"If you can't have the [static magnetic] field you love, love the [static magnetic] field you have." - William A. Edelstein

Ever have an MRI? If so, you benefited from many inventions by Bill Edelstein, whose passing, earlier this week, is mourned by many.

Such ugliness should be an opt-in, not a secret vice. (An open letter.) [Puzzling color corruption in uploaded images turns out to be Google "auto-enhancement."]

Dear Google, please consider making the "auto-enhancement" of uploaded images an opt-in choice, rather than a hidden default.

I like your picasaweb cloud-based photo-hosting service, which I've been using for years. Recently, though, I discovered that I had a problem: newly uploaded photos had corrupt colors. Ugh. I tried deleting and repeating; same problem. What could the issue be? Was this a color management problem for which I was somehow responsible? Actually, no. Turns out, it was something that you, Google, see as a feature.

A few months ago, I found that it was necessary to upgrade my Google account to a "Google plus membership," in order to attend a meeting via a "Google plus video hangout." So, I did. Turns out that you processed all my image uploads thereafter using a feature that you, Google, call "image auto-enhance." Those bad colors were your idea of "enhancement:"

"ENHANCED"

"REVERTED TO ORIGINAL"

(Idiots.)

I've now cancelled the "enhancement" of those photos (individually, as you gave me no way to do so en masse; I was relieved that I did not have to re-upload everything). And I've also turned off the "auto-enhancement" of newly uploaded photos, going forwards.

In general, I do not alter my photographs. Light goes through a lens, and hits a sensor, and electrons get happy, and a file is written; that is what I want to see. How dare you, Google, presume that you should "auto-enhance" any image that I entrust to you for storage? And how dare you, Google, presume to do so without even telling me?

In closing: Dear Google, without mentioning that you would modify the images I uploaded, you made them ugly. I've fixed this issue with respect to my own image uploads. I respectfully suggest that in order to spare other people similar ugliness, confusion, and delay, that you please make image "auto-enhance" an opt-in choice, rather than a hidden default.

Respectfully,
Jim Pekar
Kensington, Maryland, USA

Our 2013 Top Eleven!

The top* ten-plus-one NeuroCooking posts of 2013:

1. Bucky is not like other dogs. But he is like a motorcycle, or Gerald Ford, or Harry Potter... ("Visually similar images" from Google's "search by image")
2. Title of the Week!
3. Don’t bring a data set to a food fight!
4. Edward I. Koch, 1924-2013
5. Mid-Winter Dog-Blogging!
6. Cooking with NeuroCooking!
7. "Bucky is not like other dogs. But he is like ..." Part III. ("Visually similar images" from Google's "search by image")
8. Your functional neuroimaging update (with study questions).
9. Brains are different like bikes are different.
10. Two Views of Christmas Afternoon
11. O Lucky Man!

Bucky, from "Mid-Winter Dog-Blogging!", February 12.

Self-strangling morning glory, from "O Lucky Man!", October 17.

Bucky, from "Two Views of Christmas Afternoon," December 25.

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*As ranked by number of pageviews.

Proposed: Understanding the brain doesn't suck.

"... recall the famous quip from Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer, who said, 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.' We contend that working in biostatistics using complex neuroimaging data to solve the biggest puzzle of them all – understanding the human brain – is a worthy alternative."

-from "WANTED: Neuro-quants" by Brian Caffo, Martin Lindquist, and Ciprian Crainiceanu, which appears in the the Huffington Post.

H-index, I10-index, Etc.

Dear NeuroCooking friends, my Google Scholar Profile is now public.

Title of the Week!

"The Effect of Criticism on Functional Brain Connectivity and Associations with Neuroticism" by Michelle Nadine Servaas, Harriëtte Riese, Remco Jan Renken, Jan-Bernard Cornelis Marsman, Johan Lambregs, Johan Ormel, and André Aleman, appears in the journal PLOS ONE.

Title of the Week!

"Strobing Brain Thunders: Functional Correlation of Extreme Activity Events" by F. Lombardi, D.R. Chialvo, H.J. Herrmann, and L. de Arcangelis, appears in the journal "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals."

Your functional neuroimaging update (with study questions).

1. "Graphs are the new blobs."

Discuss. How are graphs and blobs similar? How are they different?

2.  A leading search engine gives no hits on that phrase:

Do you expect this to remain true for long?

Understatement of the Week?

"In setting the nation on a course to map the active human brain, President Obama may have picked a challenge even more daunting than ending the war in Afghanistan or finding common ground with his Republican opponents."

–The opening sentence of the article "Connecting the Neural Dots" by John Markoff in today's New York Times.

Compelling and Devastating.

