@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz
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albertcardona

@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz

How does the brain work? Someday, we'll figure it out.
Group Leader, MRC LMB, and Professor, University of Cambridge, UK.
#neuroscience #Drosophila #TrakEM2 #FijiSc #CATMAID #connectomics #connectome #vEM #iNaturalist #entomology
Born at 335 ppm.
Brains, signal processing, software and entomology: there will be bugs.

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albertcardona, (edited ) to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

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

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@futurebird

On fairy wasps, they do include them. This is what they write:

"In the small Hymenoptera, neuron size may be a limiting factor for brain miniaturization, as shown for the smallest insects (the parasitoid wasp Megaphragma [42]), whose larval brains comprise less than 5000 cells, the cell bodies of which are lost during pupation. The brain of the smallest species in our sample (the parasitoid wasps Leptopilina; figure 1) comprised around 30 000 cells (electronic supplementary material, table S1). Similar neuron numbers (2.2 × 105–3.7 × 105 neurons; [43]) have been estimated for fairyflies (Hymenoptera: Mymaridae), which are smaller than the smallest of our samples, suggesting that our cell number estimates may be conservative."

On ants: ants have large antennae and use them for all sorts of tasks, including sensing wind, scent, and mechanoreceptively as if they were hands but also as drums for assessing through vibration the content and properties of what they are touching. Parasitoid wasps ("flying ants", sort of) use their antennae to drum surfaces, a form of active echolocation of caterpillars and larvae inside plant stems or wood. All of these activities need a lot of brain power to process them.

Granted, eyes as 2D surfaces require lots of repeated neurons for contrast and color, and neurons that integrate across them just to process movement in the visual scene. I'd like to see a comparison with the size of antennal lobes and AMMC (antennal mechanosensory and motor center) regions of wasps and ants.

By the way, large brains may be costly for parasitoid wasps for little benefit, say van der Woude et al. 2019 https://academic.oup.com/jeb/article/32/7/694/7326298

rmounce, to random
@rmounce@mastodon.social avatar

This is big news: https://library.harvard.edu/about/news/2024-04-23/harvard-library-launching-harvard-open-journals-program

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@rmounce

Now imagine that Harvard departments stated that unless their faculty publishes there instead of in the usual glamour journals, they won't get tenure or be allowed to apply for grants.

Now wouldn't that bring about change immediately. And lots of shouting. Ultimately, what glamour journals can do, and could do very well, is write short summaries of papers for broad consumption. Not publish the original works.

albertcardona, to random
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Conway's game of life, the book: https://conwaylife.com/book/

"This book provides an introduction to Conway's Game of Life, the interesting mathematics behind it, and the methods used to construct many of its most interesting patterns"

albertcardona, to academia
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

NIH increases PhD and postdoc salaries:

"Predoctoral scholars will receive an approximate 4% increase in their pay level bringing it to $28,224, and postdoctoral scholars will receive an approximate increase of 8%, with pay levels beginning at $61,008 and upwardly adjusted based on years of experience. NIH aims to increase these pay levels over the next five years."

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-increase-pay-levels-pre-postdoctoral-scholars-grantee-institutions

For postdocs, "only" ~10k short of entry-level salaries at : https://www.hhmi.org/news/hhmi-announces-postdoc-salary-changes

stefan, to random
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online avatar

Adding descriptive alt text to your images is punk rock.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@stefan

Agree, yet, can’t shake off the feeling of feeding the scrapers in search of text-image pairings to train ever larger machine learning models.

garfiald, to random
@garfiald@mastodon.social avatar

Hello! Serious post from me for once. If there are any autistic people reading this who have views about the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, I would be immensely grateful if you could share them with me. I'd also be grateful for any resources relating to autistic people's perspectives on Baron-Cohen's work. Thank you

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@FrauZeitlos @garfiald

Cousins, IIRC.

neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

So what would it take to publish a paper here on mastodon and do public peer review? Just an agreement to use a few hashtags like , and in replies things like , , , ? Some automatically generated web and pdf output summarising the thread? Submission to something like Zenodo to give a DOI? Linking user accounts to orcid to verify identity? Only real problem I see is that even with markdown and LaTeX, Mastodon posts are not well suited for longer posts with multiple figures etc. Maybe fine for short results though?

