Had a great time presenting at #MBBS2026 in Berlin - thank you so much to the organisers for a wonderful conference
11.03.2026 18:21
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Had a great time presenting at #MBBS2026 in Berlin - thank you so much to the organisers for a wonderful conference
Artist ShouXin brilliantly captures the range of personalities of cats with his energetic pencil drawings. trib.al/R9wjsog
Are we born with a sense of space? 🧠
A new preprint from the #MoserGroup suggests that the brain’s internal navigation system 🍩 begins forming before young animals actively explore the world.
🧵(1:5) Have a look at the preprint here 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧠 Resting-state fMRI is often treated as the gold standard for studying the brain’s intrinsic organization.
But is it actually the best way to estimate functional architecture?
We tested this directly.
🧵1/8
Want to learn how to contribute to #opensource? 👩💻👨💻
Never used #Git before?
Join us for our free beginner-friendly workshop and learn the basics of contributing to open source projects like #psychopy
🗓 March 19th
⏰ 12:00 PM (UK time)
Everyone is welcome 🚀
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/my-first-p...
200+ compute hours on HPC coming up. Wish me luck. 🤞 The repo already has a battle-tested database that recovers automatically from HPC interruptions. Sometimes you have to make your own luck. 😄
#MATLAB #MATLABambassador #OpenScience #PreRegistration #PsychSciSky
Getting the calculation right is a prerequisite for everything that follows. You can't build clinical applications on shaky analytical foundations.
github.com/dagmarfraser/velocity-curvature-power-law-simulation
The trick: unknown true values cancel in pairwise pipeline comparisons. You don't need ground truth to test the framework in epirical data... hopefully! 🧠 We spin up a MATLAB implementation of Lin's CCC for that step, tested against R's DescTools::CCC to < 0.001 tolerance.
Two kinematic derivation methods × three regression approaches = six pipelines, stress-tested across synthetic trajectories with known ground truth. Noise colours (white, pink, red, black and inbetween), magnitudes(0-10mm), drawing speeds. Then validated against real movement data.
A shared question runs through all of them: where and when can we trust the power law calculation? In the presence of what level of noise? With what analytical tools? That's what this pre-registration tackles.
Introduced the papers behind this a few weeks back 👇 Fraser (2025): legacy methods bias the law's value. Cook (2026): autistic movements diverge. Hickman (2026): the law can help classifiers betwixt autism vs Parkinson's vs controls.
bsky.app/profile/dagmarfraser.bsky.social/post/3mfmasbyubc23
A power law linking speed and curvature is thought to underlie all biological motion. Humans, primates, bumblebees, elephants. But can we reliably measure it? We've pre-registered the biggest test yet. 14.7M parameters, six pipelines, seven databases. 🐘🐝
osf.io/dwxa2/registrations 🧵👇
Specific details about PLOS Biology's mandatory code-sharing policy
In support of #OpenScience, we routinely ask authors to openly share their #research #code before publication.
We are now formalizing this practice with a mandatory #code-sharing policy and clarifying what we mean by code sharing.
May be nice to cut-out the box for reference
plos.io/47dPeOW
🧪
Temporally-precise sensory encoding of predicted content, entraining motor oscillations to derive time. @akalt.bsky.social's first study out @currentbiology.bsky.social, testing parts of this idea (tinyurl.com/TiCSKaltenma...). Huge thanks @leverhulme.ac.uk ac.uk @erc.europa.eu, great work Aaron!
Funding Call Now Open!
If your science addresses industry-specific challenges, MathWorks invites you to submit for the Spring 2026 open call. Selected proposals may receive up to $20,000 (USD) in funding. 🧪
#MATLAB #Simulink #Scisky
Details and submission link 👉
www.mathworks.com/academia/res...
Autistics (N=17) on ageing journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... e.g. an autistic aged 46 on Parkinson's: "I have traits in common with Parkinson’s already... But it also might be that they don’t really have Parkinson’s, it’s just what autistic people look like when they get old. I’d like to know"
Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5
If this had existed earlier in my career it could have saved me hundreds of afternoons of visdiff and regret.
Can't make it live? Register anyway, they'll send the recording. spr.ly/6041horHd
#MATLAB #MATLABAmbassador #MathWorks #CodingTips
I am largely stuck in my ways. But if you want to actually be better - there's a free MathWorks webinar on 24 March (1pm or 6pm GMT) "Don't Be the Messy Coder." 45 minutes of small workflow tweaks that make code readable, reusable, and less likely to make future-you ask ‘who coded this nonsense’!? 😅
Functions that made perfect sense at 11pm on a Tuesday. Bugs I introduced by "just quickly fixing one thing." 28 years of MATLAB and the self-sabotage is, if anything, accelerating.
I have absolutely been (am?) the messy coder.
Scripts named final_FINAL_v73_actualfinal.m – even in recently uploaded repositories for pre-regs.
cool people, follow them!
I built a bluesky labeler for neuroscience methods.
1️⃣ follow/subscribe to: @neuromethods.bsky.social
2️⃣ like the post with your favorite method
➡️ get a shiny methods label in your profile/posts. 🌟
SfN Neuronline logo. Webinar series: Meet-the-Expert. No Pain, No Gain: Advice for Turbulent Times in Neuroscience Research. Wednesday, February 25, 1–2 p.m. EST. Cheryl L. Stucky, PhD.
Tomorrow is the day!
Learn how to navigate obstacles in the neuroscience field—from making mistakes in the lab to juggling work and personal life—in this Meet-the-Expert webinar.
Register here🔗: vist.ly/4sqe5
#neurosky #neuroskyence #academicchatter
Building on these, next week I'll share an exciting (to me at least!) pre-registration, that builds on all three. 👀 Watch this space.
#MATLAB #MATLABambassador #OpenScience #Kinematics #Autism #ParkinsonsDisease #PsychSciSky
That open science code is here github.com/dagmarfraser... - you can open it, edit it, run it in MATLAB Online without a license! Anyone gets 20 free hours a month, all UK universities will have unlimited use.
With work from 2025 - Biological kinematics: a detailed review of the velocity-curvature power law calculation link.springer.com/article/10.1... - these three papers form a constellation. In which we hope to set the calculation of the power law, and its divergences, on a principled footing.
Seven years since we began this work, and many of the ‘descendant’ publications have landed first. Such is academic publishing! 😅 Last week we published another paper where Lydia Hickman measures strikingly similar divergences in parkinsonian movement
bsky.app/profile/dagm...
The paper takes Huh and Sejnowski's beautiful 2015 work on the velocity-curvature power law, a spectrum of kinematic invariances thought to underlie all biological motion, and uses it to quantify subtle divergences in a neurodivergent population’s movements.
This one is deeply personal for me. I joined Jennifer Cook (the lead author's) lab back in 2019, and this paper was one of the very first things we started building together. 🧠✨
🚨 New paper alert! 🚨 The relationship between speed and curvature differs in autistic and non-autistic tracing movements
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
And just as important, the open code and data: osf.io/j4ncd/overvi...