Jeffrey C. Erlich @jerlich@qoto.org

This is an old project, but by some miracle it's still working and I woke up this morning wanting to celebrate the things I love more.

This Inkplate e-ink screen shows Conway's Game of Life, seeded from tarpits I have on the Internet. The tarpits are programs on my computer that superficially look like insecure Telnet and Remote Desktop services, but actually exist to respond super slowly and make bots scanning the Internet 'get stuck'.

When a bot connects to the tarpit, the data it sends gets squished into a 5x5 grid and 'stamped' onto a Game of Life board. Data from a bot at the IP address 1.1.x.x will get stamped on the top left corner, data from a bot at 254.254.x.x will get stamped on the bottom right corner.

Conway's Game of Life, a set of simple rules that govern whether cells should turn on or off, updates the display once per second. The result is that bot attacks end up appearing as distinct 'creatures', that get bigger and more angry looking over time (as their centre is updated with new data). After the attack finishes, the 'creature' eventually burns itself out.

Despite that description, it's a really chill piece of art that doesn't draw too much attention but I can happily watch for a long time.

Credit for the idea goes to @_mattata, I had been wanting to make a real-life version of XKCD #350 for years before seeing his Botnet Fishbowl project.

#projects #inkplate #esp32 #eink #infosec #tarpit

@NicoleCRust @axoaxonic

Why wouldn't emotions be amenable to computational theories/modeling? When you hear news and have an emotional response, that's a computation. Information coming in is turned into anger, sadness, whatever else. A computational theory would be quite helpful in order to explain why certain emotions rather than others arise in response to certain inputs

I have just uploaded a new preprint: "Concerns about Replicability, Theorizing, Applicability, Generalizability, and Methodology across Two Crises in Social Psychology". I was amazed at how much history is repeating. https://psyarxiv.com/dtvs7/ It is full of extremely cool quotes from the previous crisis that could just as easily have been written in 2015. I don't know why I didn't know about all these papers, but I hope to spread some historical awareness among my fellow meta-scientists.

Do you know where the term “liberal arts” comes from? I long assumed it meant “liberal” as in “all-inclusive” or something…but no. The original Latin phrase, _artes liberalis_, means roughly “skills or practiced principles worthy of a free person.” Free as in taking a fully privileged part in civic life. Free as in self-determining. Free as in not a servant or a slave.
12/

In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul. I took it for two very good reasons:

1. I was (and am) named Paul.
2. The prof was (and is) cool.

I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

WHAT LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION IS FOR: A THREAD

1/

For the 28% who don't know pipx yet, I really like it: it's a tool for installing Python CLI utilities that gives them their own hidden virtual environment for their dependencies and then adds the tool itself to your PATH - so you can install stuff without worrying about it breaking anything else

pipx install sqlite-utils
pipx install datasette
pipx install llm

Etc https://pypa.github.io/pipx/

Given that "the era of exponential growth in academic research is over", Casey Bergman had (2012) some advice for senior academics:

"3) For established academics: you came up during the halcyon days of growth in science, so bear in mind that you had it easy relative to those trying to make it today. So when you set your expectations for your students or junior colleagues in terms of performance, recruitment or tenure, be sure to take on board that they have it much harder now than you did at the corresponding point in your career [see points 1) and 2)]. A corollary of this point is that anyone actually succeeding in science now and in the future is (on average) probably better trained and works harder than you (at the corresponding point in your career), so on the whole you are probably dealing with someone who is more qualified for their job than you would be. So don’t judge your junior colleagues with out-of-date views (that you might not be able to achieve yourself in the current climate) and promote values from a bygone era of incessant growth. Instead, adjust your views of success for the 21st century and seek to promote a sustainable model of scientific career development that will fuel innovation for the next hundred years."

https://caseybergman.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/the-logistics-of-scientific-growth-in-the-21st-century/

HT @quantixed

#academia #science #ECR #EarlyCareerScientists #TenureTrack #PhD

Glasgow Psychology/Neuroscience is hiring! Four tenured lectureships in Behavioural Neuroscience (animal x 3 and human x 1) Closing Date: 20th July 2023 Please boost https://www.nature.com/naturecareers/job/12800829/senior-lecturer-lecturer-research-and-teaching-track-4-posts-/

A short argument for why the big publishers cannot be part of a publishing reform effort

Science is stuck in a vicious cycle it is hard to escape from. The decision to publish a scientific paper is made based on an evaluation of its likely importance and technical correctness. Scientists are evaluated based on these publication decisions, and resources (jobs, grants and promotions) are distributed accordingly.

