Alex Weber @weberam2@qoto.org

Elsevier, everyone's favorite copyright maximalist closed-access publisher, argues that their high costs are necessary because they're the arbiter of quality.

The arbiter of quality keeps publishing LLM-written papers. Thanks for making my argument for me, Elsevier! They didn't even read it.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1930043324001298

"In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I'm very sorry, but I don't have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model."

If markets were actually competitive, corporations would keep their prices as low as possible as they competed for customers. Instead, the concentration of the American economy into the hands of a few corporate giants gives them the power to raise prices with impunity — costing the typical American household an estimated extra $5,000 per year.

Antitrust law enforcement used to be a thing of the past. It's a big deal that the Biden administration is reviving it.

#iamreading

Thought I‘d try something: this book by Juerrero has come up a lot in some of the most interesting conversations I‘ve had on this platform about #causality, #complexity #neuroscience #agency #behaviour #mind and #brain and #dynamical systems but it‘s not an easy read. I am now determined to tackle it and will be posting updates as I go…

care to join me? OA at https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545662/context-changes-everything/

AIDS denialism. COVID denialism. Vaccine denialism. Deadly quackery is on the rise. This isn't healthy iconoclasm as some have suggested that will wilt under peer review. It's toxic and impervious to logic. Call it out for what it is. My latest for The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/aids-denialism-joe-rogan-bret-weinstein-rfk/

@weberam2 yep, ask your friends to agree to review your paper and promise you'll do the same for them 😉 What's the point of pretending now 😕 reviewing 1 is likely to be your pals' grad student anyway

2nd edition of ITNS is ready for your stats/methods classes! Estimation first, rigorous testing, with meta-analysis and Open Science integrated throughout. Get a desk copy here: https://tinyurl.com/yc4yn42s

Big thanks to all who helped make this possible. Feedback welcome!

#stats #OpenScience

Watching an HBO doc on the Y2K bug and efforts to fix it. I was 13 when the year 2000 kicked off and I remember much of the doomsday stuff in the media well.

Despite that, it feels like such a distant, fictional world where governments and private companies around the globe actually put in the time and resources to solve a crisis before it was too late. From a 2024 perspective - especially following the events of 2020 - that level of cooperation by people in power is basically unimaginable.

How can we fix academic publishing? I just wrote a new article outlining my thoughts on this based on all the attempts I've seen, what has worked and what has failed, and finishing with the strategy we developed for @ScholarNexus. I'd love to hear your feedback!

https://thesamovar.github.io/zavarka/how-do-we-fix-publishing/

Periodic reminder: The only way to write good code is to write tons of shitty code first. Feeling shame about bad code stops you from getting to good code.

Another function of neural traveling waves is clearing metabolic waste. The waves are there for a reason. It turns out that there are many reasons.

Neuronal dynamics direct cerebrospinal fluid perfusion and brain clearance
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07108-6
#neuroscience

"When asked by Nature how the papers made it through review, a Sage spokesperson responded that the publisher relies on journal editors to make individual decisions on submitted works based on the evaluations of peer reviewers. In its retraction notice, Sage said that it discovered one peer reviewer who had evaluated the three papers was affiliated with an anti-abortion organization."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00556-0?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=ad2ff535f6-briefing-dy-20240228&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b27a691814-ad2ff535f6-49733304

New results out: Zac & Kelson looked at order and disorder in the functional representations in the auditory cortex. On large scales, there are tonotopic maps, but on small scales, neighboring cells can be tuned very differently. To reconcile this, they imaged 3D volumes and found that there is a fractured columnar small-world functional network organization.
Read here:

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/2/pgae074/7606489

GitHub is struggling to contain an ongoing attack that’s flooding the site with millions of code repositories. These repositories contain obfuscated malware that steals passwords and cryptocurrency from developer devices, researchers said.

The malicious repositories are clones of legitimate ones, making them hard to distinguish to the casual eye. An unknown party has automated a process that forks legitimate repositories, meaning the source code is copied so developers can use it in an independent project that builds on the original one. The result is millions of forks with names identical to the original one that add a payload that’s wrapped under seven layers of obfuscation. To make matters worse, some people, unaware of the malice of these imitators, are forking the forks, which adds to the flood.

“Most of the forked repos are quickly removed by GitHub, which identifies the automation,” Matan Giladi and Gil David, researchers at security firm Apiiro, wrote Wednesday. “However, the automation detection seems to miss many repos, and the ones that were uploaded manually survive. Because the whole attack chain seems to be mostly automated on a large scale, the 1% that survive still amount to thousands of malicious repos.”

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/02/github-besieged-by-millions-of-malicious-repositories-in-ongoing-attack/

ROGER PENROSE: I have a new mathematical physics paper

ME: Great! Before I read it: Are you trying to mathematically prove the existence of the human soul again?

ROGER PENROSE:

ME: Roger. Roger, are you trying to mathematically prove the existence of the soul again?

ROGER PENROSE: *Holds up a finger, pulls his phone up to his ear and walks out of the room quickly as if he has a call, he clearly does not have a call*