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@neuralreckoning

Perhaps software publishing requires a new application that happens to implement ActivityPub but isn't necessarily Mastodon.

What you are describing reminds me of @joss https://github.com/openjournals/joss

25kV, to random
@25kV@mas.to avatar

Is there a product that degrades less gracefully when there is no internet access than Microsoft Office 365?

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@25kV

I have been on the internet since 1995, written client-server software applications and more, and I am not able to understand what is the use case of Microsoft Office 365, or what advantages it may have over plain old software application running on one's computer. None at all.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@25kV

Google Docs and Overleaf aren't far from a system that works. I still find local document writing augmented with good version control systems better for collaborative writing.

Adria, to random
@Adria@mstdn.science avatar

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01080-x

This is a systemic injustice that people from passport-underpriveleged places must suffer through to be successful in a research career. The fact that UK and US universities also impose huge fee increases on international students adds insult to injury.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Adria

And not just "Global South". Citizens from European Union countries that aren't part of Shengen have trouble with visas – they are left out of al the bilateral agreements and visa waivers. As do Chinese students.

albertcardona, (edited )
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Adria

In the UK at least, ever since the introduction of fees for undergraduate degrees – instead of direct funding from the government –, and particularly since Brexit, a major source of funding are foreign students and their high tuition fees. How long the situation will last is anyone's guess. But fair it is not.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Adria

At the moment, in the UK, for many universities, foreign students are subsidizing domestic ones. It's that bad.

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

Are there actually neuroscientists who dont believe that most invertebrates, fish, etc. have lowercase-c consciousness, an internal subjective experience of the world? Is the alternative that they are just reflex machines? Why wouldnt we make the opposite assumption - that animals that have a complex enough nervous system to run a whole body thats responsive to their ecosystem are "conscious" until proven otherwise. But what would the point be of proving otherwise? I guess im just deeply uninterested in semantic games that exclude most of the animal kingdom from the assumption of mere subjectivity.

Re: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01144-y

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@jonny

Reading Thomas Seeley's "Honeybee democracy" https://archive.org/details/honeybeedemocrac0000seel and observing bees in the wild, and having read Goulson's "Bumblebees behaviour, ecology and conservation" https://www.nhbs.com/bumblebees-behaviour-ecology-and-conservation-book , it's quite the exercise to conclude that bees don't haver inner representations of the world and complex wants, leisure, and play.

yoginho, to Futurology
@yoginho@spore.social avatar

Wow. Mike Levin has finally come out as a full : https://noemamag.com/ai-could-be-a-bridge-toward-diverse-intelligence

I'm not sure "most of us think this way about the world we want for our kids"... at least I don't. Not at all. I find this toxic optimist "vision" utterly naive & disgusting. /1

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@yoginho

You are asking for effort. Reasonable, but unlikely.

The scary bit for me is that presumably intelligent and highly educated people are capable of deluding themselves as much as the rest of us.

albertcardona, to climate
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Cambridge, UK: 8C at noon, about 7C less than the historical mean daily maximum for April 22nd. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge#Climate

A peek into the jet stream shows a massive meander bringing cold air from the North. Courtesy of : less temperature differential between the poles and the equator weaken the jet stream which then meanders more, swinging the weather from cold to hot and to cold again over the space of a couple of weeks as meanders shift about.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/250hPa/orthographic=-352.11,45.49,352

video/mp4

jon, to random
@jon@gruene.social avatar

I am tired of

  • being attacked by middle aged men
  • in newspapers read by middle aged men
  • the media is edited by middle aged men, who...
  • ... mostly drive cars, which is typical of middle aged men
  • who make Besserwisser type of arguments, about how the ticket doesn't pay for itself, an argument typical of middle aged men

When the ticket benefits all sorts of people across the whole of society, most of whom are not middle aged men

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@jon @coolesding

One only has to bring in the costs of not taking the train: all the state subsidies to roads, to traffic police, to health care not just for accidents but also from the lack of exercise and the crankiness of not interacting with fellow human beings and being stressed in a car, plus the cost of lost leisure and labour from having committed the time to driving instead. And the environmental damage of driving and cars.

