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...
3. "MATLAB DocMaker: making it easier to create documentation for your MATLAB toolbox"
Pick of the Week by Mike Croucher
blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2026/01/30/matlab-docmaker-making-it-easier-to-create-documentation-for-your-matlab-toolbox/
as well as the reply by the original author, similarly showing problems in online assessed behavioral data: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
I am a dyed in the wool MATLAB user so I also find anything pythonesque fiddly! The Pavlovia Surveys can be 'standalone' - or embedded into the standard sort of psychophysics experiments we are used to from PsychoPy - pavlovia.org/docs/surveys....
paging @psychopy.org! PsychoPy Surveys can ingest QSF files pavlovia.org/docs/surveys... exported from Qualtrics www.qualtrics.com/support/surv... . They have a flat fee for a year of experiments, with a massively generous license. They are open science first - and all round good folk!
Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects
doi.org/10.1177/2515...
We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share!
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...
poor bee GOLD_07, whose embarrassing mistake has been immortalised in a way beyond his comprehension
#MATLAB #MATLABambassador #OpenScience #Kinematics #Autism #ParkinsonsDisease #PsychSciSky
The long-standing anecdotal, subjective likeness between the two doesn't hold at the objective kinematic level. This matters enormously for diagnostic practice given that autistic people score highly on PD rating scales and are being diagnosed with PD at elevated rates.
The finding -- as Lydia sets out much more eloquently in the quoted post -- is that autistic and parkinsonian movement patterns were clearly distinguishable from one another.
Those features then go into classification algorithms trying to sort autistic, parkinsonian and control participants from each other.
-- how sharply people slow down around tight corners (speed modulation i.e. the power law), how often they stop and restart within a single stroke (sub-movements), and how quickly they can initiate a movement at all (reaction time).
What the code actually does: pulls fine-grained kinematic features from shape-tracing trajectories
All the impenetrable comments, questionable variable names and slapdash implementations are mine. All the inspired analytical choices are Lydia's.
