Alex Weber @weberam2@qoto.org

Sorry to see that Daniel Dennett has died. I was just thinking about him the other day and how he was the only member of that “new atheist” group to not turn out to be a total jerk. I knew him from way before that as I was doing a lot of reading in philosophy of mind in my early undergrad days in the ‘80s. I think I read Brainstorms right after G.E.B.

https://dailynous.com/2024/04/19/daniel-dennett-death-1942-2024/

Incredibly sad to hear of Daniel Dennett's passing. He was an astonishing thinker whose groundbreaking ideas guided me (and numerous others) towards a much more scientific and sane world.

Thank you for your intuition pumps, memes, unwavering pursuit of truth, and service to human thinking in general.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html

A while back, I heard a comedian describe an anecdote where they asked their possibly autistic friend if they were "on the spectrum", and the friend responded "we're all on the spectrum - that's why it's a spectrum". The punchline being something like "it was completely accurate but also the most on-the-spectrum answer someone could give".

I like the idea of it and have trouble finding a more accurate or illustrative example. Is it problematic when delivered with care?

@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."