@alexh@fediscience.org
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

alexh

@alexh@fediscience.org

Science do-er and reformer in Sydney, Australia.
human object tracking book: https://tracking.whatanimalssee.com/intro.html#summary

Biases include https://mastodon.social/@siminevazire (for), cats (against). #metascience #perception #visualattention

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alexh, to random
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The journal
Psychology of Language and Communication is being considered for listing by the Free Journal Network. Let us know if you have any comments about it. https://sciendo.com/journal/PLC

alexh, to random
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It is bizarre to me that vegetarianism hasn't been increasing, not even slowly, over a period where support for LGBT increased enormously. Societal norms are weird.

alexh, to random
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After a few decades trying to work with the traditional system to reform scientific publishing, several charities have given up, realizing that the multinational oligopoly of Elsevier et al. and conservative prestigious journals have too much of a stranglehold over scholarship to give up their profiteering ways. https://www.science.org/content/article/bold-bid-avoid-open-access-fees-gates-foundation-says-grantees-must-post-preprints

alexh,
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

I see requiring preprints as an end-run around the publishers. Many of us are involved in building peer review back up, on top of preprints (e.g., WikiJournal of Science, Meta-psychology, and Meta-RoR, and PCI Community In, and the Free Journal Network, just to name some of the initiatives that I personally am involved in). Preprints also have advantages on their own, even if the publishers weren't a problem, most notably rapid dissemination.

alexh, to random
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

Gates Foundation, and me: Mandate preprints, support peer review services outside of big publishers

Today the Gates Foundation announced that they will "cease support for individual article publishing fees, known as APCs, and mandate the use of preprints while advocating for their review”. I am excited by this news because it’s been disheartening to see large funders continue to pour money down the throats of high-profit multinational publishers over the last couple…

https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2024/03/28/gates-foundation-and-me-mandate-preprints-support-peer-review-services-outside-of-big-publishers/

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

Biologists please take a month and learn to use multilevel models. In most conditions you cant treat individual cells or synapses as independent measurements for a statistical test, but you also dont have to throw that data away by using a per-organism mean only. Im sure theres some new hotness in modeling software since I had to use it, but lme4 uses almost the same syntax as R's lm
https://pubpeer.com/publications/98FCB4581543F4A4D1BE2F386D6BDA

alexh,
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

@jonny love multilevel models but who has time to "take a month" haha

alexh,
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

@jonny yeah, I get it

alexh, to random
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Things have gotten so bad in Spain with researchers gaming their publications records that the university accreditation body has woken up, its director saying "“The whole system is crazy and it’s costing millions of euros. That’s why this is an excellent moment to change it,” she affirms."
Support community-controlled free journals , e.g. those we list at freejournals.org, and real quality assessment, not publication counting and multinational corporations.

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-06-04/a-researcher-who-publishes-a-study-every-two-days-reveals-the-darker-side-of-science.html

cian, to random
@cian@mstdn.science avatar

Made the mistake of flicking through a few Wikipedia articles on topics I am familiar with. Apart from some out of date statements, the main issue is just how random a lot of the points are. Eg this page on synaptic plasticity is really unrepresentative of the field state of the art imo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_plasticity

Is this the kind of garbage students are reading and ChatGPT is training on?

alexh,
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@NicoleCRust @sls @tyrell_turing @cian Yes, they're often very random, partly because no one wants to take on re-organizing an article, instead they just add new bits. Some options:
-Host an edit-a-thon, e.g. at a neuroscience conference or just anytime
-Integrating Wikipedia editing into a neuroscience class for your students (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Student_assignments). Wikipedia also has course packages and other support for this, but I can't find the link now.
-Writing a full Wikipedia article or revision, and

alexh,
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

@NicoleCRust @sls @tyrell_turing @cian submitting it to WikiJournal of Science, which is a Scopus-indexed scholarly journal where I am an AE. One purpose of it is to take candidate Wikipedia replacement articles, and subject them to peer review until they are deemed good enough to replace an existing article.

