Stephan Saalfeld @herrsaalfeld@qoto.org

„Welche Signale senden wir als Land in die Welt? Kommt her, wir brauchen Arbeitskräfte! Fühlt euch aber nie sicher! Richtet euch gar nicht häuslich ein“, sagt die Chemnitzer Ausländerbeauftragte Etelka Kobuß, die die Familie unter… https://taz.de/Von-Abschiebung-bedrohter-Vietnamese/!5915088/

#bioimaging #microscopy #science #meetings #machinelearning
We have an exciting symposium on Machine Learning in Biological Imaging – How to Train Your Artificial Neural Network at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2023. The abstract submission deadline closes on Feb 16. https://www.microscopy.org/MandM/2023/program/descriptions.cfm#biological

Final presentations plus concert by Master Boot Record — what a way to end #DLinJava!!!

Thanks to all participants for being awesome, @humantechnopole for having us, and @AI4Life and #GlobalBioImageing for all the support!

Hi all! I’ll be live on @NPR Science Friday tomorrow with Melanie Mitchell of the Santa Fe Institute! We’ll be talking all things AI, including yes, ChatGPT. Tune in and ask us some questions!

@humantechnopole @AI4Life Impressions of what happens at #DLinJava when we are not coding. Lunch in a real and active prison, concerts of various kinds, bar inspections. #fun and #productive 👍

@humantechnopole @AI4Life And the fun continues… here some dinner impressions! #refueling @AI4Life #GlobalBioImaging #DLinJava

The range of all estimates of how much #CO₂ is taken up by the #ocean is now larger than the current fossil fuel #emissions of the #European Union.

Help us reduce the uncertainty by a targeted benchmarking of the ocean biogeochemistry models within the framework of the #horizon2020 project #OceanICU Improving Carbon Understanding.

Apply for the 2 year #PostDoc position @awi by 07 March 2023.

https://jobs.awi.de/Vacancies/1271/Description/2

First hackathon ever hosted @humantechnopole — sooo exciting after years of pandemic and us moving here to 🇮🇹!

Our goal? Bringing #DeepLearning to #Java and enable open bioimage analysis tools to benefit from this! @AI4Life #Icy #Fiji #Qpath #DLinJava

Want to work at the intersection of morphometry and representation learning for bioimage analysis?

We have TWO open postdoctoral positions! Each comes with its own challenging biological question, unique dataset, and exceptional team of collaborators!

Details below👇

The emerging connectome, or synaptic wiring diagram, of the Drosophila brain has transformed fly circuit neuroscience. But the ventral nerve cord, which mediates limb proprioception and motor control in the adult fly, has lagged behind. We set out to fill this gap. 🧵1/n
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.15.520299v1

Today is day 1 of the Global Bioimaging Hackathon on deep learning models in bioimaging Java-based image analysis tools in Milan at Human Technopole.

This is just a straight-up joke, right?

Tufte has been an inspiration over the years. But here we have a series of quotes and admonitions about misleading statistics—followed by the completely unsourced, utterly imprecise, almost certainly inaccurate, and likely far-overestimated figure about something we can at best estimate only very approximately and with substantive caveats and qualifications.

Pfizer and Moderna defending their price increase of Covid vaccines - from about $20 to about $120 - by saying the price “is consistent with the value delivered”

In other words, it’s the price they feel they can get away with because the vaccines are so crucial to the well being of much of the planet.

Capitalism is awful

#COVID #News #LATimes

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-01-24/column-moderna-and-pfizer-are-jacking-up-the-price-of-covid-vaccines-the-government-should-stop-them

With global sea ice currently at *record low* levels, both poles (#Arctic and #Antarctic) are more than two standard deviations below average (1981-2010)...

More visuals: https://zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-ice-figures/. Data from https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index.

@albertcardona @NicoleCRust @neurobongo @xaq

It’s a very fair critique, and some of the PR does us more harm than good. For example, we don’t have a map of 100,000 cells that tells us little, we have an EM volume spanning 100,000 cells that was at the edge of what was possible at the time that still requires a lot of (manual or automated) proofreading to turn into analyzable data.

The full set of initial science papers from the mm3 volume is almost ready to submit, but our existing work has started to reveal details about the nature of connectivity in a cell-type-specific manner. For example, a 2022 eLife paper (Dorkenwald et al.) shows that you see a bimodal distribution of synapse sizes on layer 2/3 cells, but _only_ if you restrict analysis to synapses from other layer 2/3 cells. Similarly, we found a variety of factors that could predict how much chandelier input a pyramidal cell would receive. These data suggest that neurons have type-specific rules for connectivity and plasticity that are hard to see if you can’t separate connections out this way.

More recently (as in Monday), I posted a manuscript to the biorxiv describing inhibitory connectivity across a column of visual cortex that shows that inhibitory selectivity (at least at the cell type level) is the norm, not the exception. In particular, we find selective inhibition not only for each excitatory projection class (IT, NP, ET, and CT) as well as sublaminar groups of IT neurons. This suggests a network of precise inhibition across cortex. We also find a new class of disinhibitory specialist interneuronal that targets basket cells, unlike the well-described VIP->SST circuit. This opens up a host of follow up questions, and we hope that using patch-seq data to link EM data to transcriptomics will help make this experimentally possible.

Ultimately, I think we’re still in the early days of getting the data out and finding the science in it. This is very much like in Drosophila, where the first studies at the whole-brain scale were highly focused. But I believe it will go the same way, becoming a way to study large scale structure at single cell resolution, complementing single lab studies, and helping answer unexpected questions. For example, one of my colleagues noticed that oligodendrocyte precursor cells in the EM looked like they were doing phagocytosis, which wasn’t a known function for them, and she just published a nice PNAS paper (Buchanan et al) about it.

I just encountered my first conference that won't allow me to give a remote talk when an emergency (ish -- gave 3 weeks notice) responsibility as a caregiver came up. It's not a big deal to me not to give a talk, I'm just kind of disappointed in the organizers.

The party of free speech, folks!

Florida teachers told to remove books from classroom libraries or risk felony prosecution

@juddlegum

https://popular.info/p/florida-teachers-told-to-remove-books