Back on the attack

Ah, that's what I needed. A little reprieve from the guilt of being a bad blogger and not updating the site on a totally self-imposed schedule does wonders. So, as I slowly get back into the swing of things, including my RSS feeds, postings will become more frequent.

Right now I have two advisees, a bunch of MatLab code, and a #$*@-ton of neural data to attend to, so this is a quick announcement that DNI lives on.

Super Paper Friday will hopefully resume next week, since I need to migrate and sync all my paper lists, and catch up on the past 6 months or so. I'll also be sticking with Mendeley for citation management, but also post an EndNote file to my public DropBox.

A few random other personal things...

Great to meet folks at SfN! Ah, Chicago. And to the person that gave me swine flu, I wish nothing but the worst for you! j/k, though no idea who it was. I ended up staying with family an extra few days in Chicago because I was too sick to fly. Thankfully the bug hit on the last day of the conference. If you got sick, don't blame me! Our whole lab was a sea of virus shedding nerd phlegm, it was a pretty widespread thing.

Windows 7 is spiffy. Installed it on 4 PCs and they're all popping along pretty happily. 64-bit Business edition. No driver issues with any of the 11-ish devices I have here (list at bottom of post), x58 chipset (x2), Core2Duo laptop, and G45 chipset (x1). Matlab's happy, installed (but haven't messed with) Visual Studio 2010 Public Beta, PeerBlock being all PeerBlocky (replacement for PeerGuardian that has a signed driver, meaning no more booting in Test Mode). Performance is slightly better than Vista on computational stuff, but where 7 really blows away Vista is in I/O. In Vista, you'd boot and then your hard drive would be thrashing for 20 minutes after on some mysterious process of no consequence - even on my RAID 0 Velociraptors. In 7 you boot, and, like a normal computer, everything loads and settles down after 30 seconds (even on my laptop's 5400rpm HDD). Only two programs gave me trouble: Instant Eyedropper (gets values of colors anywhere on the screen), and Eraser 6 beta (secure file deletion program - haven't tried the stable v5 yet). Other than that, about 30-40 other programs launched and worked fine during the minimal testing I did.

So, posts will be forthcoming. Apologies for being all meta again.

(Devices: Logitech: G19 keyboard w/ color LCD, G9 mouse, Illuminated keyboard, G13 Gamepad, Quickcam 9000, Quickcam Pro for Notebooks. iPod Classic, iPhone, Wacom Bamboo tablet, Connexion3D SpaceNavigator, Gateway docking station.)

SfN Wifi WTF?

Dear SfN,

Your wireless sucks.

Signed,
Everyone

(Posted from my laptop tethered to my iPhone, which is infinitely faster. That's sad.)

Sf'nN

Should be fun! (And educational. And fun!)

For you travelers

So, just a warning for those of you coming in for SfN. It appears, oh man, I mean really, I... ugh it appears the Department of Homeland Lunacy now has the power to confiscate anything that can hold data - digital or analog - indefinitely. That means iPods, PCs, pads of paper, napkins, and you're really fucked if you jotted down a quick note on your hand. Seriously, folks, we have no idea what's going on at this point. We're trying to fix it. Apparently this the 4th Amendment was just kind of a recommendation.

I'm wondering how this will play out in the BCI field, since many researchers have confidential information, either patient, company NDA related, or time sensitive data. So, backup everything to a drive that you plan to leave behind. It might be a good idea to leave it with someone you trust, too, cuz we detail Icelandic girls here. Yeah. We're threatened by Iceland. I mean, sure if we were all Polar Bears, or trees, but ah forget it.

Next, grab a copy of TrueCrypt and if you're adventurous enough, try the new features, that include completely masking the entire boot drive with a fake OS partition. For those more conservative, just lock it down with the strongest encryption you can select and hide the files in an unassuming directory. Not Music or Movies, since our government is also the RIAA/MPAA's lapdog and will be checking those. Throw it in a place that it would be reasonable to find large files of odd types, like a Program Files/Adobe/AdobeBackupRepair. Split them into different sizes, name them things like ClientPermissionsRepair.dll, FlashPluginUpdater.bho, etc. I haven't checked, but I assume the actual encrypted files have no header info to identify them as encrypted. Clear out your Windows logs (Google it if yo don't know how), and of course run TrueCrypt from a flash or external drive. Wipe the unused space with something like Eraser, delete Eraser or other secure file deletion programs. Generally speaking, modern hard drive platters are mostly unreadable after a 7-pass algorithm, but the more paranoid may want to spend the time with a 35-pass Guttman.

