Eve Marder's excellent essay on lecturing with chalk, not Powerpoint→

I'm picking up my chalk tomorrow.

Teaching with chalk forces students to experience the material in real time. The tangible reality of chalk and board create the moment — remember Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” (1964)? As I draw or write on the board it gives my students the time to take notes. Images ready-made in PowerPoint or on overheads can come and go too quickly for students to process, and the images can be too complex, making their core principles difficult to discern. (Because I can’t draw very well, I can only make diagrams showing the essential points.) Teaching with chalk makes it easy to stop mid-thought or mid-diagram and ask the class what comes next, making students active participants in the developing logic of the lecture.

Questioning short-term memory and its measurement: Why digit span measures long-term associative learning→

We cast doubt on this general approach in a detailed analysis of the basis for the robust finding that short-term memory for digit sequences is superior to that for other sequences of verbal material. Specifically, we show across four experiments that this advantage is not due to inherent characteristics of digits as verbal items, nor are individual digits within sequences better remembered than other types of individual verbal items. Rather, the advantage for digit sequences stems from the increased frequency, compared to other verbal material, with which digits appear in random sequences in natural language, and furthermore, relatively frequent digit sequences support better short-term serial recall than less frequent ones.

JOBS: Obleser lab (University of Lübeck) hiring postdocs in auditory cognition→

Fantastic opportunity.

We are looking for creative minds with a PhD degree and a promising track record in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, physics, or engineering. A strong background and interest in research methods is desirable. Prior experience with either human neuroscience methods (especially advanced EEG and/or fMRI analyses) or modeling of rich data sets (e.g., latent growth modeling, structural equation modeling) is expected.

The neonatal connectome during preterm brain development→

Analysis of neonatal functional connectivity (FC) showed the early formation of resting-state networks, suggesting that functional networks are present in the preterm brain, albeit being in an immature state.

“Visual” cortex responds to spoken language in blind children→

We find that “visual” cortices of young blind (but not sighted) children respond to sound. Responses to nonlanguage sounds increased between the ages of 4 and 17. By contrast, occipital responses to spoken language were maximal by age 4 and were not related to Braille learning. These findings suggest that occipital plasticity for spoken language is independent of plasticity for Braille and for sound.

Women can be knowers, not just pleasers: Soraya Chemaly on the "credibility gap"→

Great talk. Practice equality at home, and then bring this equality with you into your institutions.

Creating concepts from converging features in human cortex→

In summary, this study has found that the top-down retrieval of object knowledge leads to activation of shape-specific and color-specific codes in relevant specialized visual areas, as well as an object-identity code within left ATL. Moreover, the presence of identity information in left ATL was more likely when both shape and color information was simultaneously present in respective feature regions. The strength of this dependency predicted the correspondence between top-down and bottom-up activity patterns in the ATL. These findings support proposals that the ATL integrates featural information into a less feature-dependent representation of identity.

Role of of the cingulo-opercular network in the maintenance of tonic alertness→

The complex processing architecture underlying attentional control requires delineation of the functional role of different control-related brain networks. A key component is the cingulo-opercular (CO) network composed of anterior insula/operculum, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and thalamus. Its function has been particularly difficult to characterize due to the network's pervasive activity and frequent co-activation with other control-related networks. We previously suggested this network to underlie intrinsically maintained tonic alertness. Here, we tested this hypothesis by separately manipulating the demand for selective attention and for tonic alertness in a two-factorial, continuous pitch discrimination paradigm. The 2 factors had independent behavioral effects. Functional imaging revealed that activity as well as functional connectivity in the CO network increased when the task required more tonic alertness. Conversely, heightened selective attention to pitch increased activity in the dorsal attention (DAT) network but not in the CO network. Across participants, performance accuracy showed dissociable correlation patterns with activity in the CO, DAT, and fronto-parietal (FP) control networks. These results support tonic alertness as a fundamental function of the CO network. They further the characterization of this function as the effortful process of maintaining cognitive faculties available for current processing requirements.

