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The New Yorker on neuroscience in the media
Read in a James Wood article about secularism: These days, one is continually running up against a crass evolutionary neuroscientific pragmatism that is loved by popular evolutionary psychologists and newspaper columnists (of the kind who argue that we are happiest living in suburbs and voting Republican because neuroscience has “proved” that a certain bit of
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Estimating a PSTH with Bayesian splines (BARS)
The PSTH (post-stimulus time histogram) summarizes the timing of neuronal spikes following a stimulus. When few trials are available, or the neuron being recorded seldom fires, the PSTH can be quite noisy. Thus, the PSTH is frequently smoothed with a Gaussian kernel — for example, to reliably estimate the latency of the response. It is
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Psychtoolbox – Now available for 64-bit Linux
PsychToolboxhas resisted the upgrade to a 64-bit codebase for some time. The recent 3.0.9 update introduces 64-bit support on Linux only, and Mario Kleiner promises that in this version, […] the extra bits provide you with 50% higher effect sizes, higher d’ and greater levels of significance with less subjects, whatever you’re measuring. Well maybe
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Gibbs sampler in Matlab using mexme
Darren Wilkinson has a nice post up comparing different programming languages (C, Java, scala, Python, and R) for writing Gibbs samplers. Unsurprisingly, C is fastest, although it is certainly not the easiest language to program in. In particular, I/O is a bitch. Others have suggested an interesting solution: write the core of the Gibbs sampler
xcorr: AI & neuro 