Jeffrey C. Erlich @jerlich@qoto.org

Congratulations to @lili on a superb PhD defense today!

Watercolor artwork by @lili's co-advisor Bing Brunton.

#neuroscience #phd

I went to sign some books at Woodstock's The Golden Notebook bookshop today and they gave me this book as a thank you. Two hours later her death was announced.

Nurture versus nature:

"Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income homes remain well behind their more economically advantaged peers years later in school. Each month, they recorded one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Two and a half years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families. Between professional and welfare parents, there was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating this verbal interaction to four years, a child in a professional family would accumulate experience with almost 45 million words, while an average child in a welfare family would hear just 13 million—coining the phrase the 30 million word gap."

https://products.brookespublishing.com/Meaningful-Differences-in-the-Everyday-Experience-of-Young-American-Children-P14.aspx

I don't think everyone realizes how much #neuroscience #opendata is really downloaded and reused...

e.g. our dataset of responses to visual stimuli has 18,000 downloads; wholebrain #zebrafish neural activity from the Ahrens lab has 7,000 downloads; Nick Steinmetz's eight-probe Neuropixels data has 6,500 downloads. and there are many commonly used neuro datasets on websites that don't count downloads that must have thousands too!

post your data and they will come :) #openscience

We are delighted to announce that Tim Behrens (@behrenstimb) has joined SWC as a Group Leader.

The Behrens Lab will strive to understand the neural mechanisms that support flexible goal-directed behaviour. In doing so, the team hope to build new bridges between human and animal neuroscience, between biological and artificial intelligence, and new methods for integrating across scales of neural activity.

Find out more: https://www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/research-news/tim-behrens-joins-swc-group-leader

We are excited to share that Dr Julia Harris will join SWC as a Group Leader in January.

The research conducted in the Harris lab will follow the activity of individual neurons across cycles of wake and sleep. The team will examine the cellular mechanisms involved in sleep-mediated circuit reorganisation and how these changes influence and refine behaviour across repeated cycles of wake and sleep.

Find out more: https://www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/research-news/julia-harris-open-sleep-lab-swc

Our review paper on #cortical integration of #vestibular and #visual signals is now out on @AnnualReviews. We delve into the fascinating topic, shedding light on knowledge gaps and suggesting promising directions for future research. Check it out!

#multisensoryintegration #percepcion #spatialnavigation #selfmotion #cortex #neurosciene #neuralcircuits

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-120722-100503

I'm finding it a little hard to work today with this in my head.

Antarctic ice extent is now 6.4 standard deviations below the mean. That is, I'm reliably told, a one in 13 billion year event.

We're about to see a lot of shit hit a lot of fans. And we are far from ready.

Business as usual is over. Politics as usual is over. We need to be putting our effort into building systems that can help us survive what greed and power and wilful blindness have wrought.

#ClimateCrisis #Antarctica

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/

This thread is now available as a blog post:
https://innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto

–––

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, Cal Roetzel, 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