Philipp Schlegel @uni_matrix@qoto.org

When an article says "some scientists think" then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn't given sufficient thought to the reverse operation. 🧵

More evidence -- this time with audio tapes from the original experiment -- showing that the Stanford Prison Experiment was rigged to encourage terrible behavior by the guards

In Medium: https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/K7gMN

Talking about this with my son, I was struck by how many pieces of major science/theory/culture in the mid-20th-century insisted that they "proved" humanity was inherently, natively selfish -- but turned out to be much less true

1/x

#statistics #pvalues #math #analytics

@eric_normandeau @jonny @LudoWaltman @eLife

It's all too clear, isn't it. #WebOfScience would like the status quo to not change at all – they are profiting enormously from it. Whereas scientists would like the status quo to change – our grants are being drained dry from publishing fees, our libraries are also drained dry from subscription fees, and academic administrators spend countless moneys on bibliometrics supplied by Clarivate to "evaluate" academics for their "throughput" – in quotes because using these words for what they actually do (counting papers and citations) is a perversion.

By the way #Clarivate owns #EndNote, #Publons and #ScholarOne – we really ought to not use *any* of these. It's in our power.

#ScientificPublishing #academia

#programming #names Aargh

Throw the programmers in the sea

The NeuronBridge website, for matching #ElectronMicroscopy and #LightMicroscopy data for #Drosophila #Neuroscience research, now includes EM data from FlyWire. Getting it working was a great effort by @neomorphic, Cristian Goina, Hideo Otsuna, Robert Svirskas, and @konrad_rokicki. Here is a screen capture of looking up a neuron on FlyWire Codex, finding its match in NeuronBridge, then viewing the match in 3D with volume rendering in the browser.

https://neuronbridge.janelia.org

This is a mistake

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/mex_24_5324#:~:text=Commission%20concludes%20that%20online%20social%20networking%20service%20of%20X%20should%20not%20be%20designated%20under%20the%20Digital%20Markets%20Act

Interesting feature of the Apple LLM reasoning paper. I always tell my students that exams include no irrelevant information, which gives you a clue as to the answer. LLM's have learnt this too well, and can't ignore irrelevant info (perf drops 17-70%).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05229

In other words: exam-style questions have massive leakage that many students don't pick up on but that LLM's find impossible to ignore. I suspect this tells us more about the way we write exam questions than anything else. They're not a good measure of LLM performance, nor human!

Cabel Sasser is my new hero. His talk at XOXO Conference is absolutely EPIC and a must see that you should watch till the very end. I cried my eyes out (and I have 20 minutes to recover my composure before a conference call): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df_K7pIsfvg

Follow Cabel here: @cabel

My little one is only 3 years old but I will make sure to save this video and show it to her when she's a bit older.

For now, I'll encourage her to follow Cabel's advice: appreciate everything, endlessly ✨

very happy and proud to finally share our work on the evolution of feeding preference in flies! @TomAuer @dahaniel @RibeiroCarlitos and support from many beautiful people (@Benton lab, @Arguello lab, @Simon_Sprecher lab)...hope you like it!
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.11.617601v1.article-metrics

my god

Whole adult fly brain connectome for FAFB (female adult fly brain) – last year in preprint form, today as an immersive feature in Nature.

140,000 neurons, over 50 million synapses – organised into over 8,000 cell types. (VNC not included.)

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-024-00053-4/index.html

The whole connectome: Dorkenwald et al. 2024 (Seung, Murthy) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07558-y

Cell types: Schlegel et al. 2024 (Jefferis) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07686-5 by @uni_matrix

Network statistics: Lin et al. 2024 (Murthy) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07968-y

Visual system: Garner et al. 2024 (Wernet, Kim) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07967-z and Matsliah et al. (Murthy, Seung) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07981-1

Seung also put out a solo paper on predicting visual function from the connectome: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07953-5

Control of halting in walking: Sapkal et al. 2024 (Bidaye) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07854-7

FAFB imaged by @davi 's group back in 2018: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30787-6

#neuroscience #Drosophila #connectomics #FAFB

We are looking for exceptional #AIScientist|s to join our AI@HHMI initiative at @hhmijanelia. We want to uncover fundamental principles underlying complex biological systems that are inaccessible without new innovations that combine #AI with experimental design. We are strongly committed to #OpenScience and interdisciplinary collaboration.

https://hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/job/Janelia-Research-Campus/AI-Scientist_R-3065

If you are interested in how #AI methods can be applied to #model biological systems, this should be interesting for you: https://alleninstitute.org/events/data-driven-discovery-ai-and-modeling-in-biology/
. Presentations and discussions will be live-streamed.

For #SciArtSeptember: 50 EPG neurons from the #Drosophila, segmented from electron microscopy images, rendered in #Blender3d driven by neuVid. This ring of neurons forms part of the fly’s internal compass. As the fly changes its heading, neuronal activity moves around the ring, as shown by the false color gradient. Imaging and reconstruction by #HHMIJanelia and Google Research (www.janelia.org/project-team/flyem/hemibrain); function described by Hulse et al (doi.org/10.7554/eLife.66039).

Can we observe how the injured leg of an animal is regenerated?

We have figured out how to do this in the crustacean Parhyale. Over the course of a week, we can record the entire process of leg regeneration at cell-by-cell resolution.

Our latest preprint describes how we do this and what we see:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.11.612529v1

More info/links on https://bsky.app/profile/michalis-averof.bsky.social/post/3l3xonnzt6u2n