dewarrn1

There are already commercial operations using (or claiming to use) fMRI for lie detection [0]. I can understand the potential appeal of similar positions for applicants — there's a scarcity of academic jobs for even highly skilled cognitive neuroscience PhDs.

As I've posted elsewhere in these comments, the best available evidence suggests that fMRI is no more useful than polygraph for lie detection. Unfortunately, the power of brain images to induce credulity in otherwise intelligent people is well-known [e.g., 1].

[0] http://noliemri.com/

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12152-007-9003-3

fMRI as a method is not bankrupt or ill-founded. However, as the study you linked shows, it is susceptible to statistical artifacts that must be controlled to support rigorous conclusions.

Don't believe the hype. Applying fMRI methods to lie detection is at least as problematic as the polygraph. Here's a good review:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15265160701842007

Excellent news! The Anaconda distribution has been great for me, and CA's policy of free academic licensing for their go-fast extensions [0] is the cherry on top.

[0] https://store.continuum.io/cshop/academicanaconda

So with a 5.5% margin the $1.6 billion contract would be expected to yield $88 million in profit? Given what I'm assuming are large R&D expenditures on top of launch-related costs, I wonder whether the business is sustainable.

I think s/he means that the HTML source includes ASCII art showing Mario:

<!------------ SUPER MARIO BROS. 30TH ---------------

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      ############\\\\\\\\\\\\############
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      ++++++###\\\+++\\\\\\+++\\\###++++++
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      +++++++++\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\+++++++++
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--------------- THANK YOU! -------------->

A legend. My first exposure was through his participation in U2's Rattle and Hum album/rockumentary [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRHV-HWhqWQ

Looks like FreeBSD runs relatively well on many ThinkPad models: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops

Agreed, I like FreeBSD a great deal. I especially like Nicole's guide because it's so matter-of-fact. By following her instructions, I think anyone with *NIX experience could get a similar setup working without too much hassle, and that's a great contribution.

I've been using it for about 6 months and I've been very satisfied.

Yes, URL appears in the statusbar on Windows 7 Thunderbird 31.5.0.

ggplot2 is a very elegant language for describing how to draw your data. Two great books for interested parties: the R Graphics Cookbook [0] which has tons of ggplot2 examples and gets you plotting immediately; and ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis [1] written by the author of the ggplot2 library and providing a very thorough description of this implementation of the "Grammar of Graphics".

[0] http://amzn.to/1AhyEdE

[1] http://amzn.to/1B4OSq9

Decent references. I find myself doing similar, final-draft touch-ups with plots for manuscripts.

R has a built-in Cairo-based SVG output device that allows you to write out any plot in a vector format: http://www.inside-r.org/r-doc/grDevices/cairo. It's great for publication-quality plotting.

ggplot for Python [0] is coming along nicely. My own recent use suggests that for basic plotting, most of the expected functionality is there. More advanced displays, such as faceting, are still in progress. Overall, I've been impressed.

[0] https://github.com/yhat/ggplot/

Not bloat, configuration. That is, I suspect the parent comment is not suggesting that these Debian installations are bloated, but that their default configuration leaves much to be desired.

In my own use, I found Crunchbang to have the UX polish of a large distro with the overhead of a minimal distro. An excellent combination that will be greatly missed.

First, I should point out the original work of Ralph Adolphs, the Damasios, and Dan Tranel on this case [0]. It's a short, important paper that started this whole line of investigation based on the single extraordinary case of SM.

In my interactions with her, SM was uniformly happy, and it's my impression that she's like that in everyday life as well. A former labmate, Justin Feinstein, wrote an interesting paper based in part on observing her in real-world settings [1]. He didn't observe fear in any of a variety of potentially frightening contexts — she generally confronts such contexts with laughter or wonder.

Regarding love, she's deeply attached to her family. I distinctly remember stopping when we walked past the hospital chapel so that she could pray for members of her family. I can't say as much about grief, but she never seemed anxious in any of the time that we spent together, and she certainly never got angry or even upset.

[0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7990957

[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21167712

I've had the privilege of working with the patient described in the podcast. She's unique in any sense of the word.

Regarding custom kernels, DO says that BSD will be able to boot them: http://disq.us/8lqxh7.

False memories of the kind that Chabris and Simons discuss are ubiquitous in healthy people, and there are lots of interesting wrinkles in the literature describing these memory errors — here are two of my favorites.

First, even individuals with extraordinary memory abilities are susceptible to false memory phenomena [0]. People with what's been called "highly superior autobiographical memory" (HSAM) can, for any given date in the last decade or two, tell you what they did, what they ate, and what the weather was like with extraordinary accuracy. However, when tested with standard laboratory tasks that induce false memories, they are just as vulnerable as typical individuals.

