My name is Ben and I’m a self-taught programmer with no formal computer science training. A few years ago I gained the painful self-awareness that my scientific programming was shitty. I’m not saying it was wrong (I hope not) but it was just bad. I confused familiarity with my language of choice with proficiency. I had […]
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matlab rant 2
So I just read this great rant about Matlab by Olivia Guest, and it reminded me to update my previous rant about Matlab, so here it is. For the record, I don’t disagree with anything Olivia said, and I’m not overly defending Matlab. I am trapped in its local minima and am slowly reaching escape velocity, moving over […]
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new guest editorial piece out in Perception
A short viewpoint piece that Keith and I wrote just came out in Perception. Go check it out, it’s open access. May, K. A., & Vincent, B. T. (2016). Fewer Statistical Tests … or Better Ones? Perception. http://doi.org/10.1177/0301006616677909
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A grammar of multi-panel scientific plots: initial thoughts
In common with many scientists, I have no formal training in computer science and my coding skills have been entirely self-taught. I’ve been coding for over a decade and a half, and I thought I was a relatively good programmer, but I had mistaken familiarity with expertise. And so recently I have been on a […]
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Bayesian analysis toolbox for delay discounting, version 1.3
Posterior predictive checks The toolbox now calculates 2 measures of “goodness of fit” of the models. This is a useful quantitative reassurance that the models describe the participant discounting behaviour better than chance. In turn, this is important when we come to deciding which (if any) data files we should exclude. You can go and […]
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Bayesian analysis toolbox for delay discounting, version 1.2
I’ve just released Version 1.2 of the toolbox ‘Bayesian analysis toolbox for delay discounting.’ The main feature of this release was the addition of new models. For example, you can now estimate discount rates (ignoring the magnitude effect). So you can obtain estimates of the discount rate k, which is very useful if your primary […]
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Pimp your research code using UML class diagrams
Ideally, all research code should be made available at the point of submitting a paper. I’ve found that the way I write my research code has changed for the better now that I’ve made a commitment to making it open. However it can somewhat opaque and time consuming to understand, so how can we help those wanting to review, use, […]
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Hierarchical Bayesian estimation and hypothesis testing for delay discounting tasks
I am happy to announce my 3rd paper of the year, accepted for publication in Behavior Research Methods. Following my initial foray into writing review papers (2 earlier this year), this is my first methods paper, and also my first contribution to higher-level decision making.
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Cognitive modelling 3: the importance of a script
One of the key things we must avoid is mess and confusion. In the last post I briefly covered one possible template for a research project. One of the reasons why cognitive modelling projects might be a little tricky is because you are not just using an off the shelf software package. For example, if […]
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