Discussion

things i would like to see in mastodon that pleroma has been able to do for years:

- the ability to defederate an instance except for explicitly approved accounts (pleroma has supported this since the beginning of MRF in 2018)

- the ability to defederate a hashtag (pleroma has supported this since 2019)

- the ability to quarantine unknown instances until they are approved by the admin (pleroma has supported this through a combination of multiple features since 2019)

Just realised that on Mastodon, boosting is the algorithm.

There's no code trying to cleverly show me stuff it reckons I'd be into, based on what my contacts are into, instead my contacts are saying "I like this, I bet my contacts would like it too" and that is way smarter than any algorithm.

Thank you, boosters!

This is a pretty apt image for how we prioritize the space in our cities in general, not just during the San Francisco marathon.

#cars#ArroganceOfSpace#cities#FuckCars

For anyone wondering how we put DOI's on blog posts it is handled by @rogue_scholar, which I highly recommend for other science/scholarly bloggers.

I've seen a lot of awful and ridiculous AI hype in the past two years, but this weekend there was one that briefly took away my ability to even.

I recovered, and wrote up a newsletter post:

https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/medical-science-shouldnt-platform-automating-end/

I've seen a lot of awful and ridiculous AI hype in the past two years, but this weekend there was one that briefly took away my ability to even.

I recovered, and wrote up a newsletter post:

https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/medical-science-shouldnt-platform-automating-end/

I think the dataset I finished collecting last week nails down the neurons in which motor learning happens in #drosophila

https://bjoern.brembs.net/2024/07/whodathunk-motor-learning-in-motor-neurons-huh/

The data suggest that motor neurons rely on the genes aPKC and FoxP to change their properties in response to motor learning. We are currently writing a proposal to find out how the neurons are changed physiologically.

#neuroscience

We've signed an open letter to the European Commission in support for @EC_NGI

Their funding has enabled us and many other FLOSS projects to develop and maintain great software, from which everybody benefits.

However, their own funding is probably cut next year, which would have a big negative impact to FLOSS projects.

Read more at:
https://f-droid.org/2024/07/23/ngi-funding-open-letter.html

I don't know who originally made this, but they are a genius.

Y’all out here talking about our instance moderation when people talk about racism on Mastodon, wanting to believe that all the racists hang out at IamANazi.social.

Maybe mastodon isn’t the “good people” platform and is filled with racists like everywhere else?

animal behavior / navigation folks -- do you have an example of a task where animals clearly use different strategies to solve it (ie 1/2 use an egocentric strategy 1/2 use allocentric, or some combo like that) -- and the strategies are easily identifiable? open to any thoughts/ideas!! Pls #RT :)

I’d like to look at some university policies around AI in research using human subjects data, with a particular eye to how AI is defined. Is anyone collecting these?

I’ll add some personal bonus information to why I’ve come to think opening a git issue is peer review.

I started my PhD by beginning to develop little software/hardware tools by myself. I could “finish” them off and get a publication out of it (actual academic currency) and leave it at that, as happens ever too often.

Yet, I believe that we (the scientific community) need fewer projects, that are (1) better maintained, (2) with a larger community and (3) better adoption. I think this is crucial to ensure not just future reproducibility, but also that skills we researchers acquire (and learned how to use a piece of software is a skill that takes valuable time) will benefit us for much longer.

So what I decided, instead, I re-aligned, and decided my efforts were better spent contributing to existing projects that were almost what I needed, but not quite. Rather than committing code, I’ve written countless detailed feature requests and bug reports, spending countless hours coming up with minimal reproducible examples to help the developers pin down issues. I’ve worked closely with a number of project maintainers improving their projects (at least I think so) without contributing a line of code.

I think it’s the best decision I could possibly have made. It means the software that is already used widely (or that I think will be) improved, and personally I have had so many great interactions because of it. But there is no formal way this adds anything to my CV - grant applications, job applications are completely unaffected by what I consider some of my most important contributions to science as of now.

Deadline is today!!

--

Discounted/sliding scale virtual registration for ACL 2024:

https://2024.aclweb.org/registration#discounted-virtual-registration

** Note deadline of July 26 **

The ACL provides this option in order to make ACL events accessible to researchers who otherwise would be unable to participate. Please spread the word!

Modern science relies on (open source) software and hardware, but whereas creating tools (writing code) can be turned into academic currency (papers), there is currently no incentive for researchers to provide feedback and improvement suggestions for tools despite how valuable these contributions are to the scientific community as a whole. One possible way forward would be to treat "issue creation" and other Git-based activity as an acceptable form of peer review.

This is an issue and idea I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’d love to flesh it out into an actual set of actionable proposals/suggestions, as well as figuring out which (technological) hurdles would need to be overcome, in a opinion-styled paper - could anyone be interested in working on this together with me?

Please share!

Whodathunk? Motor learning in motor neurons, huh?

I was very excited when our latest research paper came out, after all, I was confident our 30-year-long search for the sites of plasticity in the form of motor learning we study was coming to an end. In this work, we were fairly confident that underlying the type of learning we study was a novel form of plasticity in a very specific set of motor neurons in the ventral nerve cord of the flies we use for our research.

https://bjoern.brembs.net/2024/07/whodathunk-motor-learning-in-motor-neurons-huh/

Okay, this is part of my contribution to the idea of a monoculture on mastodon.

I'm Nigerian. Nigeria is about to go on a huge public strike, and I haven't heard anything about it here. Now, I don't blame anyone for that, obviously, but I think it shows the fact that perhaps there aren't as many Africans as I'd like.