via Facebook: facebook.com/share/p/16eDx3zoA

NPR - The year red-blooded patriotic American high-school jocks replaced migrant farm workers!

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program.

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#ArteConcert is so amazing! I don't remember who on Mastodon first pointed me to it but it's *so good*. Thanks to whoever you are.

If you don't know it, Arte is a a European public service channel and Arte Concert is their live music. The live concert performances are top quality and it's all free to watch, with *no ads* (thanks EU!).

This evening I've been watching a jazz concert by Hiromi's Sonicwonder. Earlier in the week I watched Moderat live at the Grand Palais in Paris. I've discovered fantastic African blues musician Fatoumata Diawara and Cuban funk musician Cimafunk and singer song-writer Asaf Avidan. There's everything from metal to electronic to jazz to classical.

While a lot of the internet has been turning to ad-filled spyware goop, Arte Concert is a wonderful exception.

This is me feeling grateful.

arte.tv/en/arte-concert/

#music #concerts

This was a brave project with an ambitious goal and I think it kicks the legs out from some shaky, simplistic assumptions about cycle time, and how we use software metrics in general. We've also got a huge bank of code, statistical approaches, and methodology along with our preprint so others can replicate our work or use it as a learning example.

arxiv.org/abs/2503.05040

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When designing a scientific experiment, a key factor is the sample size to be used for the results of the experiment to be meaningful.

How many cells do I need to measure? How many people do I interview? How many patients do I try my new drug on?

This is of great importance especially for quantitative studies, where we use statistics to determine whether a treatment or condition has an effect. Indeed, when we test a drug on a (small) number of patients, we do so in the hope our results can generalise to any patient because it would be impossible to test it on everyone.

The solution is to perform a "power analysis", a calculation that tells us whether given our experimental design, the statistical test we are using is able to see an effect of a certain magnitude, if that effect is really there. In other words, this is something that tells us whether the experiment we're planning to do could give us meaningful results.

But, as I said, in order to do a power analysis we need to decide what size of effect we would like to see. So... do scientists actually do that?

We explored this question in the context of the chronic variable stress literature.

We found that only a few studies give a clear justification for the sample size used, and in those that do, only a very small fraction used a biologically meaningful effect size as part of the sample size calculation. We discuss challenges around identifying a biologically meaningful effect size and ways to overcome them.

Read more here!
physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

@steveroyle i guess when you remember that you are sending and receiving to a scholastically generated sequence of words it makes more sense. The existence of the paper is less relevant than the probability that this conversation would occur where a paper was real given that a PMID and DOI was supplied

Two open positions in my lab to develop scientific software with python and javascript.

Software: CATMAID

Documentation:
catmaid.readthedocs.io/en/stab

Source code:
github.com/catmaid/CATMAID/

Example:
l1em.catmaid.virtualflybrain.o

If you have experience with #SQL (#postgresql), #python and its many libraries (particularly #django), #rust, and #javascript, write to me and let's discuss.

Examples of open issues: github.com/catmaid/CATMAID/iss

Brits can sleep safely tonight, after the heroic work of the Metropolitan Police. The Reverend Sue Parfitt, 83, a retired priest, was arrested in Parliament Square for holding a sign which read:

“I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Under British law, this now puts her in the same category as an ISIS or Al-Qaeda terrorist. The courts may impose a prison sentence of up to 14 years, to protect the public against the existential threat posed by this very dangerous woman.

You may have heard that globalchange.gov and all the national reports on climate change have gone down.

We got em all on #sciop, a webrip and all the PDFs extracted: sciop.net/datasets/globalchang

Edit: context - apnews.com/article/climate-cha

Americans make fun of the European regulation on data protection (GDPR), regularly ("cookie banner law").
And then a data leak happens, and they're like: why do we even have this data around? who decided to keep admission forms for ten years?
GDPR is based on sound principles. The US should use it.

Over my years in academia, I helped create a variety of free online mathematical materials. Pirouette is a Spirograph clone that runs in a web browser. I hope you and your students enjoy the software! Read more:

diffgeom.com/blogs/free-online

#Math #MathArt #ITeachmath

Dear practitioners in statistics and data scientists:

In writing a data file, are there any standard ways, symbols, or notation, to indicate that some ordinal or continuous values of some datapoints are right- or left-censored?

Very grateful to anyone who share their uses and experience – as well as references!

[Edit: adding tag for R]

#statistics #datascience #rstats

Please share widely: I'm still looking for a postdoc in computational genomics to join my team in Oxford. If you want to help develop better ways to detect AML from epigenetic profiles in blood, then get in touch:

cutt.cx/analytics/masto1

Great team and environment, 3-year secured funding, ideal for transition to independence!

#jobs #academia #science #job #FediHire

"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. […] Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."

arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #ML #MachineLearning #Learning #ChatGPT #OpenAI #Llama #Ollama #LMStudio

Our on chronic variable (CVS) procedures in rodents is now out in Journal of Neuroendocrinology!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10

A sister study to this, focussing on the reporting and justification of sample size in these studies (currently in review somewhere else) can be found on BioRXiv biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

We systematically explored the literature where behavioural tests were performed following CVS. We found extreme variability in terms of the protocols used with any hardly any study using the same CVS protocol. We then asked whether the specific protocol influenced the outcomes of the study. For instance, we would expect a longer stress to cause a larger effect than a shorter one. We found only very small correlations between the strength of the stress protocol and the effect size measured in the study. In a case (forced swim test) correlation was even negative. Overall, our analysis reveals complex relation between stress protocols and behavioural outcomes and raises important ethical questions on the design of CVS studies.

Any comments very welcome, we're working on a couple of follow up manuscripts if anyone's interested!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10

I recently saw a highly accomplished woman I know demonstrating a new AI product that, of course, has a female name.

When the product launch was shared on LinkedIn, the C-level men didn't share the name of the woman doing the demo, in spite of her being in all the photos, just the name of the AI.

I'm still mad.

#UsPol #NIH #Academia

NIH scientists publish declaration criticizing Trump’s deep cuts in public health research

Some quotes:

"The NIH that I'm working in now is unrecognisable to me. Every day I go into the office and I wonder what ethical boundary I'm going to be asked to violate, what probably illegal actions am I going to be asked to take"

"It's particularly frustrating when we are being sold this lie that this is being done in the name of efficiency. Because when we terminate these studies, when they're 50, 60, 70, 80% complete, we're not saving the 1 or 2 million dollars left at the tail end of the study, we are wasting the 3 or 4 million dollars that have already been invested."

New computer with Windows pre-installed? Want to install #Linux 🐧 instead?

You pay for #Windows, even if you don’t use it. That’s unfair and non-transparent.

#Refund4Freedom from @fsfe & @ItaLinuxSociety defends your right to get refunds for unused pre-installed software! 😎

refund4freedom.org/

The campaign starts in #Italy 🇮🇹 but will later be extended.

FSFE & ILS support your right to choose your operating system. They also support #EndOf10 to prevent e-waste!

#GetYourWindowsRefund

"As these tools become more powerful and affordable, #skepticism in #media will grow. But the question isn't whether we can trust what we see and hear. It's whether we can trust who's showing it to us. In an era where anyone can generate a realistic video of anything for $1.50, the #credibility of the #source becomes our primary anchor to #truth. The medium was never the message—the #messenger always was."

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/ai-

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