Le Code de la conscience

[Invité]

They also note that a specific software bug was discovered:

Second, a 15-year-old bug was found in 3dClustSim while testing the three software packages (the bug was fixed by the AFNI group as of May 2015, during preparation of this manuscript). The bug essentially reduced the size of the image searched for clusters, underestimating the severity of the multiplicity correction and overestimating significance...

I.

Et voilà qu'on vient de découvrir un autre bug, qui altère les résultats, de certains outils importants utilisés en imagerie par résonance magnétique iRMF.

Last month we learned that a problem in commonly used fMRI analysis tools was giving rise to elevated rates of false positives. Now, another issue has been discovered in an fMRI tool. The affected software is called GingerALE and the ‘implementation errors’ are revealed in a new paper by Simon B. Eickhoff et al., the developers of the package
[...]
Should users re-run these old analyses with the latest GingerALE? What should researchers do if they find that their results change?

This is a tricky issue that arises whenever software errors of this kind are discovered. I can’t see many neuroscientists being keen to revisit and perhaps correct (or even, retract) their old papers.
[...]
Given that these errors put researchers in an “unfortunate situation” – potentially, a catastrophic situation if a really serious bug made it into someone’s published papers – perhaps we need a formal system of software validation?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuro ... 7nP5dGVtQI

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