Andrew Kennard @askennard@qoto.org

Helping someone debug someone, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.

I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.

Hello naparistas! We are proud/relieved to announce the release of napari 0.4.19! 🥳 Back in August @czaki was like, "I think we should make a quick bug-fix release post 0.4.18”… 6 months later… 😅 #FOSS #OpenSource

We fixed major, long-standing bugs with color handling in Labels layers, and improved performance — especially for (u)int8/16 data. It's also easier to create custom colormaps — see 1st pic which uses a variant of Glasbey. 😍

Check out the full release notes! https://napari.org/stable/release/release_0_4_19.html

Moralizing QRPs without acknowledging or providing alternatives for our punishing reward / job / work system does not align with my personal values or the values of the academic system I want to be building.

Happy #MicroscopyMonday!

The New Yorker & single cell seq

I traveled to Paris to give my philosophy crash course for scientists (http://johannesjaeger.eu/philosophy.html) to a wonderful group of PhD students at LPI Paris, as I do every year.

Contact me if you want to bring this course to your own institute!

It's not only fun, but also useful allowing you to become a better researcher through philosophy. The course has an interactive, discussion-based format that is based on an online series of lecture which are freely available: https://youtu.be/EH3-9myS8qU?si=gGxiF0sj5S_eij2S.

Holy shit I love this research paper

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1

#anthropology #anthro #academia #academicresearch #longevity

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of MBE, the SMBE journals will be publishing Perspectives and Virtual Issues each month highlighting our historic and contemporary contributions to a specific topic in molecular evolution. Read more in our first Perspective, written by the EiCs of both journals. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msad264 #science #evolution #biology #genome #evolgen_paper

I guess we do #introduction posts over here? I work on the #neuroscience (am I doing those hashtags right!?) of learning and memory, specifically how we learn while we navigate space and context. To do this, I take in vivo recordings (currently calcium imaging but ephys has my heart) of freely moving rats! After that, I use computational and mathematical approaches to analyze their neural activity! I am currently a BRAIN Initiative K99/R00 postdoc at Northwestern working with John Disterhoft and Sara Solla. I was trained at MIT with Matt Wilson, where I got my PhD in biology, and my BS is from Carnegie Mellon. Welcome!

Early-bird deadline is Friday 19 January for Journal of Cell Science 2024 Journal Meeting 'Diversity and Evolution in Cell Biology' organised by Gautam Dey, Lillian Fritz-Laylin, Snezhka Oliferenko, Meg Titus & Michael Way. Apply to attend at https://www.biologists.com/meetings/jcsevocellbio24/
#cellbiology #evolutionarybiology #comparativebiology #Phylogenetics #imaging #microscopy #geneticengineering
@gautamdey @WallaceUCSF
@mcsymbiont @DudinLab @thattai @BungoAkiyoshi

Born in 1919, Isabella Aiona Abbott became the first native Hawaiian woman to earn a PhD in #science.

A marine botanist, Abbott became the 1st woman & person of color to become a full professor in Stanford’s Biology dept.

She wrote 8 books, >150 articles & was awarded the Gilbert Morgan Smith Medal by the National Academy of Sciences.

In 2005, Abbott was named a “Living Treasure of Hawaii” by the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii. https://woc.aises.org/content/isabella-aiona-abbott-becoming-“first-lady-limu” #history

So.

None of you thought it *might* be important to tell me that ferns have sperm that swim??? I just had to find all this out on my own?

And, (apparently, & no one thought to bring this up either🙄) fern plants are only one form... they have this 'other form' (tiny, ephemeral, difficult to find in the wild) alternates generations-- Fern spores don't grow into ferns! (WHAT) they grow into 'gemetophytes' (WHAT) THEN you get a fern.

Feel like I've uncovered a massive scandal.

Recently submitted a research grant. The online system didn't let me upload a document, asking instead to type it in (right; copy-paste!) instead. So adding figures required inserting them one by one at the right places using a rich-text widget nobody asked for.

One week before the deadline, I was ready, but upon performing the last update of the text I forgot to re-insert the figures – because of course "select all" and "paste" over removed the figures. Our research office then submitted the grant ... and now it can't be updated any further, despite the deadline still being in the future.

Would like to think it's a natural experiment in not adding bullshit graphics like a Gantt chart, but the preliminary data is missing too. Given the abysmal funding ratios, it's unlikely to have any effect whatsoever on the default answer: reject.

Grant writing is fun. It's clear chances of funding are miserable. To me, the value is elsewhere: on clarifying my own mind on what's worth doing, spell it out in detail, and then find ways to see the project through despite the lack of funding – chances are much higher if one doesn't care where the work gets done and who gets the credit. After all, what matters is adding more paragraphs to the proverbial book of knowledge.

#academia

No, I cannot rank this student among their class (I have not taught classes at this institution!) & I cannot compare them as "2nd in 10"or similar among the master students I supervised: I supervised folks at three different institutions & systems in two different countries plus every one has their strength and weaknesses, there is no order from best to worst.

My reference letter will tell you nothing and you are wasting everyone's time because of your stupid form 😬

#AcademicChatter #Academia

All engineering is reverse engineering if you document things poorly enough.

Really useful comprehensive post on clustering methods in #RStats

https://petolau.github.io/Overview-clustering-methods-in-R/

Addgene is stopping all activity on Twitter/X

https://blog.addgene.org/addgene-is-stopping-use-of-x

In December I asked for suggestions of papers for a course I teach. Thank you to those who responded.

Here is the full list for anyone interested. It's a selection of twenty or so cool papers in biology from last year. I'll find out this afternoon which one(s) the students have picked for their coursework!

https://quantixed.org/2024/01/08/papers-for-md9a8-2024-edition/

The right is using asymmetrical shame warfare against the left. Trump has taught Republicans to never be ashamed of anything they’ve done, no matter how heinous or indefensible their actions. Democrats, OTOH, still have consciences. So Republicans can hound somebody like Claudine Gay out of her job, knowing that the same attack will not work against their own. They will repeat this playbook as long as it keeps working.