Husbands who work long hours linked to wives quitting their jobs (especially with children)→

How many hours you work per week may affect your partner's career choices.

Results show that having a husband who works 60 hours or more per week significantly increases women’s odds of quitting by 42 percent (exp[.352] = 1.42). However, having a wife who works 60 hours or more per week does not significantly affect men’s log odds of quitting.

though for those working under 60 hours:

The effect of having a spouse who works 50 hours or more per week is not significant for either men or women.

Effects are stronger in those with children:

Specifically, professional mothers’ odds of quitting increase by 2 times when their husbands work 50 hours or more, and 3.2 times when their husbands work 60 hours or more, as compared with their childless counterparts.

The interesting thing seems not to be the specific numbers, but realizing two partners' professional lives are interdependent, and that one way we can support our partners is to not work more than 60 hours per week (which seems reasonable!).

How Groningen invented a cycling template for cities all over the world→

The essence of Van den Berg’s traffic circulation plan, as it came to be called, was that the centre of Groningen would be divided in four sections. For motorists, it would become impossible to go from one section to the other: cars had to take the ring-road around the inner city, whereas cyclists could move freely about on new cycle paths constructed to accommodate them. Driving a car would become a time-consuming affair in the centre of Groningen. In the future, travelling by bike would be a much quicker option.

Yes, you can be a good parent and a good scientist→

Heartening.

The naysayers are wrong. I am a successful academic researcher and an active parent, and I am not the only one bucking the prophecies. As my future within the academy becomes more secure, I’ll be working even harder to support students and young faculty on their paths toward work-life success. I don’t want them to hear only defeatist talk, I want them to see a real-life model of “having it all.” I’ll never pretend it’s easy, just that it is achievable. And I’ll be working inside the system to make sure that’s true.

Estimating anatomical trajectories with Bayesian mixed-effects modeling→

Nice.

• We introduce a framework for structural trajectories using Longitudinal MRI.

• Bayesian inference on trajectories is realized using Posterior Probability Maps (PPM).

• We validate the model in simulations and real MRI data from the ADNI project.

Nilearn: Machine learning for neuroimaging in Python→

Looks like an interesting package.

Surface-based display of volume-averaged cerebellar imaging data→

Looks like a nice way to visualize cerebellum data.

Brief guide to 3D "glass brain" visualizations of MRI data using ITK-SNAP and ParaView→

Nice overview of visualizations using ITK-SNAP and ParaView.

Doing terrible things to your (data analysis) code to make it better→

Test the heck out of your code!

One thing that surprised me was that the code itself was rarely the problem. He occasionally had some comments about the way I wrote or structured the code, but what I clearly had no idea about is testing my code.

I dreaded handing my work over to him for inspection. I slowly, painfully learned that the truly difficult part of coding is dealing with the thousands of ways things can go wrong with your application at any given time – most of them user related.

Workaholism isn't required for advancing in science→

It's a complicated issue, but I like this perspective.

I began arriving an hour earlier, and staying an hour later. But at 8 am, the same people were already in working. And at 6 pm, they showed no signs of going home.

I’m the competitive sort, so I rose to the challenge. I cranked it up to 12-hour days, 7 am to 7 pm. But the same people were still in there before me and stayed after me.

This silent arms race escalated for another six months, at great personal strain.

But then I came to a realization. The additional hours were not translating into extra progress, but rather only into extra exhaustion. So I went back to working eight-hour days, before moving on a few years later to a faculty position at Harvard.

Making better tables→

Short, illustrated guide to better tables. (Not that different from APA style, when done well!)

Warning for MRI researchers: Unexpected clothes (e.g., yoga pants) may contain metal→

Lululemon uses what it calls silverescent technology, according to information on some Lululemon clothing. The technology purports to stop odour-causing bacteria from embedding itself into the clothing.

But according to Alison Matthews David, an assistant professor at Ryerson University, silver or metal fibres can turn up in other brands but you may not know it.

“If you see the label, anti-microbial, in other words it kills microbes or bacteria, it mostly like does that with silver technology. Nano silver technology,” she said.