Neurofrontiers @neurofrontiers@qoto.org

Understanding #Mastodon gets easier once you get the basic idea that federation between servers can be understood as homeomorphisms across hyperplanes between the Riemannian manifolds of toots, whereas the servers represent countable finite sets of discrete entities.

For environmental reasons, I will not be leaving coal in anyone's stocking this year.

Those on the naughty list will instead get a 1 month subscription to #Twitter Blue.

Right now everyone is still engaged in making connections and introductions, but as @PessoaBrain mentioned, we should think about ways to stimulate good #neuroscience conversations (especially sans timeline algorithm).

I don't think there is any magic formula, so I'd encourage everyone to just post what fascinates them: stray thoughts, quotes from papers and books, diagrams, contentious topics, and perhaps my favorite: 'dumb' questions. 🤓

[...]

did you know it’s free to say, “I don’t know enough to weigh in” and skateboard away like bart simpson

A new massive EEG dataset using tens of thousands of object images from the THINGS database:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811922008758

The THINGS initiative keeps growing! For more details, check out https://things-initiative.org

#thingsInitiative

I've actually written a Medium article about this! I really want to build an online community for people to do more independent science.

https://medium.com/@oliver_winks/lets-revive-independent-science-7c5447f39d82

So I’m a science nerd. But now I’m not part of a university I've been completely cut off from the scientific community. Journals are behind paywalls and conferences are way too expensive for me to attend! Why is it so difficult to do independent science?

Rebuilding After the Replication Crisis https://asteriskmag.com/issues/1/rebuilding-after-the-replication-crisis

Over a decade has passed since scientists realized many of their studies were failing to replicate. How well have their attempts to fix the problem actually worked?

Interesting piece by Stuart Ritchie

This is an #introduction toot.. We are here because India is currently experiencing a fascist takeover, but many people in the West (even leftists!) continue to think of India as a normal country, a democracy, a good trading partner.

The ruling party, the BJP, is erasing rights to speech, to protest, to practice religion. The forces of Hindu supremacy are bull-dozing Muslim neighborhoods in Delhi, banning hijab in public schools in Karnataka, building camps for the 1.9M mostly Muslim and Adivasi (tribal/indigenous) people who have been stripped of their citizenship in Assam.

We're a small group who are close both to Indian and Western perspectives, hoping to explain the rise of Indian fascism to leftists in the West who are open to learning more and educating others about how their governments and public figures give cover for these human rights abuses and the settler-coloniser agenda of the fascists in power.

We are here in solidarity with Dalits, Muslims, Bahujans, Adivasis, Kashmiris; with political prisoners, journalists and academics rotting in jail; with gender and sexual minorities struggling to live their lives in peace and dignity.

@bbcmicrobot

or as the usual source of the phrase reads
"Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit."

"And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness."

What math do neuroscientists need to know?

A highlight of #SFN2022 was Ella Batty's answer to this question. She showed off an incredible math for neuroscientists course she has developed at Harvard with open materials (https://ebatty.github.io/MathToolsforNeuroscience/) and discussed her amazing work with Neuromatch Academy (https://compneuro.neuromatch.io/)

Her SFN slides are here: https://osf.io/s94b2

#Neuroscience #GradSchool #Math

Hi #Mastodon, I’m new and wanted to introduce myself while figuring things out here! I am a #neuroscience PhD student at #UCIrvine. I’m interested in the topics of #aging, #Alzheimer’s, #vascular disease and #memory.
I also happen to make a lot of #SciArt like the one below. Look forward to interacting with you all on here! 😊 🧠

I've figured out what pisses me off so much about Facebook's Galactica demo.

It's not because people can use to to write bad essays for their homework. There are plenty of large language models that can do that. It's because Facebook is presenting it as something that it most definitely is not.

Facebook is selling it as a knowledge engine, a "new interface to access and manipulate what we know about the universe."

Actually it's just a random bullshit generator.

http://galactica.org

Boost this toot if you're planning on sticking around Mastodon whether or not it becomes more popular than the birdsite.

https://psyarxiv.com/2uxwk/
This paper is so awesome it is prompting me to write my first toot.
The science, the writing, the conclusion about scientific writing. I laughed out loud multiple times reading it. Hats off!

Yesterday, someone asked me a (great) clarification question about code for a 2017 paper, and it took me < 1 minute to figure out the answer. Thank you, past Eiko, for taking extra time back then to save current Eiko time.

PS: absolutely NO thanks to pre-2016 Eiko omg what the hell was going on there ง(•̀_•́)ง

Early November, a paper was published in which authors claim to find "direct evidence" for the #serotonin hypothesis of #depression.

A day later, the Guardian wrote very positive press coverage.

Given serious issues with the conclusions of the study (n=37, non-significant result changes to p=0.04 after exluding 1 outlier, etc.), I wrote a blog explaining the issues (https://eiko-fried.com/clear-evidence-for-serotonin-hypothesis-of-depression/).

And woke up this morning to see that the Guardian now actually edited their headline (+"claims to").

"Try reading the following out loud:

Hashtag screenreaders for the hashtag blind and hashtag VisuallyImpaired read every hashtag HashTags out loud and so it's hard for people with hashtag VisualImpairment to get the sense of the post because it's being constantly interrupted by well-meaning hashtag accessibility hashtag allies.

Easier to read with a block of hashtags at the bottom:
#screenreaders #VisuallyImpaired #blind #allies #Hashtags #accessibility"
--original author unknown