Second, focal brain injury may reduce susceptibility to false memories [1]. Full disclosure, this is some of my own published work. We investigated the effects of damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) on false recall in a standard laboratory test involving lists of conceptually similar words (the DRM task [2]). Patients with vmPFC damage showed reduced (but not abolished) false memories relative to healthy comparison participants. This is especially interesting to us because vmPFC appears to be necessary for decision-making in complex situations, particularly when prior knowledge must be integrated into ongoing behavior. We believe that deficits in decision-making accompanying vmPFC damage may stem from the same root cause the reductions in false memory that we observed. Regardless, we’re not recommending vmPFC resection for healthy people seeking more accurate memory (not yet, anyway).

Although these are highlights, empirical work on false memories and other kinds of memory errors extends back more than a century. It’s a fascinating domain, and I very much enjoy working in it. More information on a variety of related topics can be found at my website [3] and in my published work (see Publications).

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24248358

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24872571

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deese%E2%80%93Roediger%E2%80%9...

[3] http://david-e-warren.me

This may be a silly question, but could publishers simply set up their own Amazon storefronts? That is, could I buy a book from "Hachette, fulfilled by Amazon" if Hachette was willing to set things up on their end? I'm sure that the current dispute would make this approach untenable, but I have to wonder why publishers aren't using Amazon services to sell books at their preferred prices.

Earlier comments are already critiquing the author for suggesting that exercise is a bad thing or that particular exercises don't work, but that perspective misses the point. The author isn't criticizing exercise itself, but she is instead observing the almost religious focus on suffering that happens to be embodied by approaches such as Crossfit. I admit to being puzzled as well.

I am perplexed by the degree of what I might call fitness elitism that exists in a nation as fundamentally unfit as the US (I'm American, BTW). I'm seeing a lot of comments about how simple exercise isn't effective and HIT is a necessity, etc. HIT is great, but it's a pretense to suggest that running, biking, or aerobics that raise your heart rate without being tortuous are not also effective exercises that can drastically improve one's health. I feel that there is an unnecessary focus on very intense exercise programs when simple cardiovascular conditioning that nearly anyone can do has the potential to drastically improve the health of so many.

DFW's commencement speech at Kenyon is another terrific example:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http://www.margina...

Yes, it's all part of the experience. Reportedly, DFW liked the idea of jarring readers out of a steady progression through his text and used all kinds of notes to effect this.

No. NPR derives about 5% of their funding from US, federal, state, and local governments. Source:

http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances

NPR certainly has its own biases in reporting, but it is not solely funded by the US government and it is not a US government mouthpiece.

Agreed, the MS 4000's split design helped tremendously with my ulnar nerve irritation. Keeping my wrists aligned with my forearms is the key. I've also been keeping an eye out for a mechanical keyboard in a similar form factor without any luck. The few alternatives that I've seen are such an enormous price premium over the 4000 that I can't justify the expense. Maybe I'll be the second contributor to your putative Kickstarter campaign.

Gonzo journalism targeting a tech audience.

Turning back to Twitter, I like the service, and find 140 characters refreshingly brief. I don't know how to preserve it, but they've got huge mindshare and should be able to leverage that profitably.

OK, so you don't think much of ESR. Any alternative recommendations in the same topic area?

I like the idea of hosting my own web-accessible repository, but am most familiar with Mercurial. Does GitLab support non-Git repositories, or is there an alternative that does?

"The surgeon claimed that the destruction was precise, but the autopsy actually determined that damage was much more widespread than expected."

This is flat wrong. Based on structural neuroimaging evidence, Corkin et al. (1997) showed that HM's resection was less extensive than Scoville's notes suggested, not more extensive. The more recent post-mortem analysis of HM's brain (Annese et al., 2014) concurs, and in fact gives an even more conservative estimate of the resection.

As a researcher who studies memory and works with severely amnesic patients, I think that it's important to point out that the precision of HM's lesion was unique in our field because every other bilateral hippocampal amnesic patient has a naturally-occurring lesion. Etiologies vary (herpes simplex encephalitis, anoxia, and, historically, Korsakoff's), but common to each etiology is the potential for widespread damage beyond the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe (MTL). Given that HM's surgery predated sophisticated neuroimaging methods, his case provided researchers of the era the very best possibility of isolating the cognitive processes that depended on the MTL. There have been many methodological and theoretical improvements over the intervening decades, but the work that Brenda Milner, Sue Corkin, and many others carried out with HM was seminal for the field.

Annese, J., Schenker-Ahmed, N. M., Bartsch, H., Maechler, P., Sheh, C., Thomas, N., … Corkin, S. (2014). Postmortem examination of patient H.M.’s brain based on histological sectioning and digital 3D reconstruction. Nature Communications, 5, 3122. doi:10.1038/ncomms4122

Corkin, S., Amaral, D. G., Gonzalez, R. G., Johnson, K. A., & Hyman, B. T. (1997). H.M.’s medial temporal lobe lesion: findings from magnetic resonance imaging. J. Neurosci., 17, 3964–3979.