How cool is this?
Tethering transgenic fruit flies to a torque meter inside of a 360° display to let them learn how to control a punishing heat beam with their turning attempts.
It looks like we have finally discovered in which neurons the plasticity takes place that is required for this kind of learning:
We may not be 100% sure, yet, but everything is pointing towards plasticity in the motor neurons of the ventral nerve cord that control the wing angles.
@brembs
The idea of short term learning in motor neurons in a ganglionic nervous system is giving me chills and I cant quite pick out why. Embodied learning where there isnt a clear distinction between "symbolic" learning of "how to control beam" as some thought abstracted from its physical reality as a motor pattern is beautiful to me, even if I am oversimplifying/misunderstanding bc I know next to nothing about fly brains and this long research question
Indeed, for making research data accessible for scrutiny, what we should have instead, is an #openscience infrastructure at every research institution that should be as commonplace and as standard as microscopes or computers:
<<to insist on data. “You have to learn how to be an asshole,” he told MIT Technology Review. “It shouldn’t be this hard.” >>
[conference attendees] "discussed how to persuade the community to view data sharing positively, rather than seeing the demand for it as a sign of distrust. They also brought up the practical challenges of asking graduate students to do even more work by preparing their data for outside scrutiny when it may already take them over five years to complete their degree."
Academic publisher with a reputation for exploitation doubles down:
"In its most recent annual report (for 2022), Springer Nature posted an operating profit of €487 million (around £410 million) on revenues of more than €1.8 billion (around £1.6 billion)."
That's a 27% profit margin and then they offer their employees a real-term pay cut. The only thing anybody should be surprised about is that they went for so long before going after their own employees as well.
"Universities aren't institutions of knowledge anymore. They're assets. They're revenue streams. If they're not generating money for the top, then they only pose a threat, and they have to be weakened and destroyed."
Faced with a collective action problem, it helps to pick a small group with the autonomy to change their ways.
In scholarly publishing, there are about 8-12 million authors who are not even free to decide where they publish.
There are only a few thousand editorial boards where editors have complete freedom to choose where they work.
"Save editors time."
"Time is scholar’s most precious resource."
"Focus on the community."
"Journals are communities. "
@nemobis I was thinking in the realm of Diamond Open Access initiatives. Not thinking about the societies. There are other factors at play in the societies than just publishing, and a lot of the societies think of publishing as orthogonal to their actual mission. Others use it to fund their mission, but don't view it as their mission. That creates conflicts of interest around publishing even in a democratic context.
@danielbingham Yes, my point is that nowhere in diamond OA recommendations have I ever seen the number of voting members flagged as a relevant criterion/tool. So I'm very curious to see cases where that helped. (I've not looked that far.)
This otherwise sensible proposition is still mired in 17th century thinking. In any sensible, modern publishing system, "replicated" would be a stage any publication would go through, among, e.g., "peer reviewed", "open data/code verified", "cited", etc.
"Peer-replication model aims to address science’s ‘reproducibility crisis’"
@adredish @brembs
Like could it be that the prevailing norms in publishing are in fact designed to provide plausible cover for doing work that overclaims as much as possible while surviving just enough scrutiny to land the next grant and improve the JIF for the next quarters shareholder call.
Could it be that the very last thing we should do is pay double to publish results twice to the very organizations who construct the underlying conditions that cause the need for replication in the first place? Its the tail wagging the dog - instead of asking how we get people to do direct replications, we might consider asking why we need to work in such a way that the many many partial replications that happen all the time have no venue, and work is only publishable if it is demonstrably not a replication?
@adredish @brembs
There was a lot of noise made about publishing negative results about a decade ago, but instead of building a system where a continual process of shared results makes a clearer picture, we leaned into the same publication model and the only negative results that are published are big, splashy failures to replicate that are too late to do anything and add little to ongoing practice.