Category: Hardware
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The Zeo sleep coach: EEG-based hypnograms for the masses
You can’t do math if you can barely keep your eyes opened. While improving sleep quality can increase your science productivity, this is easier said than done. The famous number theorist Erdös once said that a mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into theorems, and it is well known that he abused amphetamines himself;…
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Coarse-grained parallelism in Matlab with parfor
Previously, I discussed how you can take advantage of multiple cores in C. In day-to-day research, however, it’s more common to work with high-level languages like Matlab and Python. Although Matlab has been multithreaded for several years now, it’s not very good at maximally using all the cores in a computer. You can verify this…
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DIY number-crunching machine on the cheap
My old work computer is starting to show its age, and so for about a year now I’ve been almost exclusively working on one of the computers in the lab cluster. The mini-cluster, which I built out of robust core i7 920 machines to analyze array data, has been a great success, and now it’s…
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Quartz clock accuracy matters in RF estimation
To estimate visual receptive fields accurately with reverse correlation or other inference techniques, you need to know the exact timing of each stimulus and spike (give or take 10 ms). In my more naive days, I thought that I could use the nominal frame rate of the computer screen to figure out when each frame…
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Snow Dots project for psychophysics, neurophysiology in Matlab
There’s a new project for coordinating large scale psychophysics and neurophysiology in Matlab called Snow Dots. It uses PsychToolbox as a presentation layer and builds a framework around it to automate experimental flow, do GUIs, move data around, etc. It’s a little too Java-ish for my tastes (I’m a lightweight, convention over configuration kind of…
xcorr: AI & neuro 