MolemanPeter

elduvelle, 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago) to random

#Zotero still asking $60 for 1 year of 6Gb… 😭 @zotero I love you all but it’s 2024 now, maybe you could either reduce the price or increase what we get for it?
#ReferenceManager

Edit: not even 60… just SIX

davidho, 2 months ago to random

Behold the longest tunnel specifically built for biking and walking.

Timelapse through a 3 km tunnel lit by different color lights in different sections

MolemanPeter, 2 months ago to random

Across every aspect of being a self, we perceive ourselves as stable over time because we perceive ourselves in order to control ourselves, not in order to know ourselves.

Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (The Sunday Times Bestseller) (p. 222). Faber & Faber. Kindle-editie.

NicoleCRust, 2 months ago to random

Fascinating first person account by a psychologist who faked data

The scientist: Diederik Stapel. A Dutch social psychologist. He wrote a book explaining the context and how one thing led to another until he was caught. Nick Brown translated it into English. Freely available here:

http://nick.brown.free.fr/stapel

Page 101:

I also became increasingly skilled in the use of techniques that could put a healthy-
looking shine on otherwise mediocre results. If I didn’t get the effect I wanted across all the
different measures I’d used or the questions I’d asked, I would use the ones that did show
that effect. If an effect was present in an experiment, but not strongly enough to be tapped
by all of the types of measurements I’d used, I would make it stronger by combining the measures where the effect seemed to be only partly working. ...

Page 102:

After years of balancing on the outer limits, the gray became darker and darker until
it was black, and I fell off the edge into the abyss. I’d been having trouble with my
experiments for some time. Even with my various “gray” methods for “improving” the data,
I wasn’t able to get the results the way I wanted them. I couldn’t resist the temptation to go wanted it so badly. I wanted to belong, to be part of the action, to score. I really, really wanted to be really, really good. I wanted to be published in the best journals
and speak in the largest room at conferences. I wanted people to hang on my every word
as I headed for coffee or lunch after delivering a lecture. I felt very alone.

p103

I was alone in my tastefully furnished office at the University of Groningen. I’d taken
extra care when closing the door, and made my desk extra tidy. Everything had to be neat
and orderly. No mess. I opened the computer file with the data that I had entered and
changed an unexpected 2 into a 4; then, a little further along, I changed a 3 into a 5. It
didn’t feel right. I looked around me, nervously. The data danced in front of my eyes.
When the results are just not quite what you’d so badly hoped for; when you know that that
hope is based on a thorough analysis of the literature; when this is your third experiment
on this topic and the first two worked great; when you know that there are other people
doing similar research elsewhere who are getting good results; then, surely, you’re entitled
to adjust the results just a little?

glynmoody, 2 months ago to random

Air #pollution could be significant cause of #dementia – even for those not predisposed - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/21/air-pollution-could-be-significant-cause-of-dementia-even-for-those-not-predisposed?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco "People in areas of high PM2.5 concentrations had higher amounts of amyloid plaques in brain"

brembs, 2 months ago to Neuroscience

Some interesting #neuroscience !
When flies like #drosophila sit, walk or fly, the gain in their motion vision adapts:
https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/217/10/1737/14000/Octopaminergic-modulation-of-the-visual-flight
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2492
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/25/9231
Like many other animals, flies also attenuate expected motion input during turns:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416316798?via%3Dihub
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221013361?via%3Dihub
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4083
Because mice appear to have similar features, this was considered quite general.
Work in monkeys now challenges that notion:
https://www.thetransmitter.org/animal-models/monkey-studies-throw-wrench-into-decade-old-idea-about-movements-effect-on-visual-cortex/

jonny, 3 months ago to random

They did WHAT
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/05/no-data-no-problem-undisclosed-tinkering-in-excel-behind-economics-paper/

NicoleCRust, 3 months ago to random

Do psychologists "measure"?

Weird question, right?

"Measurements of attributes such as emotions, well-being, or intelligence are widely used for various purposes in society, but it remains a matter of discussion whether psychological measurement is analogous to measurement in the natural sciences, and to what extent it qualifies as measurement at all.'
https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2300693
Edit: author is here! @mieronen

My initial take: what?! This seems silly. But I'm starting to warm up to it. It's about causality. Consider: "insomnia causes fatigue"; no one disputes it. But there's not a physical thing in the world called insomnia that causes a physical thing in the world, fatigue billiard-ball-style. Rather, the physical causal chain happens by way of a lack of sleep causing the brain state that leads to the mind state of fatigue (in other words, that word "cause" is doing some heavy lifting in that phrase). The question is: can you meaningfully talk about causality when you have abstracted away from physical interactions?

On one hand, of course - you can develop causal models formulated entirely at the psychological level (rewards, punishments, surprises, mood) that make falsifiable predictions and you can both perturb and measure these things to test those models.

On the other hand, we probably do need to take some care that we aren't confusing ourselves as we throw around that word "cause" interchangeably for things that physically interact and abstractions of those things.

Thoughts? I'm particularly curious about cases in which this type of abstraction has led researchers astray.

NicoleCRust, 3 months ago to random

Thoughts on these provocative ideas (about how research in psychology should proceed)?

The last author tipped me off to this one. Curious to hear impressions.

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4284943

(also here, behind the BBS paywall: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/beyond-playing-20-questions-with-nature-integrative-experiment-design-in-the-social-and-behavioral-sciences/7E0D34D5AE2EFB9C0902414C23E0C292)

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment’s specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. The researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm—and with far greater efficiency.

ekmiller, 4 months ago to random

New paper! A universal pattern of brain wave frequencies. They are slower in deep cortical layers and faster in superficial layers. When something is this ubiquitous, you know it is doing something important.
https://picower.mit.edu/news/study-reveals-universal-pattern-brain-wave-frequencies

NicoleCRust, 4 months ago to random

Done writing the book.

(Deep inhale).

~90K words. A few years of work. A transformative journey that did not end at all as I thought when I started. I'm grateful to have done it - what a privilege. A much bigger conceptual project than anything I've done up to this point.

I got to think intensely for a better part of a few years (in parallel to running a lab and teaching as a professor). Somehow there was not time for that before. I'm not exactly sure where I found it; I just did.

There will be many revisions going forward. And it won't hit the shelves anytime soon. But I'm going to pause and celebrate this moment, where every one of the bits are finally in place. I learned so much along the way. Even today, on the last day, I was fascinated, and I'm grateful. (That said, I'm also a bit tired).

What's the book about? A slice of the spirit behind it is captured here: https://www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neuroscience/is-the-brain-uncontrollable-like-the-weather/

UlrikeHahn, 4 months ago to random

New year, new blog post...

This time with some thoughts on social media for science discourse!

all comments welcome!

https://write.as/ulrikehahn/some-thoughts-on-social-media-for-science

NicoleCRust, 5 months ago to Neuroscience

My new piece for @thetransmitter. Why is treating brain dysfunction so ENORMOUSLY challenging?

Because it amounts to controlling a complex system.

Drawing from the history of weather research, I pose the question: Can it even be done? And 14 experts in complex systems chime in. Would love to hear your thoughts as well!

https://www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neuroscience/is-the-brain-uncontrollable-like-the-weather/

#neuroscience #complexity