Andy Singer says it best:

image/png

albertcardona, (edited ) to random
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I had forgotten camera SD cards have limits. Just reached "Camera full" for the first time – it's a 128 GB SD card, with nearly 50,000 12 MP photos and some videos. 99% of invertebrates, largely insects: 6478 of 7155 observations at #iNaturalist https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/albertcardona?view=tree&details_view=observations , of which the last ~5000 were done with this camera.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@neuralreckoning

The real issue is always finding time later to sort them out. My older is nearly a teenager and I still entertain the fantasy that, some day, I will pick about 100 for each year and make annual photo albums.

albertcardona, to Neuroscience
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

"Noise limits of event cameras" AKA event-based silicon retinas. A talk by Tobi Delbruck in Cambridge, UK, in March 25, 2024.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY31GaiOkNM

The screenshot below features Patrick Lichtsteiner and his work on mimicking retinal circuits in the design of the dynamic vision sensor (DVS), an event-based camera where the log difference of light intensity at time t and t-1 is emitted (the event), rather than a typical camera frame. This has extraordinary implications for visual processing, data transfer bandwidth and data storage.

albertcardona, (edited )
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

An innovation I had missed: mixing in a DVS pixel with 15 other "normal" color pixels, in a 4x4 16-pixel macro-pixel configuration. And what for? To use the events from the fast, single DVS pixel to deblur and get sharper edges imaged by the other, slow 15 pixels. Can then use a 120 fps input plus the events to reconstruct the video at 5,000 fps (!).

https://youtu.be/YY31GaiOkNM?t=1177

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Having determined that the DVS pixel noise is limited to 2x the shot noise, Tobi's group built a "Scientific DVS" targetting e.g., very fast imaging of neural activity with low noise. They've done it by tweaking the DVS pixel circuit and also binning 4 pixels together for spatial integration.

The result: 10x more sensitive.

Looking forward to seeing applications in neuronal activity imaging, which seems ideally suited for event-based imaging: large fields of view where largely nothing changes, with few, very sparse but fast changing pixels – where neurons are active.

image/png

cdarwin, to random
@cdarwin@c.im avatar

Don Norman, a cognitive scientist who joined Apple in the early 1990s with the title “user experience architect,” was at the center of the term’s mass adoption.

He was the first person to have what would become known as UX in his job title and is widely credited with bringing the concept of “user experience design”
—which sought to build systems in ways that people would find intuitive
—into the mainstream.

Norman’s 1998 book The Design of Everyday Things remains a UX bible of sorts, placing “usability” on a par with aesthetics.

Norman, now 88, explained to me that the term “user” proliferated in part because early computer technologists mistakenly assumed that people were kind of like machines.

“The user was simply another component,” he said. “We didn’t think of them as a person
—we thought of [them] as part of a system.”

So early user experience design didn’t seek to make human-computer interactions “user friendly,” per se.

The objective was to encourage people to complete tasks quickly and efficiently.
People and their computers were just two parts of the larger systems being built by tech companies, which operated by their own rules and in pursuit of their own agendas.

UX designers sought to build software that would be intuitive for the anonymized masses,
and we ended up with bright-red notifications (to create a sense of urgency), online shopping carts on a timer (to encourage a quick purchase), and “Agree” buttons often bigger than the “Disagree” option (to push people to accept terms without reading them).

A user is also, of course, someone who struggles with addiction.
To be an addict is—at least partly—to live in a state of powerlessness.

Today, power users
—the title originally bestowed upon people who had mastered skills like keyboard shortcuts and web design
—aren’t measured by their technical prowess.
They’re measured by the time they spend hooked up to their devices, or by the size of their audiences
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/19/1090872/ai-users-people-terms/

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@cdarwin

Ironically, the webmaster of the MIT technology review reveals quite a bit about what is wanted from its "users":

pvonhellermannn, to random
@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

Half thinking of starting an hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.

Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@pvonhellermannn

In the short term, the cost cutting makes the decision-makers (VC and pro-VC) look smart among themselves. Plus all they need is another year or two of holding the fort until stepping down – they “serve” a term, you see, they aren’t owners or dictators – to then pick up a golden parachute into charing a charity or towards actual retirement.

albertcardona,
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@pvonhellermannn

Accountability isn’t ever for them. It’s that old approach to crises from “Yes, Prime Minister”:

Bernard Woolley : What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard Woolley : What's that?
Sir Richard Wharton : Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0751831/characters/nm0001329

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