Alex Weber @weberam2@qoto.org

@jerlich

Good to see the Journal of Neuroscience move on to open peer review. 6 months in, would be interesting to know the opt-out rate for authors and for reviewers.

Regarding publication costs, indeed the ~$6000 seems excessive; it’s 3x the cost of publishing in eLife, for example.

#ScientificPublishing

I've been following @e_urq of Assigned Media for a long time, but this article is particularly brilliant.

The Pope declaring some people "less worthy of dignity" is deeply horrifying. Evan's response is deeply orienting, the way truth is when you hear it.

"When I lectured the police on moral injury...I was drawing on whatever I had inside me to assert my worth in a situation designed to deprive me of my dignity"

#transrightsarehumanrights
#transgender #dignity

https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/transgender-dignity-responding-pope-francis

Also… Oxford Open Neuroscience💫 publishes reviews alongside the papers- check out the supplement 👀 #neuroscience

Ho lee shit.
The AP has found that the number of deaths caused by the police in the US is SIGNIFICANTLY higher than thought because they're not always reported as being "officer-involved."

❝
The investigation found that between 2012 and 2021, more than a thousand people died after police use physical force that was not intended to be lethal. That includes batons, stun guns, physical restraints, and chemical agents. The oldest victim was 95 and the youngest 15.

Only 28 of the officers were charged.

The Police role was only cited in about half of the cases, meaning that many more Americans have died at the hands of the police than was previously known.
❞

Watch the PBS segment here
https://youtu.be/5rrMUfbGVlM?feature=shared

#PoliceBrutality #PoliceDontKeepUsSafe #FuckThePolice #DefundDisarmDismantle

Wondering about the current state of affairs of data science and data management in neuroscience collaborations? Wondering where your tax dollars go? Well, wonder no more! Edgar Walker, Guoqiang Yu and myself collected some data! And opinions :-) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.20.585936v1

Claustrophobia is an apt analogy to how it feels. I've increasingly felt trapped by my job — by the entire concept of having "a job". Especially since transitioning, because so much of who I am is now dependent upon lifelong healthcare access, which in the US basically means you must be employed.

So about five days ago, or so, people on Bsky and Twttr started highlighting Elsevier science papers with GPT/LLM hallmark phrases riddled all throughout them. Literally thousands of peer-reviewed papers.

As I said, then, and as I discussed in my dissertation, knowledge-making and expertise are always a tricky process, but it needs deep, intentional confrontation and reform:
https://media.proquest.com/media/hms/PRVW/1/twSaS?_s=yIAhHtzhif4xd76I%2BihtcJJXTPw%3D

Anyway, now it looks like @404mediaco has dug down on this, and found *Even More of It* and I am genuinely and completely struggling against despair at what the future of being an educator, researcher, and writer will even mean over and at the end of the next 5 years.
https://www.404media.co/scientific-journals-are-publishing-papers-with-ai-generated-text/

Quite frankly, this should genuinely a) be the death of peer review as we know it (Again: AS WE KNOW IT), and b) lead a complete reformulation of the knowledge-making and expertise processes, but it won't and that terrifies and saddens me.

It's 2024 and most text editors don't have a column-select mode. How can anyone live without it.

#ViM

Lightning fast, self-contained explorable explanations!

https://rowanc1.github.io/myst-lite/

This uses Thebe, a tool that connects a "static" webpage with a Jupyter Kernel to make the page "dynamic" with interactive computation. It also uses JupyterLite, which means the kernel is provided *within the browser*.

More at:

https://mystmd.org
https://thebe.readthedocs.io

“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/

#tech #cloud #ai #datacenter #environment

Super happy with my Framework laptop by the way!

The module system is great. I printed a snack drawer today! Now I can always take three peanuts with me!

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/