[citation needed]

I don’t usually use this blog to advertise things (so please don’t send me requests to publicize your third cousin’s upcoming bar mitzvah), but I think these two opportunities are pretty cool. They also happen to be completely unrelated, but I’m too lazy to write two separate posts, so…

Opportunity 1: We’re hiring!

Well, not me personally, but a guy I know. My current postdoc advisor, Tor Wager, is looking to hire up to 4 postdocs in the next few months to work on various NIH-funded projects related to the neural substrates of pain and emotion. You would get to play with fun things like fMRI scanners, thermal stimulators, and machine learning techniques. Oh, and snow, because we’re located in Boulder, Colorado. So we have. A lot. Of snow.

Anyway, Tor is great to work with, the lab is full of amazing people and great resources, and Boulder is a fantastic place to live, so if you have (or expect to soon have) a PhD in affective/cognitive neuroscience or related field and a background in pain/emotion research and/or fMRI analysis and/or machine learning and/or psychophysiology, you should consider applying! See this flyer for more details. And no, I’m not being paid to say this.

Opportunity 2: Design the new science!

That’s a cryptic way of saying that there’s a forthcoming special issue of Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience that’s going to focus on “Visions for Open Evaluation of Scientific Papers by Post-Publication Peer Review.” As far as I can tell, that basically means that if you’re like every other scientist, and think there’s more to scientific evaluation than the number of publications and citations one has, you now have an opportunity to design a perfect evaluation system of your very own–meaning, of course, that system in which you end up at or near the very top.

In all seriousness though, this seems like a really great idea, and I think it’s the kind of thing that could actually have a very large impact on how we’re all doing–or at least communicating–science 10 or 20 years from now. The special issue will be edited by Niko Kriegeskorte, whose excellent ideas about scientific publishing I’ve previously blogged about, and Diana Deca. Send them your best ideas! And then, if it’s not too much trouble, put my name on your paper. You know, as a finder’s fee. Abstracts are due January 15th.

I’ve been swamped with work lately, so blogging has taken a backseat. I keep a text file on my desktop of interesting things I’d like to blog about; normally, about three-quarters of the links I paste into it go unblogged, but in the last couple of weeks it’s more like 98%. So here are some things I’ve found interesting recently, in no particular order:

It’s World Water Day 2010! Or at least it was a week ago, which is when I should have linked to these really moving photos.

Carl Zimmer has a typically brilliant (and beautifully illustrated) article in the New York Times about “Unseen Beasts, Then and Now“:

Somewhere in England, about 600 years ago, an artist sat down and tried to paint an elephant. There was just one problem: he had never seen one.

John Horgan writes a surprisingly bad guest blog post for Scientific American in which he basically accuses neuroscientists (not a neuroscientist or some neuroscientists, but all of us, collectively) of selling out by working with the US military. I’m guessing that the number of working neuroscientists who’ve ever received any sort of military funding is somewhere south of 10%, and is probably much smaller than the corresponding proportion in any number of other scientific disciplines, but why let data get in the way of a good anecdote or two. [via Peter Reiner]

Mark Liberman follows up his first critique of Louann Brizendine’s new “book” The Male Brain with second one, now that he’s actually got his hands on a copy. Verdict: the book is still terrible. Mark was also kind enough to answer my question about what the mysterious “sexual pursuit area” is. Apparently it’s the medial preoptic area. And the claim that this area governs sexual behavior in humans and is 2.5 times larger in males is, once again, based entirely on work in the rat.

Commuting sucks. Jonah Lehrer discusses evidence from happiness studies (by way of David Brooks) suggesting that most people would be much happier living in a smaller house close to work than a larger house that requires a lengthy commute:

According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.

I’ve taken these findings to heart, and whenever my wife and I move now, we prioritize location over space. We’re currently paying through the nose to live in a 750 square foot apartment near downtown Boulder. It’s about half the size of our old place in St. Louis, but it’s close to everything, including our work, and we love living here.

The modern human brain is much bigger than it used to be, but we didn’t get that way overnight. John Hawks disputes Colin Blakemore’s claim that “the human brain got bigger by accident and not through evolution“.

Sanjay Srivastava leans (or maybe used to lean) toward the permissive side; Andrew Gelman is skeptical. Attitudes toward causal modeling of correlational (and even some experimental) data differ widely. There’s been a flurry of recent work suggesting that causal modeling techniques like mediation analysis and SEM suffer from a number of serious and underappreciated problems, and after reading this paper by Bullock, Green and Ha, I guess I incline to agree.

A landmark ruling by a New York judge yesterday has the potential to invalidate existing patents on genes, which currently cover about 20% of the human genome in some form. Daniel MacArthur has an excellent summary.

I’m exaggerating. It’s really more like a foot and a half, but if you squint the right way, and add some imagination, it adds up real quick. Photos from the early-morning walk my wife and I took today: