TopicTweaks
2010
- Masking in SPM5
Masking is an extremely useful function within SPM. For example, you might want to see whether your parietal cue-related activation is subsumed by, or independent of, the parietal retrieval-success activation that is reliably found in the…
- Saving Powerpoint 2003 slides as high-quality (300dpi) image files
Every now and again, Microsoft Powerpoint or Excel graphs or illustrations turn out just as you want them. In these situations, it's handy to have a way of saving each slide as a high-quality image file.…
- Keeping residuals after SPM estimation
Occasionally, it's nice to look under the bonnet and see what's going on during any automated process that you take for granted. More often than not, I do this when the automaticity has broken down and…
- Analysis Threshold Masking in SPM
By default, SPM masks the images that contribute to an analysis at the Estimation stage. If a voxel is masked out because it fails to exceed an arbitrary analysis threshold (set to a defulat of 0.8…
- Making SPM faster
Here's an interesting wikibooks page detailing how you can make SPM faster. Some of the tweaks involve simply adjusting the spm_defaults.m to utilise the amount of RAM you have installed at the model estimation stage. Others…
- Seamless fMRI Stimulus Presentation
One of the most annoying and stressful things that can happen during an fMRI experiment is for system notifications, pop-ups or even the Windows taskbar to suddenly appear on the screen on which you are presenting…
2011
- Good habits
Having just skimmed the Lifehacker article below, I started thinking about what habits I have started incorporating into my work-day, and what habits I really need to cultivate. Lifehacker's "Why and How I Switched to a…
- Remote Desktop Improvements
Speed Here's a link to some pretty useful tweaks for getting the most speed possible out of a Windows Remote Desktop connection: The end result isn't too much faster than when using the default settings for…
- SPM: Changing the default number of tabulated local maxima
SPM will, by default, show you 3 local maxima within each cluster displayed when you click 'whole brain' within Results. To change the default number of local maxima displayed in the output table, edit spm_list.m and…
- The non-breaking space
The non-breaking space looks like a normal space, but prevents an automatic line-break from occurring between the two text items it connects. Wikipedia link: Non-breaking space I use it when I want words not to get…
- Reading pdf documents on an iPad
Can the iPad2, with its 132ppi 1024 x 768 screen, be used to comfortably read pdfs without the need to zoom and scroll about single pages? That was a question that troubled me when I was…
- SPM: DICOM Import Error
Since setting up lab in St Andrews I've consistently run into a DICOM Import Error that causes the process to terminate about half-way through. I finally fixed the problem today after a quick search on the…
- Embedding Prezis into Wordpress.com Blogs
Having experimented with prezi a fair amount recently, I've been looking at ways to showcase the output on this blog, hosted on wordpress.com. Pasting the standard embed code into the 'HTML editor' just results in a…
2012
- Marsbar error in pr_stat_compute
Do not duplicate I ran into the following error when trying to use a script to make Marsbar extract betas Error in pr_stat_compute at 34 Indices too large for contrast structure This problem occurred when I…
- Modifying DrawFormattedText to allow offset of horizontal centering
To present stimuli for my experiments in the lab, I use Psychophysics Toolbox (Psychtoolbox) in conjunction with Matlab. One limitation of Psychtoolbox is that the included DrawFormattedText function does not allow text to be horizontally centered…
- Exploring Online Experiment Participation with Google Analytics
The lab's first Javascript experiment has been online for about 3 weeks now, and has amassed close to 200 participants. It's been a great experience discovering that the benefits of online testing (60+ participants a week,…
- My new favourite online tool: IFTTT
IFTTT , if this then that , is an online, multi-service task automation tool I first read about on Lifehacker last year. I finally started using it today, and am seriously impressed. Once you've signed up…
2013
- Fix Prezi Desktop's 'Upload to Prezi.com...' Function
I give all of my lectures and presentations using the cloud-based Prezi . Because of this, I have a subscription, which gives me access to the offline Prezi creator, Prezi Desktop. The major advantage of Prezi…