After all, our laws are more to make the morons in our country feel like they are being listened to. They are totally ineffective in combating their primary objective and just serve to make those of us with any gray matter scared to challenge the gov. Pathetic.

Sf'nN approaching

Don't forget to submit your abstracts by Thursday! I will be skipping the presentation thing this year, but I'll be there. A couple code bugs have kept me from pushing out some more MUA schtuffthz in time for the deadline (along with that annoying, looming prelim).

But, the Neurocritic has the deets on a paper in PLoS on trends in submissions to the conference. Even has pretty graphs and funky statistics.

Sf'nN

The abstract search whirley gig thingy is up for SfN, which means public disclosure, which means I can post info.

In case you're interested, two posters from our lab have been chosen for the SfN Press Book:
- (517.4/UU20) Directional tuning in motor cortex of a person with ALS (Simeral, Kim, ...)
- (517.15/VV1) Motor cortex local field potentials and multi-unit activity during intended movements in humans with tetraplegia (King, Truccolo, ...)

The lab has several great posters on display, so do a search for 'Donoghue' or 'Hochberg' for more. I'll post a list later with all the kids' posters linked.

Here's mine and Wilson's:

Program#/Poster#:	517.15/VV1
Title:	Motor cortex local field potentials and multi-unit activity during intended movements in humans with tetraplegia
Location:	San Diego Convention Center: Halls B-H
Presentation Start/End Time:	Monday, Nov 05, 2007, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Authors:	*B. KING1, W. TRUCCOLO1, G. M. FRIEHS2,3, J. STEIN4, J. P. DONOGHUE1,5,6, L. R. HOCHBERG1,5,7; 1Dept. of Neurosci., 2Dept. of Clin. Neurosciences, Brown Univ., Providence, RI; 3Dept. of Neurosurgery, Rhode Island Hosp., Providence, RI; 4Dept. of Physical Med. and Rehabil., Spaulding Rehabil. Hospital, Harvard Med. Sch., Boston, MA; 5Rehabil. Res. and Develop. Service, Dept. of Veterans Affairs Med. Ctr., Providence, RI; 6Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc., Foxborough, MA; 7Dept. of Neurology, Massachusetts Gen. Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Spaulding Rehabil. Hospital, Harvard Med. Sch., Boston, MA
We examined the relationships between motor cortex (MI) local field potentials (LFP) and multiunit activity (MUA) and intended movement in two humans with tetraplegia due to spinal cord transection (participant S1) or pontine stroke (S3). As part of a pilot clinical trial of the BrainGate Neural Interface System (IDE), a microelectrode array was chronically implanted in the dominant MI arm (knob) area in each participant. We investigated LFP and MUA activities offline in two main tasks: imagined pursuit tracking of a cursor moving on a computer monitor, and a 4 or 8-direction ‘neural cursor’ center-out step tracking task in which the cursor position was driven by the participant’s motor intention, decoded from MI spiking activity via a neural interface system. Recorded intra-cortical LFPs during the center-out task had features similar to those previously observed during reaching movements in monkeys. Typical attenuation of beta-oscillation (~20 Hz) and ‘motor’ event related potentials (ERPs) appeared 200-500ms after the instruction to move to the target. ERPs were statistically different (p<0.05)>
Disclosures:	B. King, None; W. Truccolo, None; G.M. Friehs, Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc., B. Research Grant (principal investigator, collaborator or consultant and pending grants as well as grants already received); Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc., E. Ownership Interest (stock, stock options, patent or other intellectual property); Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc., F. Consultant/Advisory Board; J. Stein, None; J.P. Donoghue, Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc., E. Ownership Interest (stock, stock options, patent or other intellectual property); Chief Scientific Officer: Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc., Other; L.R. Hochberg, Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc., B. Research Grant (principal investigator, collaborator or consultant and pending grants as well as grants already received).
Support:	Office of Research and Development, Rehabilitation Research and Development Service, Dept. of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Providence, RI
	National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) Neural Prosthesis Program, NINDS Grant NS25074
	Office of Naval Research (award N00014-06-1-0185)
	Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems, Inc.