but, for lack of a better term, were too lazy to make the analysis and then question individual authors for their imaging methods. In any event the methods need to be substantiated more now than in the past due to the proliferation of information. If left untested the number and aura created can generate a form of viral buzz that makes some research acceptable before it is validated, reproduced or reviewed by peers. Given the sensationalism with which some of the results are heralded and spring board people to be guests of Dr. Phil of Oprha’s show, the microscope needs to be every where if we as society continue to put science on the same dais as sports and financial logic. Clearly there is always the potential of a McCarthyisque tone now that the White House has turned its attention to other things than pillorying the efforts of science.

The amount of published research from imaging experiments has drastically increased over the last 10 years. Of course, some scientists are very knowledgeable and have a really strong grasp of their methodology, from both the data acquisition end and there are others who use a plug-and-play like approach. An area of the brain lights-up and both types of experimental teams have the opportunity to explain it for the reader what it all means. When this is done in retrospect enormous problems raise their shinny little heads.

The criticized authors complained about the immediate publicity of the criticisms. This may indeed not be the way that scientific discourse took place in the past but the Internet has changed the rules as all in politics and business have come to find out. Now science is seeing that ‘change’ is part of the lab and the lecture hall as well as the fMRI tube.

Questioning findings that were publicized is a requirement of science first and the populace second. There are thousands of journals and more coming every day. Some have yet to earn their chops. Their reviews are the same that get published there and have incestuous relationships like coaches in the NFL. Clearly, for science to not return to the dark ages it must regulate its content or someone else will do it for them and that elicits pictures of Alberto R. Gonzales or Rush Limbaugh or perhaps the former attorney general of New York State, Eliot Spitzer. It seems appropriate that the criticisms be addressed and answered by the same audience. Journals that accept manuscripts according to the chance that they make headlines in the popular press may want to consider a different strategy.

All experimenters better be sure they can explain their data, particularly those who don’t work in the field of brain imaging, and are at the mercy of the reviewers to assure them that those images weren’t made in Photoshop.

Short of that, use the Baloney Detection Kit published here. If the authors appear out to prove something rather than understand something you might want to apply the Kit. In either case, you are going to continue to hear about fMRI and interpreting results for many more years.

Now, you want to know what the real problem is?

There is a lack of empiricism in the questions being asked in the first place so this distraction is the same old pea soup in a kettle that psychologists, philosophers and non-scientists everywhere have wasted the eons away with. No matter how exact, exotic and sophisticated the instrument you use to measure, if what you measure is not observable, empirical and the concept is not falsifiable, it is equivalent to flying in an airplane at 35,000 feet at night and looking out the window for answers to even the big questions like, “What the heck is going on out there?’

Good luck with those subjective approaches… let me know how that pans out.

Brain imaging studies under fire from brainy people in the know…

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Jan 29
They’re at it again. Yes they are… As part of the Rube Goldberg contingent from Mythinformation Central. From the people that brought you “you’re fat because of your friends” you are now presented with: “your genes influence who will become friends.”

They set up the straw man: that it is an error to suggest people are a function of a “simple model for the metabolic, neural and Internet networks, and the same model is applied to human beings — that all parts of the network are identical and interchangeable”.

They never knock it down but extrapolate beyond the data with innuendo of their own PR. One can only imagine that Christakis and cronies will be doing collaborative work with Steven Pinker soon on the topology of the mind, call it science and write another book on the mind’s influences in support of Pinker’s postulate that the reason the Chief justice misquoted the oath of President Obama was a “blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling” Or was it a Freudian slip? Hmmm… Science, huh... How very canny for the Language Don Dr. Pinker to point that out as he knows so much about both people’s histories, relevant factors and ‘mindful’ homunculi like those “inherent characteristics that govern where we [as individuals] gravitate to in the social network.”

“A second implication is that the [current] study suggests that if we really want to understand how things [?what ‘things’?] diffuse in social networks, we need to take into account people’s locations in the social networks, which are due in part to their genes,” Christakis pontificated while showing no data or peer reviewed research.

Please see the Baloney Detection Kit submitted for consideration for those reading content from any media channel, including Buzz Creation or Mythinformation efforts by mainstream print media to get more subscribers and kooks to buy their fading printed words.

I am looking forward to more “sharper predictions” from the Christakis Mythinformation crew.

Christakis, Rube Goldberg and Mythinformation

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Jan 27