alexh, to random
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

My workflow is so 2022. I don't use LLMs for writing or for coding. For writing, Google Duet integration with Docs might be good, but I think isn't available yet in Australia.
For coding, I don't want to use Visual Studio (too bulky an editor to have open all the time) and don't want to learn Vim.
Also, my code almost always is from an existing base, not from scratch. Any tips for what I might use for coding or writing?

alexh, to random
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The Responsible Research Assessment Initiative
https://theplosblog.plos.org/2024/02/the-responsible-research-assessment-initiative/

alexh, to random
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

David Eagleman has made an excellent podcast episode talking about motion perception and frame rates. The second half talks about our papers on the topic from a long time ago. I actually no longer agree with the conclusion he describes, that the continuous wagon-wheel illusion is entirely a result of motion detector adaptation. I now think that oscillations in the visual system have something to do with it, given how much the evidence for such oscillations has firmed up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e6xNY1DR7E&t=1198s

tdverstynen, to random
@tdverstynen@neuromatch.social avatar

Normalize punching pharmabros at every opportunity.

alexh,
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@tdverstynen so no private tutoring? Actually China made that illegal recently I think, resulting in many rich people hiring "nannies" with PhDs... What about Duolingo and the coming flood of AI-powered education products.
I think profit drives a lot of innovation, and quality generally.

alexh,
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

@neuralreckoning @tdverstynen so you are actually against private tutors? Just trying to clarify your views , exposing their folly in my view, with what seem to me somewhat absurd consequences. If you are against private tutoring, what about paid Duolingo? Private sports lessons?

alexh, to random
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement
https://www.anildash.com/2024/02/06/wherever-you-get-podcasts/

alexh,
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"the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience."

alexh, to random
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

A reason for the the increasing difficulty recruiting reviewers.

Articles published grew by 50% since 2016, "which has outpaced the limited growth, if any, in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically." arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884, via @joachim

Could this massive growth and continued use of metrics to evaluate researchers also be undermining the norm of spending time on reviewing?

alexh, to random
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Who's going to SIPS Nairobi in June? Hope to see you there! https://www.improvingpsych.org/SIPS2024/

alexh, to random
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Years ago, we discovered that saccades to moving objects, revolving about fixation, fall way short.
Now published in Journal of Vision, where we speculate about why this happens! https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2793247 All the real work was done by Jay Edelman and Reza Azadi.

alexh, to random
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

My fellow Bayesians!🤣

Do you like the phrase "sensitive evidence" as in "We found no sensitive evidence for the absence or presence of a relationship between X and Y"? (1/3 <BF<3)

To me this use of "sensitive" is tortured. Looks like Dienes (2014) may have invented this locution and others now copy it.

I think better would be “the data does not distinguish between”, "the data is not much more consistent with", "the data does not discriminate between", something like that.

alexh, to random
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

Looks like an article may be retracted as a result of a ltr to the editor we wrote.
This reminds me that people who spot such things often (usually?) aren't credited by the journal.
Looked at COPE retraction guidelines - they don't seem to recommend crediting anyone. That should be changed! @retractionwatch

alexh, to random
@alexh@fediscience.org avatar

Someone asked for advice on the options I was offered by an Elsevier journal. Is the following what we should be choosing now?

"A license to permit readers to share and adapt your article for any purpose, even commercially.
The publisher will apply the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) to the article where it publishes the article in the journal on its online platforms on an Open Access basis."

alexh,
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Answer: I recommend the first license, because if you instead include NC or ND clauses, then at least in some countries it is not clear whether universities can use your article in teaching because universities are sometimes considered commercial enterprises.

alexh,
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P.S. I myself have avoided Elsevier journals for the last 15 years because of their profiteering ways, involvement in the arms trade, surveillance of academics, and lobbying of parliaments such as Congress members to change laws to roll back open access policies.

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