marathon @marathon0@qoto.org

Anyone on #Qoto or the wider #Fediverse attending #nodes2022 #neo4j conference next week? Maybe doing some live-tooting?

https://neo4j.com/blog/nodes-2022/

I've got Graph Pattern Matching and Bootstrapping Your Graph Project on my agenda for Day 1 so far... but I'm tossed between the "Fashion Retail Recommendations Using Neo4j Graph Data Science and Apache Arrow" and "Graph Modeling: The Shadow Graph" for the next session...

Is there any kind of dedicated group mechanism on here for people to share notes and comments live while attending a conference together online? Or maybe there is a dedicated Discord (or similar) for this already?

Do you have any photo of the #LunarEclipse? I'm from #italy and I missed it!

We read this very cool paper from Ayelet Sarel, Shaked Palgi, Dan Blum, Johnatan Aljadeff, Liora Las & Nachum Ulanovsky in our lab meeting today.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05112-2 (open access!)

They recorded from two bats flying back and forth in a 135m tunnel. They wirelessly recorded from the hippocampus of one of the bats and recorded the position and ultrasonic vocalizations of the bats. As the bats approach each other, they dramatically increase their vocalizations (presumably to avoid collision).

Hippocampal place cells are modulated by the relative position of the animals in complex ways, and this modulation is very rapid (turns on and off within a few seconds) as the bats approach each other.

I think the paper is quite a beautiful demonstration of how we can use ethological phenomena (like the sudden appearance of a conspecific) to better understand neural dynamics.

That said, I have a substantial concern with the paper. Hopefully, this toot might find its way to the authors - encourage them to join mastodon and reply :)

The authors analyze the neural activity relative to the tunnel , which they call "position" and with respect to the other bat which they call "interbat distance". However, the measure that they call "interbat distance" is not distance. Euclidean distance along a line is defined as +√((x₂-x₁)²). **It is always positive**. The authors _redefined_ distance to be the signed value x₂-x₁. This quantify is the position of x₂ relative to x₁, not the distance.

You might think that I'm being pedantic. Maybe the authors just thought it would be clearer to talk about "position" and "distance" instead of saying "tunnel position" and "position relative to other bat". However, they claim that "hippocampal neurons can rapidly switch their core computation to represent the relevant behavioural variables." If we change their wording to my wording, then what they have shown is that hippocamal neurons can rapidly switch the reference point that is being used to represent their current position, including using a reference point that is moving.

This is still a cool result. But is less novel. There is extensive work examining how hippocampus remaps or "reregisters" place cells when animals have to monitor multiple reference frames. A nice example is from [André Fenton's lab](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1000403). The authors cite Fenton's work but say that Fenton "reported switching between two position maps, whereas here we found switching from position representation to distance-by-position representation." And that, i think really underscores how their redefinition of distance influenced the way they think about their results.

#neuroscience #bats #hippocampus #journalclub

Here, internet, have more dog photos!

Oh, also, I designed this #3DPrint #SaturnV with all the parts that you can download for free and print at home:
https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/various/saturn-v-rocket-louisi

Colleagues, please remember that #preparedness professionals are not the prepper community. My area of responsibility is 1050 Sq km, 500,000 citizens....That said, I wish more folks did prepare and that some are not so zealous....

-It is a hacker!
-It is Shodan!
...
+No, it's just NCSC, scanning your public IPs.

NCSC made a statement that they will be scanning public IPs hosted in the UK against vulnerabilities. They will be coming from the following 2 IP addresses. In case you see them in your logs, don't worry (or worry)

18.171.7.246
35.177.10.231

Also, if you don't want to be scanned and opt-out, you can contact NCSC via scanning@ncsc.gov.uk

#hacker #cybersecurity

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/information/ncsc-scanning-information

This one is for all the new people on #Mastodon: did you know that the #fediverse has more than just a microblogging replacement? And that they can all interoperate with your Mastodon account?

Check them out!

Facebook replacement: Friendica
Instagram replacement: Pixelfed
YouTube replacement: PeerTube
Spotify replacement: Funkwhale
MeetUp replacement: Mobilizon
Reddit replacement: Lemmy
Podcasting replacement: Castopod
GoodReads replacement: BookWyrm

Okay this might be a long post

One thing that I realised is making #twittermigration harder for people to switch is because the whole concept can feel daunting & overwhelming for non-tech savvy people.

With Twitter to them it was straight forward and easy to find topics they enjoy but with mastodon its a bit different.
So if you're new to mastodon or you want to introduce someone to mastodon here are some tips, useful sites & tools:
### Tips:
- Choosing a home instance isn't as importance as it seems, don't overthink it. Yes moderation rules & policies may differ but they all have one thing in common: Be a decent human. You **always** have the option to migrate your account to a new instance.
- Toots (or posts if you think toots are cringe ) are what we call micro-blogging instead of tweets
- You’re supposed to "boost" AKA "reblog" toots that you like.Since Mastodon does not have an algorithm that surfaces toots that have been liked a lot, boosting is the best way to help spread stuff that you like, and to show appreciation. (credit to @orsvarn for this comment)
- Another way to fill your timeline with content you enjoy is to: Find other people with similar interests, follow them, favourite their posts, boost their posts, use hashtags. rinse, repeat. (credit to @garry)
- If you ever feel yourself getting sucked into arguments on the #Fediverse, you might want to take advantage of the instance mute/block feature!
Instances tend to foster a culture, so if you find people from a specific site tend to be bothering you, muting/blocking that instance will keep other members of that community from bothering you as well.
- Finally do not share private/sensitive information via DMs on Mastodon. Direct Messages are not E2E. **Keep it in mind**

### Useful tools & resources:
[Twitodon](https://twitodon.com/) - Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
[FediFinder](https://fedifinder.glitch.me/)- Similar to Twitodon
[Fedi Tips](https://fedi.tips/) - an informal, unofficial guide for non-technical people who want to use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse
[Fedi Directory](https://fedi.directory) - A human-curated small selection of accounts to spice up your timeline.
[Trunk](https://communitywiki.org/trunk) -Trunk allows you to mass-follow a bunch of people in order to get started with Mastodon or any other platform on the Fediverse
[Fediverse.info](https://fediverse.info/explore/people) -growing list of people and topics can help you discover mutual interests with people around the world
**Mobile Apps:**
[Metatext for iOS ](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/metatext/id1523996615)
[Tusky for Android ](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keylesspalace.tusky&hl=en&gl=USt)

Lastly if you are interested in setting up your own instance you can learn via https://learnfoss.org/ its completely free and its made by the wonderful @stux

I apologize for the long post lol, just hope this helps anyones transition over

A reminder for anyone new to mastodon who might not be happy with some of the racist and bad actors out there on other servers... Just import the fediblock list to your personal blocks and you will be safe from the vast majority of bad actors.

EU are calling for more Defence spend because they say that since 2001 #EU has increased spending by just 22%, #US 66% Russia 292% and #China by 600% - This is Disinformation. Reality is EU now spends 3 times more than Russia + #US spend more than next 9 countries put together...

🐦🔗: https://nitter.eu/wallacemick/status/1588783724124332034

Two principles currently govern the work of the digital humanities: open access and open source.
COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education, covecollective.org, subscribes to both principles: supporting an open-access publication platform, COVE Editions, and using and modifying open-source tools.
https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/victorians-institute/article/doi/10.5325/victinstj.49.2022.0198/319226/Going-a-Step-Further-Than-Open-Access-and-Open