What I Use: OmniGraffle

I'm polishing my poster for the upcoming Society for Neuroscience Annual Conference. It is just about the time when I relearn how much humans inherently underestimate the time to complete large projects. I had the the additional thought - The foundation of science is data, but humans are still the audience. It behooves everyone to make posters look "pretty." Software should support that goal with minimal cost (e.g., financial or time spent learning the program).

I have used a variety of software programs in the past to create posters. My first experience was using Microsoft's PowerPoint, the de facto option. It is hard to make posters look pretty in PowerPoint. Creating a slideshow with 1 slide that is 3X5 feet exposes nonlinearities in the software. I spend time wrestling with those nonlinearities rather creating content. I had a brief infatuation with Adobe, mostly Illustrator. There is inherent friction in that system that takes ~5 minutes to open. In my experience, it is too powerful for posters. Given my level of design skill acquisition, I need less choices and more automation. However, Illustrator can make things very pretty if you spend the time to learn it. Recently, I experimented with Scribus. Being an open-source program, it is free but has bugs. As with Illustrator, you have to spend time learning the program before making anything of value.

Currently, I use OmniGraffle for posters. It has the right number of features while being fast and easy to learn. You can create great looking design elements almost immediately. It is straight forward and quick to export current drafts to share with collaborators or the final draft for printing. Check it out if you want your poster to look pretty with minimal fuss.

The Lanuage of Music?

The "language of music" is a common metaphor both inside and outside of research. It is a powerful, but ultimately limited, idea. Could there be better ones? Here are couple:

Music as nonverbal cognition.
Music as an implicit process.
Music as a series of computations.
Music as music.

Science Edition of The Daily Show

Yesterday's Daily Show covers science in the Daily Show's informative, but still fun, style. Watch it here.

The Daily Show makes references to the belief in global warming or evolution. All beliefs are wrong. Some are more wrong than others. The better question is what are you going to do with your beliefs. I can do useful things with my (current-but-probably-wrong-in-the-long-term) belief in global warming and evolution.

Technology Always Comes First

You can either create technology or creatively use it. There is an inherent lag between technology creation and use. That choice extends to science. I can spend my limited time and attention creating novel, improved methodologies. Alternatively, I can use the current, suboptimal methods and do my work today.

Self-Paced Courses

One of the classes that shaped my views on higher education was my undergraduate introduction to psychology class. I knew that I wanted to study psychology as science by the time I arrived at college. Introduction to psychology was a necessary evil. I signed up for an experimental version at San Francisco State University during my freshman fall quarter. There were two distinct aspects, out of class and in class. Out of class, all the reading was online and self-paced. (It was 1997, before widespread video on the internet). In class, you asked questions and took quizzes. It was perfect for me. I completed the course before Halloween with an A. Interestingly, that class had one of the largest failure rates in the entire university.

Self-pacing is a two edged sword. I was an outlier. I went as humanly possible. I had a clear goal and moved effectively and efficiently towards that goal. Most of the other students didn't. It wasn't their self-pace wasn't too slow, it wasn't a pace. They stood still and were wanting for a push that never came in that class.

Initially, I had thought the format of class was a bad idea. Why create a system that allows most people to fail? It is possible to create a system in which people succeeding is the default. Now I realize the early pruning is a benefit to the students themselves. Those students didn't have the ability to self-pace, an important skill for knowledge work. They had a lifetime of being primarily pushed forward (i.e., it is the 4th grade and now you study fractions). I would do something that wasn't an option - offer a class to teach self-pacing skills.

Temporarily Unbroken

The world is a mess. Or more precisely, the world is messy. Humans naturally put a structure on it. In cultural terms, that structure is called a world-view. In scientific terms, that structure is called a paradigm.

All world-views and paradigms are, to varying degrees, wrong. There is always data that doesn't fit into the structure. That doesn't mean abandon all structures. All world-views and paradigms are temporarily unbroken but can be useful in getting things done.

What I Use: Mendeley

During the course of doing science, I have to scale a small mountain of scientific papers. I need a trusted system to handle all that "stuff." My trusted system is Mendeley.

It does everything I want a reference manger to do. Mendeley is a single seamless system for every stage of workflow (i.e., collect, process, organize, review, and do). The keyboard shortcuts allow to me to focus on what I'm doing and move beyond thinking about how I'm doing it. The best part - it is free. I recommend Mendeley to any students, instructors, or researchers.

"That Is An Emprical Question."

That is one of the favorite and frequent sayings of my Ph.D. adviser. It was said most often in lab meeting after a graduate student made a crazy conjecture. It brought us back to the real world. The conjecture was the start. Before we assumed too much and became too attached to the idea, there is work to be done. Experiments to be designed, data to be collected, statistics to be analyzed, and papers to be written. Then we would in a better position to understand.

What would happen if that was the default question in the world? Applied to everything from what should you do today to how we should tackle social policies.

Scaling Unstructured Category Learning

Scientists, like all humans, are attracted to structure. Scientists studying category learning have spent most of their time and attention on structured categories. The structure underling the categories could be either rule-based or feature relationship-based. However, there are many categories that are unstructured. One example of an unstructured category is "my passwords." Hopefully, there is more than one exemplar in that category, and none of them are "password." "My passwords" are most likely alphanumeric strings, but there is no underlying rule or feature relationship uniting members of the group.

Very little is empirically known about unstructured category learning. One aspect I have recently investigated is the finite human capacity to learn unstructured categories. I was manipulating the number of exemplars per category to validate a particular set of stimuli. For this set of stimuli as I increased the the number of exemplars per category, performance could be characterized as "very easy," "easy," "kinda of hard," and "impossible." I'm not unclear what underlies this particular anecdotal result. It would better serve the field to better understand this empirical phenomenon and other unstructured category learning properties before assuming neurobiological mechanisms.

Meaningful (And Enjoyable) Science

On my lifelong quest to better understand how to "solve the right problems at the right level for the right reasons," I stumbled upon this article. It suggests weighing the gain in knowledge against difficulty as criterion for selecting the right problem to solve. If Csikszentmihalyi's challenge vs skill concept is added to the mix, science can be meaningful (and enjoyable) for everyone (including myself).

One person's tool ...

Last weekend, I was walking through a flea market and saw typesetting equipment for sale as home kitsch. That was tool was someone's livelihood, now it is a wall hanging. A single individual was the last person to own it as a tool. What happened to that person when the business changed? Did he or she consider themselves a typesetter (wedded to a technology) or person who brought books into the world (wedded to a process)?

This applies to the science of psychology. The tachistoscope is well on its way to kitsch. How long for the fMRI scanner?

Do you define your job as a technology or a process?

Anhedonia & Category Learning

A recent study found that unmediated individuals with major depressive disorder have reduced caudate response to rewards. Given the caudate's role in category learning, I would expect anhedonia to adversely effect performance in information-integration category learning tasks. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has investigated the correlation between the two. Any takers?

Ben Goldacre on Science

This video reminds me:

Doing science is fun.

Talking science is fun.

More importantly, teaching science should be fun.