Dear Collegues,
In common with all professional software developers, we have been examining
potential year 2000 (Y2k, Millenium bug) problems with our software. There
appear to be a few issues with older versions of the SPM package, outlined
below:
SPM96: Will work OK except that the date on
printouts will show the year as 1900
SPM95: As above, plus a glitch on Feb29th 2000,
resulting in all p-values being halved for
analyses run on that day. (Maybe a good time to
resurrect that non-significant data.)
SPM94: Preliminary investigation suggests that SPM94
has major problems with the 1999-2000 date change.
Do not analyse any real data after December 31st, as
SPM will physically paint blobs onto the actual
surface of the subjects cortex in orange vinyl
silk emulsion paint. This paint will require skilled
neurosurgery to remove. (At least SPM offers the
facility to filter results by corrected significance,
thereby protecting from lots of blobs appearing in
locations unconnected with the task.)
SPMclassic: ...has an interesting y2k quirk: If you can
get hold of matlab3, SPMclassic, and a Sun SPARCstation 1,
then set the time/date to 23:55 31/12/99, start an
analysis of the "verbal fluency" data using ks5_6x2.m,
and wait five minutes. We haven't tried it, but we think
what happens is that the results appear in the January 1900
edition of Nature, thereby giving you an eighty year head
start on the entire neuroimaging community.
The next release of SPM will be fully y2k compliant. Due for release
exactly a year from today (April 1st) it will be called SPM00, and
known colloquially as "ess pee emm nineteen-hundred". Loans for purchase
of SPM00 will be available at an annual percent rate - including
limitation of (APR-IL) f001 (f=euro).
Lots of love,
-spm
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| -___ ____ __ __ The Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology - |
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| \__ \ )___/ ) ( Functional Neuroimaging Software |
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