News:

Several times a month, I will be in a store aisle reaching for something and feel a hand going up the inside of my thigh. When I turn around to find myself alone with a woman, and ask her if she would prefer me to hold still so she can get a better feel for the situation, oftentimes she will act "shocked" claiming nothing had happened, it must be somebody else...

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Academia Ghetto Thread

Started by Mesozoic Mister Nigel, September 05, 2014, 05:51:06 PM

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LMNO


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Junkenstein on March 03, 2015, 10:44:21 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on March 03, 2015, 10:22:43 PM
Quote from: Junkenstein on March 03, 2015, 10:20:06 PM
QuoteRE: Color Scheme - We changed the text color to a very readable off white.


Please tell me it's a white background.

:lulz: Oh my god, I didn't even notice that.

I just don't understand this at all. It's "Make X slides (1 each) here's all the info on a plate". It's fucking busywork. Slides are black and white. No bullshit no clip art convey info. It surely takes a cretin to fuck this up and surely multiple revisions of the fucking slide format are not required.

I'm actually annoyed for you. Tell him total strangers think he's a gibbering fucking clown and I wouldn't trust him not to shit himself in public. Literally, not metaphorically and not through ill health. Make that quite clear if you would.

Tell the fucker I'm speaking for justice for the 8/11.

Luckily, that presentation is over and we're on to another one. WITHOUT THAT ASSHOLE.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Cain

Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on March 03, 2015, 10:25:34 PM
I want to do SCIENCE in a SNAKE LAB.

With actual snakes, one presumes?

Corn snakes are awesome.  Hopefully the lab has those.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Cain on March 04, 2015, 03:55:59 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on March 03, 2015, 10:25:34 PM
I want to do SCIENCE in a SNAKE LAB.

With actual snakes, one presumes?

Corn snakes are awesome.  Hopefully the lab has those.

They are actually adorable garter snakes, which IMO are the cutest snakes of all.

I realized today that if there is anything that this class has taught me, it's that I don't want to work in behavioral neuroscience. Behavioral neuroscience is essentially the interface of psychology and neuroimaging, and I realized today that the thing about it is that it is neuroimaging is to neuroscience what geography is to geology; it makes a great map, but it doesn't tell you much about the territory.

"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


LMNO


Doktor Howl

Molon Lube

Cain

Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on March 04, 2015, 09:10:39 PM
Quote from: Cain on March 04, 2015, 03:55:59 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on March 03, 2015, 10:25:34 PM
I want to do SCIENCE in a SNAKE LAB.

With actual snakes, one presumes?

Corn snakes are awesome.  Hopefully the lab has those.

They are actually adorable garter snakes, which IMO are the cutest snakes of all.

I realized today that if there is anything that this class has taught me, it's that I don't want to work in behavioral neuroscience. Behavioral neuroscience is essentially the interface of psychology and neuroimaging, and I realized today that the thing about it is that it is neuroimaging is to neuroscience what geography is to geology; it makes a great map, but it doesn't tell you much about the territory.

Garter snakes are good too.  Those and ball pythons are acceptable corn snake substitutes.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on March 04, 2015, 10:23:13 PM
That's an awesome analogy.

Thanks! I admit I'm a little proud of myself for that one.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Doktor Howl on March 04, 2015, 10:31:03 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on March 03, 2015, 09:28:40 PM
Also HI GUYS IT'S FINALS.

AND MIDTERMS

YOU SAY THAT LIKE IT IS SOME KIND OF A JOKE BUT I HAD A FINAL LAST WEEK AND NEXT WEEK I HAVE A MIDTERM AND A FINAL FOLLOWED BY FINALS.

SEND HELP.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Cain on March 04, 2015, 10:43:29 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on March 04, 2015, 09:10:39 PM
Quote from: Cain on March 04, 2015, 03:55:59 PM
Quote from: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on March 03, 2015, 10:25:34 PM
I want to do SCIENCE in a SNAKE LAB.

With actual snakes, one presumes?

Corn snakes are awesome.  Hopefully the lab has those.

They are actually adorable garter snakes, which IMO are the cutest snakes of all.

I realized today that if there is anything that this class has taught me, it's that I don't want to work in behavioral neuroscience. Behavioral neuroscience is essentially the interface of psychology and neuroimaging, and I realized today that the thing about it is that it is neuroimaging is to neuroscience what geography is to geology; it makes a great map, but it doesn't tell you much about the territory.

Garter snakes are good too.  Those and ball pythons are acceptable corn snake substitutes.

Awww ball pythons!  They're so sweet. Little sweet bundles of snaky sweetness.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

So then I got an email from the neuroimaging lab, wanting to touch bases and asking me for all the things I have already sent them. Twice.

It's a sign.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Here's the summary I wrote tonight.
I am not at all sure  that I can finish the last two.