"The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food" by Michael Moss will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Our 2012 Top Ten.

The top ten* NeuroCooking posts of 2012:

1. Best. Coffee. Ever.
2. Mid-June Dog-Blogging! (or, "SG-31R")
3. "AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D" part II (or, "Do you want fries with that?")
4. "h" vs. "H" (and the Mountain Goats, Down Under)
5. e.g., "Rule number eight: exploit superstitious thinking"
6. Proofreading Is Important, Part XHYXHYXHYX
7. Applied what?
8. "If new-laid eggs wore wooden legs I should not laugh or cry."
9. "Finally, SUPEREGO-related neural activity was localized to lateral prefrontal and parietal cortex."
10. Seeing Is Believing.

Bucky, from "Mid-June Dog-Blogging! (or, 'SG-31R')," June 14.

Cherry tree, from "'AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D' part II (or, 'Do you want fries with that?')," March 25.

The Mountain Goats, from "'h' vs. 'H' (and the Mountain Goats, Down Under)," May 16.

Nope it ain't, from "Applied what?" September 27.

Warning, from "Seeing Is Believing," May 18.

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*As ranked by number of pageviews.

Are you a methodologist or an ASS?

In the article "Primary study authors of significant studies are more likely to believe that a strong association exists in a heterogeneous meta-analysis compared with methodologists" in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, Orestis A. Panagiotou and John P.A. Ioannidis report that "authors of significant studies" (a group indicated by the acronym "ASS" in the paper's Tables; for example Table 2 has a column labeled "ASS vs. methodologists") are "influenced by their own investment in the field" and so are "more likely to believe that a strong association exists."

Привет, Россия!

Many NeuroCooking pageviews are coming from Russia, and we would be delighted to hear from our Russian readers.

Please, consider saying hello using the blog comments, or via twitter at @thaler or @jimpekar.

e.g., "Rule number eight: exploit superstitious thinking"

"Ten ironic rules for non-statistical reviewers" ("... written for reviewers who may not have sufficient statistical expertise to provide an informed critique during the peer-reviewed process, but would like to recommend rejection on the basis of inappropriate or invalid statistical analysis") by Prof. Karl Friston will appear in the journal NeuroImage.

Title of the Week!

"Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing" appears in the journal Science.

Our 2011 Top Ten.

The top ten* NeuroCooking posts of 2011:

1. "Yesterday, in the early evening, we went out to shoot..."
2. Making Sense of Occupy Wall Street
3. Made in Japan by Mr. Shin-ichi Konno.
4. Those who Espouse Only Evidence Typically Lose
5. "ASH, WHITE"
6. e.g., "less hairy mothers would have to park their young"
7. "AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D"
8. Heart, Head, Hand, & Complexity
9. Something about a story is not a story.
10. The things we do...

Cherry tree from "Yesterday, in the early evening, we went out to shoot...", April 12. 

Tree tag from "ASH, WHITE", February 13.

Steers from "AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D", September 4.

Venn diagram from "The things we do...", February 6.

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*As ranked by number of pageviews, per google analytics.

Correction of the day!

From today's New York Times:

"An article on Tuesday ... misstated the amount of energy needed to keep a 100-watt bulb lighted for an hour. It is 360,000 joules, not eight million joules."

This is your brain on...

"The majority of the radiofrequency energy emitted by a cellular telephone is absorbed by the hand and head of the user."

"In healthy participants ... 50-minute cell phone exposure was associated with increased brain glucose metabolism in the region closest to the antenna."

Word we weren't expecting...

A sentence (with emphasis added) from the second paragraph of the "Methods" section of the 2010 paper "Multiplexed Echo Planar Imaging for Sub-Second Whole Brain FMRI and Fast Diffusion Imaging" by Dr. David A. Feinberg & others:

"A plethora of different 7×7 regions are selected from the sum of the slices, and each is matched to a single point."

Inversion as a good.

In the 1940's, Jerry Cornfield & Wassily Leontief invented econometrics. In one of their first studies on the "sectors" of the American economy, they used economic data to arrive at a 24 x 24 matrix that they then needed to invert. Inverting that 24 x 24 matrix by hand, would, they calculated, take several centuries.

Harvard University's IBM "Mark I" electro-mechanical computer, developed for the war effort, was in principle available to perform this calculation, but the work would have to be paid for, and Cornfield & Leontif's bosses at the Bureau of Labor Statistics refused to approve such an expenditure, because, according to policy, the government would pay for goods, but not for services – after all, so many experts were on the government payroll that they saw no need to pay for services.

In the end, the bureau issued a purchase order, for "one matrix, inverted" from Harvard.

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Source: "The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century" by David Salsburg, 2001 (chapter 17).