Add blog post for December

blog/2023-12-21-december.md

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+---
+slug: december-2023-updates
+title: December 2023 Updates
+authors: alejandro
+tags: [neurosynth]
+---
+Hello Neurosynth Users,
+
+We're excited to share our December updates with you! It’s been a great month, having announced the release of Neurosynth Compose on social media. In the last month we’ve seen **over 1,200 new user visits**, with **200 users signing up for an account**! 🚀
+
+Help us keep this growth going by [sharing our announcement](http://localhost:3000/compose-docs/blog/announcing-ns-compose) with your colleagues. 🧑‍🔬
+
+# 🌟 What’s New 🌟
+
+We’ve also continued to introduce new features and improve the user experience. Here’s some highlights:
+
+**Large-scale association tests**
+
+A key feature that set aside Neurosynth were large-scale “association tests” (previously referred to as “reverse inference” test) 
+
+Whereas a typical meta-analysis tells you about the consistency of activation in a set of studies, an association test tells you whether activation in a region occurs *more consistently for studies in your set of studies versus a large reference sample of studies*. 
+
+Neurosynth leverages large-scale neuroimaging datasets as a reference to which you can compare the specific studies in given meta-analysis. 
+
+That's important, because this effectively allows you to control for base rate differences between regions. Certain regions, such as the insula or lateral PFC for instance, play a very broad role in cognition, and hence tend to be consistently activated for many different terms. Thus, if you see insula activity in your meta-analysis, you can erroneously conclude that the insula is involved in the process of your study. A large-scale association test lets you determine if the activity you observe in a region occurs to a greater extent in your meta-analysis than in other studies, making it possible to make more confident claims that a given region is involved in a particular process, and isn't involved in just about every task.
+
+Previously these association tests were available for the automatically generated maps on neurosynth.org. **Now you can perform large-scale association tests for your custom meta-analyses in Neurosynth Compose.** In addition, we also support other types of “pairwise” algorithms, such as ALE Subtraction, and you are free to choose from a variety of reference datasets, including the Neurosynth corpus. 
+
+**User Experience Enhancements**
+
+Based on your valuable feedback, we've made numerous bug fixes and improvements, notably: 
+
+* **Simplified Curation**: The review import page has been removed, and summary information is now added directly to the tag step.
+
+* **Searching UI**: We've replaced the dropdown with a selection gallery, making it easier to choose your preferred search method, and we now pre-populate search names for Neurostore.
+
+* **Streamlined Duplicate Resolution**: The 'resolve duplicates' function will only appear if duplicates are present. 
+
+* **Improved Editing Workflow**: The process of editing studies has been made more straightforward, allowing you to start editing with ease.
+
+We hope you enjoy these changes, and be sure to leave us feedback or ask questions if you have any problems or suggestions.
+
+
+Cheers,
+
+The Neurosynth Team 🧠