QuoteSentence comprehension in autism: thinking in pictures with decreased functional connectivity

Rajesh K. Kana, Timothy A. Keller, Vladimir L. Cherkassky, Nany J. Minshew, and Marcel Adam Just

Article Summary: Previous research and first-hand of "thinking in pictures" led this research team to hypothesize uncerconnection of certain cortical areas important in linguistic processing. To test this hypothesis, Kana et al performed fMRI scans on 12 participants with autism (AS) and 13 typically-developing controls (TDC), while asking them to process either low-imagery questions (ie., questions that require little to no visualization in order to answer them) or high-imagery questions (ie., questions that require visualization, such as imagining the number 8 turned on its side, in order to answer them) which would require collaboration between the visuospatial and the linguistic processing systems in order to comprehend. The researchers hypothesized that:

1. The AS group would have lower connectivity between these two regions than the control group.
2. The AS group would show more activation in the parietal or occipital while processing low-imagery questions than the control group.
3. Key areas of the corpus collossum would be smaller in the AS group than in the control group.

The participants in the two groups were matched on the basis of age and IQ.
Baseline was assessed in a fixation condition in which participants fixated on an asterisk without performing a task. The fMRI was done using a 3-Tesla machine, and the questions were rear-projected onto a plastic screen seriously you don't care about these details, do you? It's Finals week. Now we talk about things I don't understand but can kind of visualize in a cartoon-like mockery, like sixteen adjacent oblique-axial slices acquired in an interleaved sequence. You realize we never covered interleaved sequences? It doesn't matter, you only had three hours of lecture to talk to us about these things. You're like a mother who died before she could tell her daughter about menstruation.

So this is where one of my classmates made a show in our study session of talking about how images were corrected for slice acquisition timing, motion-corrected, normalized to the Montreal Neurological Institute template, re-sampled to 2x2x2mm voxels and smoothed with an 8-mm Gaussian kernel, but I know as well as  you do that most likely the only words he understood in there are the same ones I do, "voxels" and "smoothed". OK, I understand motion correction as well.

Group analyses, I'll have you know, were performed using a random-effects model.

21 functional regions of interest were defined I don't care I don't care I don't care, including the medial frontal gyrus and (bilaterally) the inferior frontal gyrus and IFG2, middle frontal gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, superior parietal lobule, inferior parietal lobule, inferior temporal, inferior occipital gyrus, and middle occipital gyrus, and then there is some gibberish about being assigned wth reference to the parcellation of the MNI T1-weighted dataset. Is this related to the T1 protocol you spoke about in lecture? Because the way it's framed, it really doesn't sound like it, but I don't know what else to make of it.

There's also some shit about what sounds like maybe a Pagan wedding, what with the "union of four spheres". Maybe it's wizards. Hot polyamorous wizard love would be pretty cool to read about right now, maybe I should change my major to contemporary literature.

Anyway, the upshot is that they measured functional connectivity in both groups during the high-imagery and low-imagery tasks, using the aforementioned ROIs. Which might also be a euphemism for wizard love. The ROIs were grouped together according to lobe, because that helps us make sense of the data, right?

Results, ordered by hypothesis mentioned above:

1. Yep, more activation in parietal and occipital

2. Yes, mostly frontal-parietal

3. Pretty much yup



Questions & Critique:
I'm going to be blunt, and I hope you will take it in the spirit meant. I've just finished reading the fourth paper, as I warm up to summarize the third after a couple of read-throughs, and I feel a little like a first-year Spanish student asked to critique Pablo Neruda in his mother tongue. Multi-echo echo-planar imaging? Flip angle? 3mm isotopic? 64x64 matrix? Despiking? Temporal band-pass filtering? Linear and quadratic detrending? Linear registration? I'm not saying I didn't get the gist of the paper, or that I didn't understand the fundamentals of what they're measuring, and how they're measuring it – I do – but I am woefully underprepared to ask meaningful "big picture" questions when I barely speak the language, and I don't think that with even the best of lecturers, three hours is enough time for anyone, even someone with a solid biology background and some neuroscience and systems science classes under her belt, to learn more than the most rudimentary elements of this complex and highly specific language. It is presumptious of me, at the very least, to offer critique, and the questions I could ask might be less than meaningful. That said, I will make my best attempt.

1. One control and one AS group were female. I know this is an easy thing to pick on, but come on, what? At least first establish that there are no significant gender differences in brain connectivity in AS, maybe?

2. Is there any particular reason the authors repeat the same information over and over and over again in nearly identical phrases? Is it to meet some word length requirement?

3. I am definitely not going into behavioral neuroscience, give me cells and molecules any way. I feel like a geologist trapped in a geography lab.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

I got an email back from Dr. Snake Scientist saying that my interests are well-suited to her lab! I am going to be all up in a snake science lab!
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

I AM GOING TO BRAIN SCIENCE WITH SNAKES!!!
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

It's not an internationally famous prestigious brain imaging lab. I feel a little weird turning down a spot in an internationally famous brain imaging science lab, with a scientist who won the Presidential Award, at one of the nation's most prominent and well-funded brain research facilities, in order to work in a completely obscure and underfunded basement lab full of snakes. :lol:

But for some reason, I am convinced that this is the right avenue for me.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."