Whoops...<p><pre><code> "there are abundant opportunities for error, particularly when you
are relying on software to do much of the work. This was made glaringly
apparent back in 2009, when a graduate student conducted an fM.R.I.
scan of a dead salmon and found neural activity in its brain when it
was shown photographs of humans in social situations. Again, it was
a salmon. And it was dead."</code></pre>
The authors' of the paper feel it is being misinterpreted and tried to submit errata to PNAS:[1]<p>They tried to change the following sentence:<p>“These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.”<p>To<p>“These results question the validity of a number of fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of weakly significant neuroimaging results.”<p>Link to discussion in /r/NeuroScience: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/neuroscience/comments/4ri72b/the_software_for_fmri_analysis_results_in/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/neuroscience/comments/4ri72b/the_so...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/nichols/entry/errata_for_cluster/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/nichols/entry/errata_for_cluster/</a>
Much better article and discussion in the link that sctb posted. This article has a number of issues... it's conflating several different problems with fMRI without really explaining them, then arguing that it's worthless -- as opposed to just needing more groups to follow best practices.
This story reminds me of the Therac-25 (although no deaths were attributed to this bug). The book "Fatal Defect" should be required reading for any software engineer.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Defect-Chasing-Killer-Computer/dp/0679740279" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Defect-Chasing-Killer-Computer/...</a>
Whoops. Certainly an interesting contrasting article to the recent:<p>Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practices” (2014)
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12377385" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12377385</a>
How does this affect (or does this apply to) the recent "new brain map" paper from the Human Connectome Project?<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v536/n7615/full/nature18933.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v536/n7615/full/nature1...</a>