Please stop using this graph to argue your topic is popular

It seems to have become quite common to use this sort of "number of publications" graph to argue for the importance of one's own research area:

 

The graph shows that the number of papers including a particular search term in their title, abstract, or keywords, has risen dramatically over the last few decades. In the example above, the search term in this case is "meditation OR mindfulness", following an analysis reported by Van Dam et al. (2017).

These were just some data I had easily to hand - there's no intention to imply here that mindfulness research is particularly prone to this kind of analysis.

One problem with this kind of analysis is that the number of scientific publications per year is also increasing for most disciplines. It's fairly easy to add this information to such a graph. For example, let's plot the number of papers including the word "psychology" in their title, abstract, or keywords, on the same axes:

This puts a slightly different perspective on things, and provides little support for Van Dam's claim that: "Over the past two decades, writings on mindfulness and meditation practices have saturated the public news media and scientific literature". The literature seems very far from saturated on this particular topic (depending on what 'saturated' is taken to mean - clearly not saturated in the same way that e.g. the US market for refrigerators is saturated).

If we express the number of "mindfulness OR meditation" papers as a percentage of the number of "psychology" papers, we get the following:

This graph gives us a different perspective to the one offered by Van Dam. The 'saturation' of mindfulness research in psychology was around a fairly stable low level of 1-2% from 1975 to 2000. It rose to a peak of about 6%  in 2012, but has been declining since.

Of course, there would be other, probably better ways, of calculating the 'market share' of a concept in the scientific literature than the method used here. The main point here is simply to demonstrate that raw counts are a very poor measure.

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PsychoPy on Linux

We've been using PsychoPy in our lab for a few years now, developing mainly on Linux, but often collecting data on Windows (shared testing facilities). On the basis of this experience, I recommend installing PsychoPy on Linux thus:

sudo apt install psychopy

This gives you quite an out of date version (1.85.3, released Aug 2017, for Ubuntu 18.04, as of Dec 2018), but trying to build it from source, or with pip, is just a huge time sink, often fails, and can kinda mess up your system in the process.  

This leads to a further recommendation. For archive purposes, archive your .py file as well as your .psyexp file, as more recent versions of Builder produce .psyexp files that are not backwards compatible!  

In fact, for portability, seriously consider treating PsychoPy mainly as a Python library, and develop experiments entirely as .py files, i.e. avoid Builder entirely. Builder is a good teaching tool, but anyone who can write R scripts can also learn how to write experiments directly in Python.

Renewed my FSFE donation

I renewed my Free Software Foundation Europe  supporter donation (60 EUR annually).

Donating to EFF

Donated $65 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Donating to TOR

Just donated $75 to the TOR project.

Plymouth University to open Brain Imaging Centre in 2020

Many years in the planning, yesterday we bought a 3T Siemens scanner to put in our new Brain Imaging Centre building (picture above). Due to open for business in Spring 2020.

Doom (2016) on Linux

Valve recently announced Steam Play, a system that allows previously Windows-only games to be played on Linux. It's in beta at the moment, but I thought I'd give it a go with Doom (2016). After a bit of a faff, it seems to work pretty well. The faff was that, on initially running, you just get a black screen. A search through the forums revealed that ALT+Enter brings it into a window on the desktop (rather than fullscreen), and it then works. From there, you can press ESC to bring up the game options, and set it back to fullscreen. Played for about an hour - works pretty well!

Of course, Doom 2016  not open source ... but it's still interesting how good Linux is getting as a games platform.