The current system distorts scientific priorities. Science is incredibly competitive, resources are allocated on a short term basis, and the primary metric used to evaluate scientists is their publication record. As a consequence, there is an unavoidable pressure to select problems and design studies that can lead to results that are likely to be favourably evaluated and published in the short term. This is in opposition to the long term scientific value, a fact that appears to be widely acknowledged by working scientists (https://www.vox.com/2016/7/14/12016710/science-challeges-research-funding-peer-review-process).

The current system is a vicious cycle and stable equilibrium. In principle, we could choose to evaluate scientists and their work in a better way. However, no individual or small group can do this alone. If an institution chooses to hire scientists who do work that they believe will be of enduring scientific value despite being unlikely to win short term grant funding, they will take a huge financial hit. Public research is under such severe resource constraints that this is simply not feasible for most institutions even if they wished to do so. Similarly, a public funding body that makes decisions based on long term scientific value and not short term publishability is likely to be able to count fewer high profile papers in their output, and compared to other funding bodies will appear to be underperforming when they are reviewed at the government level. Individual scientists have even less flexibility than these institutions.

Journal prestige cements this problem. It is the widespread availability of an easily calculated metric based on journal prestige that makes this cycle so hard to break. If there were no such metric, different groups could try different approaches and the effect would not be so obvious in the short term. The availability of the metric forces all institutions to follow the same strategy, and makes it hard to deviate from this strategy.

The majority of big publishers commercial value rests on their journal prestige. If there were no funding implications to publishing in one journal rather than another, scientists would be free to choose based on price or features. There are widely available solutions with better features at virtually no cost. Consequently, the entire business model of these publishers would collapse without the journal prestige signal.

Big publishers therefore cannot be part of the needed reforms. The success of these reforms would untie the evaluation of the quality of scientific work from the journal it is published in, and this would destroy the business model of these publishers. They will therefore do everything in their power to resist such reform.

Divorcing from the big publishers will not be enough. Journal prestige is the cement of the current negative stable equilibrium, but eliminating that will not guarantee a globally better system. We need systems for publishing and evaluating science that is diverse and under the control of researchers. This is what we intend to do with Neuromatch Open Publishing (https://nmop.io/).

Since announcing our new publishing model, we’ve been pleased with the engagement and questions we’ve had from the scientific community. We’ve compiled four of our most frequently asked questions and their answers here: https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/2b765a27/elife-s-new-model-your-questions-answered?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

Closing soon!

We’re seeking a postdoc to develop computational accounts of how humans and other animals make foraging decisions, in collaboration with the groups of @Brain_apps (Birmingham) and Nathan Lepora (Bristol).

Post is until 14th Feb 2025. Closing March 30th 2023.

Email me for queries

Pls Boost!

More details and application: https://jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=SCI092323

We just covered this paper at Journal Club and it is impressive:
"Tracking neural activity from the same cells during the entire adult life of mice". Nature #Neuroscience 2023
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01267-x

Flexible implants such as this (and Neuralink's) are ideal because they move with the brain. An issue with this one is that it cuts lots of axons during implantation. But its longevity is amazing. And this study counts the gray hairs on mice!

Great paper by @anneurai & C. Kelly in @eLife : academia must change to respond to the climate crisis, by shifting from a business producing papers and graduated students to a system that works towards well being, community building and fairness ! 🌈 🤝
https://elifesciences.org/articles/84991?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic