albertcardona

albertcardona, 7 months ago to science

Not sure what those who advocate for the use of ChatGPT in scientific writing have in mind. It is the very act of writing that helps us think about the connections and implications of our results, identify gaps, and devise further experiments and controls.

Any science project that can be written up by a bot from tables of results and associated literature isn’t the kind of science that I’d want to do to begin with.

Can’t imagine completing a manuscript not knowing what comes next, because the writing was done automatically instead of me putting extensive thought into it.

And why would anyone bother to read it if the authors couldn’t be bothered to write it. Might as well put up the tables and figures into an archive online, stamp a DOI on it, and move on.

#ScientificPublishing #science #ChatGPT

albertcardona, 6 months ago to Neuroscience

Periodic reminder of what fMRI's BOLD signal is measuring, and its temporal dynamics:

"blood oxygenation level–dependent (BOLD) contrast. [...] increased signal in a voxel measured with an EPI [echo planar imaging] sequence indicates recent neuronal activity because of the relative increase in local blood oxygenation that accompanies such activity. The temporal profile of this BOLD response, known as the hemodynamic response function, looks like a bell curve with a long tail, peaking around 4 to 5 seconds after local neural activity and returning to baseline after 12 to 15 seconds."

From "Principles of Neural Science", Kandel et al. 6th edition, page 115.

No matter how fast the EPI imaging is (~100 ms), the BOLD dynamics makes GCaMP look lighting fast. Temporally deconvolving BOLD is possible, to a point, but remember its spatial resolution is measured in millimetres, whereas neuronal somas measure ~0.025 millimetres.

#fMRI #BOLD #neuroscience

albertcardona, 8 months ago to android

Probing the internet hivemind, trying to help a colleague: their android phone country setting says UK, but their google account was originally created in the US, and hence the Google Play store is still set to US. There are no buttons – despite what google support online says – offered to change the country in the Google Play account settings. So UK-only apps cannot be installed. Updating the address in the google account didn't help. What else can be done?

#android #google

albertcardona, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to science

If you are drafting figures for a scientific paper or presentation, remember that https://scidraw.io/ exists: a repository of free SVG cartoons for science.

#SciDraw is supported by the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre – @SWC_Neuro

All content on SciDraw is shared under creative commons license (CC-BY) unless stated otherwise.

#inkscape #SVG #science

albertcardona, 7 months ago to uk

On the #REF and similar exercises in measuring up academic output, and the response and participation and attitude of #UK academics:

"The Sycophant", by Lorna Finlayson https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-sycophant

Quite the profile of #UK academics and the educational system. I don't know how much of it is true, and how much is left out, but it all comes across as a fair match to what I am seeing on the ground.

albertcardona, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

Is this locomotive really from 1978 or is that when the brand or model was established? @jon

Powers the night train from La Tor de Querol in the Pyrenees to Paris Austerlitz.

#trains

albertcardona, 18 days ago to Trains

In Europe, flying is cheaper than taking the train.

It's an embarrassment, and a major problem: we have to stop flying for silly short distances. Realise that the overheads of flying (reaching the airport, awaiting 2 hours, the flight, the unloading, reaching the destination) largely cancel out any time gains of flying. And the carbon costs are utterly untenable. Not to speak of the modern, dire conditions of the whole flying "experience".

Another embarrassment is that train connections can't be guaranteed when across countries or companies. They aren't even coordinated. As if those who commission and set the schedules didn't travel by train themselves, at least not internationally. In considering how tiny most European countries are, it's frankly bizarre.

There are so many destinations one could travel by train to, yet in practice, it's not sensible. A disgrace.

The upside is that it can be fixed.

#trains #EuroRail

albertcardona, 5 months ago to random

This season of family gatherings is a great moment to persuade your relatives to install the Signal App @signalapp in their phones as a way to get your photos of the events. Then setup a family group chat with them all so that there's a reason to start and then continue using it.

That's one path to wean them off whatsapp and even worse messenger apps. At the very least your own communications within the family will happen outside those privacy nightmarish ever-hungry gargantuan for-profit corporations.

albertcardona, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to Etymology

“Our word ‘acre’ – related to ‘aecer’, the Old English for acorn – originally denoted an area with oak trees.” [i.e., open woodlands, more like grasses, wildflower and shrub fields with sparse trees.]

“Someone who had the right to ‘acker’ pigs – to fatten them on acorns – was called an ‘ackerman’ or, in German, ‘Ackerbürger’.”

From: “Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm”, by Isabella Tree

UPDATE: it seems this isn’t accurate, may even be entirely false. See replies below.

#rewilding #etymology

albertcardona, 4 months ago to random

Leslie Lamport, of LaTeX fame, is a very accomplished mathematician and computer scientist with a Turing award for his work on “fundamental contributions to the theory and
practice of distributed and concurrent systems”. He just published a draft of his new book:

"A science of concurrent programs"

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/science.pdf

True to his pedagogic approach to everything he does, "The book assumes only that you know the math one learns before entering a university." Even the appendices are fantastic. Can only wish I'll remain this lucid at his 82 years old.

#multithreading #maths #LesleyLamport

albertcardona, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to Neuroscience

"The brain: what for?" – my seminar for "everyone else" at the #MRCLMB. Featuring brainless maggots and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcZwH5MYkFU

#neuroscience #ScienceForEverybody

albertcardona, 3 months ago to uk

The amount of kids, all boys, in emergency room for head concussions from playing sports – it's scary. Mostly rugby. Why isn't this sport banned in schools yet? The long-term brain damage is well documented.

#UK

albertcardona, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to Neuroscience

The honeybee brain hosts over 600,000 neurons, at a density higher than that of mammalian brains:

"Our estimate of total brain cell number for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera;
≈ 6.13 × 10^5, s = 1.28 × 10^5; ...) was lower than the existing estimate from brain sections ≈ 8.5 × 10^5"

"the highest neuron densities have been found in the smallest respective species examined (smoky shrews in mammals; 2.08 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [14] and goldcrests in birds; 4.9 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [16]). The Hymenoptera in our sample have on average higher cell densities than vertebrates (5.94 × 10^5 cells mg^−1; n = 30 species)."

Ants, on the other hand ...

"ants stand out from bees and wasps as having particularly small brains by measures of mass and cell number."

From:
"Allometric analysis of brain cell number in Hymenoptera suggests ant brains diverge from general trends", by Godfrey et al. 2021.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0199

#Hymenoptera #entomology #neuroscience #ants #honeybees

albertcardona, 9 months ago to academia

"Asymmetries in trust", new blog post on the disconnect between academics and the associated academic bureaucracy.

https://albert.rierol.net/tell/20230823_asymmetries_on_trust.html

#academia

albertcardona, 9 months ago to random

Visual acuity test: find the grasshopper. Level: easy

#VisualAcuityTest

albertcardona, 5 months ago to infosec

Hi #infosec community: any recommended practices for preventing a personal blog webpage from being dominated by crawlers?

The robots.txt seems largely ignored. Crawlers presently consume ~75% of resources according to the access logs.

I don't mind not being listed on any web search engines.

Would a basic auth work? Can one make the basic auth dialog show a message that provides the password hint in it, like "What is my first name?"

#blogging

albertcardona, 4 months ago to academia

Recently submitted a research grant. The online system didn't let me upload a document, asking instead to type it in (right; copy-paste!) instead. So adding figures required inserting them one by one at the right places using a rich-text widget nobody asked for.

One week before the deadline, I was ready, but upon performing the last update of the text I forgot to re-insert the figures – because of course "select all" and "paste" over removed the figures. Our research office then submitted the grant ... and now it can't be updated any further, despite the deadline still being in the future.

Would like to think it's a natural experiment in not adding bullshit graphics like a Gantt chart, but the preliminary data is missing too. Given the abysmal funding ratios, it's unlikely to have any effect whatsoever on the default answer: reject.

Grant writing is fun. It's clear chances of funding are miserable. To me, the value is elsewhere: on clarifying my own mind on what's worth doing, spell it out in detail, and then find ways to see the project through despite the lack of funding – chances are much higher if one doesn't care where the work gets done and who gets the credit. After all, what matters is adding more paragraphs to the proverbial book of knowledge.

#academia

albertcardona, 9 months ago to Trains

Public transport failure: the fastest route from Luton Airport to Cambridge is ... via London. In what looks like nearly adjacent train tracks forming a ridiculous loop.

The alternative route in grey includes a bus. Such bus + train alternative option goes in a far more straight line, but takes longer (!).

Both routes are about 2 hours. Yet it takes only 50 minutes by car.

