Anirudh Wodeyar @awodeyar@qoto.org

@NicoleCRust @adredish @jpeelle @ct_bergstrom Yeah, those are good points.

With a lottery (% funding levels set) scientists would know how many submissions it would take to have a reasonable expectancy of success and plan accordingly.

If a lab has not been funded but consistently recieving “meritorious” ratings, other funding sources could make reasoned choices on providing smaller temporary investments (eg universities and foundations).

A lottery, by definition, would also fund an unbiased diversity of scientific projects to match the diversity of proposals over the long run. This is a huge for plus.

1. “Imagine we land a space probe on one of Jupiters’ moons, take up a sample of material, and find it is full of organic molecules. How can we tell whether those molecules are just randomly assembled goo or the outcome of some evolutionary process taking place on the planet?”

#science #scicomm #assemblytheory

Suck it, Lewis Hine.

#photography, #crows, #corvids

📑 "healthwashing": verb [ I or T ]
to make people believe that your computer-science grant or paper is about trying to improve health, while it really is an excuse to do maths and maybe you have a few biomedical signals on a thumb drive
⚕️💻

Now one of the problems of the #neuroscience community is that we're all split among multiple platforms. Really too bad.
And I really mean it. Aside from graduate school, from 2019 to 2022 was probably the time that I learned the most about the brain because of the vast amount of material shared on social media. It was great fun for some time. 😔

A great blue heron braving the turbulent waters coming out of the spillway at the Falls Lake Dam/Tailrace in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

They were releasing a quite bit of water via the spillway. It didn't stop this great blue heron from landing in the river to begin his morning hunt for fish. I really love the waves here as it gives a more dramatic look.

https://pixels.com/featured/great-blue-heron-turbulent-waters-chad-meyer.html

#heron #nature #birds #wildlife

Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice & health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages” - @alexhanna & @emilymbender

Vital:

https://t.co/j1V4F8yOj0

Online Now: Theory of collective mind https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(23)00168-7?rss=yes&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

What is the cost of science being conducted in English? @tatsuya_amano &co reveal that non-native English speakers spend more effort than native speakers in conducting scientific activities (reading, writing, preparing presentations...) #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/46Rfptc

With people flooding in from the bird site today, let me post a quick introduction: Hi, I’m Jens, I’m not posting enough here, hope to do better in the future. My background is that I used to do the #science and now I’m just talking about it, in any way that I can imagine.
If you’re reading this, I think you’re cool.

Alright folks, ready for this morning's lesson in #AIhype? On the dissection table:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/04/18/what-the-technology-behind-chatgpt-can-do-for-governance-risk-and-compliance/?sh=340c66d136db

Right off the bat, the headline looks fishy (which is why I clicked through, actually). Governance, risk and compliance sound like domains where you don't want a chaos-machine, TYVM.

Oh, and while we're here. Take a gander at that byline. Membership is fee-based, is it? Is this in fact an infomercial?

>>

Trying to find ways to get better at doing math by studying its neural correlates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_qwFfldMK4
"Overlapping neural responses to symbolic math and formal logic in the intra-parietal sulcus" Yun-Fei Liu, Dr. Shipra Kanjlia, and Dr. Marina Bedny 2020

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1603205113
"Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians" Marie Amalric and Stanislas Dehaene 2016

The dissimilarity with language networks is interesting, and maybe my hyperlexia and difficulties with dyscalculia relate to one another. The intraparietal involvement in math, logic, and the multiple demand system is extra interesting to me though, because it is also correlated with integration of perceptual information to organize scenes and represent objects. Thinking of doing #mathematics as manipulating imagined objects, instead of language-like representations like nominalism suggests, seems to fit the data.

It's like something the mathematician Yuri Manin said in his book, "Mathematics as Metaphor" (2007):

"But what are we studying when we are doing mathematics?
A possible answer is this: we are studying ideas which can be handled as if they were real things. (P. Davis and R. Hersh call them 'mental objects with reproducible properties')"

Just out in Nature Neuroscience:

Cortical regulation of two-stage rapid eye movement sleep

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01195-2?utm_source=neuro_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=toc_41593_25_12&utm_content=20221130