#trains #PublicTransport #UK

albertcardona, 6 months ago to academia

"To win one of these coveted positions, then, you need to do everything exactly right from your freshman year of high school onward: get good grades, garner strong recommendations, work in the right labs, publish papers in prestigious places, never make anybody mad, and never take a detour or a break." – Adam Mastroianni https://www.experimental-history.com/p/ideas-arent-getting-harder-to-find

I had less than stellar grades throughout my undergrad until the last year; I did undergrad and grad research in a fringe lab at a low-ranked university – which afforded me huge freedoms –; I published my first glamour paper after I was tenured and only because my co-authors insisted on the venue; I made many people mad by telling them what I thought instead of what they wanted to hear to the point that I had to reapply 3 years later; and I took breaks to rear children. All of this between the years 2000 and 2015.

Despite everything you may hear, there is room for being creative and getting away with it. I am not an exception, plenty of peers had similarly awkward career paths.

#academia #AcademicChatter

albertcardona, 5 months ago to Neuroscience

This Scientific American issue from 1979 reads like a who's who of early neuroscience research:

Cowan, Crick, Kandel, Hubel, Wiesel, Stevens ...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/issue/sa/1979/09-01/

#icanhazpdf ?

In particular, Ordaz et al. 2017 https://doi.org/10.4103%2F1673-5374.213532 credit Francis Crick in this issue as having formulated the need for optical methods with cellular resolution to control the activity of neurons - a precursor to the development of optogenetics.

Crick's idea didn't come out of the blue: by then, bacteriorhodopsins (light-gated ion channels for protons) had been known and published for almost a decade (Oesterhelt and Stoeckenius, 1971 https://www.nature.com/articles/newbio233149a0 ), and halorhodopsin (light-gated chloride channel) had been reported 2 years earlier (Matsuno-Yagi and Mukohata 1977 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0006291X77912451 ).

(Channelrhodopsin, a light-gated cation channel that can depolarise and therefore activate neurons, wasn't reported until 2002, by Nagel et al. 2002 https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1072068 ).

#neuroscience #optogenetics

albertcardona, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

Yesterday I witnessed a behaviour I never expected from a solitary bee: she unloaded all its pollen baskets onto a leaf, then tasted it, and soon after flew off, releasing a cloud of pixie dust as she jumped and beat its wings down to take off. As if she had had a change of heart, and the pollen wasn't good enough?

Lasioglossum sp. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/183728376

#iNaturalist #nativebees #entomology #insects #Hymenoptera

albertcardona, 4 months ago to random

Michal Olšiak, Czech sculptor, did it again. This time, giant sculptures of insects. Fascinating exhibition, wish I could go there.

Ants, flies, weevils, beetles, and more. The gallery:

https://www.idnes.cz/kultura/vytvarne-umeni/michal-olsiak-megabrouci-vystava-brouci-hmyz-modely.A240103_204921_vytvarne-umeni_kurl/foto/COC5ced1bb436_174616_3915720.jpg

(If a Czech native speaker could translate his wikipedia page to English or French or Spanish, that would be greatly appreciated: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_Ol%C5%A1iak )

#MegaBrouci #entomology

Big statue of a mosquito with a red abdomen, engorged with blood.
Human-sized ant statues shown tending to aphids.

albertcardona, 7 months ago to llm

“when a large language model produces false information, it’s referred to as a “hallucination.” He prefers “confabulation.” Hallucination implies not only the presence of an inner mind, but the capacity of that mind to have sensory experiences. Confabulation, on the other hand, happens when a person unknowingly falsifies information to gloss over a gap in their memory. It’s still a metaphor, but a far better one for how current AI works” —says Ted Chiang https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6308990/ted-chiang/

#LLM #TedChiang #AI

albertcardona, 4 months ago to android

Public service announcement

Here's how to disable background apps in an Android phone:

1. Go to Settings
2. Search for "Developer Options"
3. Enable them at top right
4. Scroll down to "Background process limit"
5. Choose "No background process" or "At most, 1 process".

Further down, see also "Standby apps" and adjust their priority as wished. Most should be at rare, restricted, or never.

With these edits, even inexpensive, underpowered phones feel snappy. Helps as well to remove altogether any "smart" assistance apps by Samsung.

#android

albertcardona, 2 months ago to vim

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

#ViM