Redish Lab / is on Nostr

Scientist studying learning, memory, and decision-making. Poet and Playwright.

Last Notes

2024-06-15 13:34:51

Welcome back, Voyager 1!
Voyager 1 is sending full science data again!
This is an amazing debugging job, of a 1970s computer, done remotely over a distance of 15 billion miles (nearly 163 AU), and a lag time of nearly a day each way.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-program/voyager-1/voyager-1-returning-science-data-from-all-four-instruments/
#voyager1 #NASA

2024-04-27 22:27:48

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@npub1skv…aky3 Have you tried An Leckie's Ancillary Justice trillogy? Or Arkady Martine's Memory of Empire?

2024-04-04 00:42:42

For the one-year anniversary of the audiobook version of CHANGING HOW WE CHOOSE (The new science of morality) audiobooks is having a sale until 30/April.
https://www.audiobooks.com/promotions/promotedBook/646609/changing-how-we-choose-the-new-science-of-morality?refId=128804
#science

2024-03-04 13:25:10

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@npub19d9…f02p @npub1a7m…j0p9 @npub18ur…k9ge
It is not true at all that people "never get career credit for software they wrote." I know several cases where people got both explicit and implicit career credit for code they wrote.
For example, I can tell you that there were at least a few dozen cases where when people met me, they told me they used my software all the time.* I remember one senior faculty who only listened to my science because they recognized my name from the code their lab depended on.
In our annual merit review document, there is a space for us to include contributions/service to the community such as software design or maintenance. I know that my software* was an important piece of "service" when I went up for tenure. (It was mentioned in several of the letters.)
And in the new NIH biosketch (not so new anymore), you are supposed to list 5 "contributions to science" and under those, you are absolutely able to include software contributions. (And people do.)
* I wrote one of the early spike sorters called "MClust". At one time it was used for all tetrode spike sorting. I know it is still used by lots of people.
That being said, I do wish that we had a tradition of counting code citations. That's my one regret code-wise - that I didn't write a paper to cite - so I can't numerically count all those (MClust, A. D. Redish) citations. But I know that I got career credit for it.

2024-02-16 14:27:42

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@npub14d7…dm4s @npub1m7h…sn57 @npub1vvs…k2yk
@npub14d7…dm4s: Agree 100%. It's wild because the original Frontiers was a solution to the prestige treadmill system. (@npub19d9…f02p : I think the original Frontiers systems identified below are both wonderful ideas we should try to get back. (ideas for your new list))
When Frontiers started, it had a host of important changes that were really good. Then it got bought up by the prestige publishers and they are basically all gone now.
1. A new peer review process that provided gatekeeping without prevention. The peer reviewers "endorsed" a publication. You could reject a publication, which said "I refuse to put my name on this", provided (private) feedback to the authors and your name never appeared. (Authors never saw that reviewer's name either.) But another person could endorse the paper.
What this meant was that you could tell the quality of a paper by who was willing to endorse it. You could use that endorsement to judge whether you wanted to trust the paper.
In practice, papers got rejected when none of the reviewers in the field were willing to endorse the paper. So papers could get effectively rejected when the field didn't approve of it (no one would endorse it), but no one person could gate-keep a paper.
2. Papers moved UP not DOWN.
The first publication was in a field specific journal (that was generally low impact) and was judged on scientific merit, not impactfulness. Then, based on actual metrics (like downloads, votes, etc), the authors would be invited to write an article for a second-tier journal (less field specific, more general). There was supposed to be third-tier journals, but I don't think they ever appeared. When Nature bought Frontiers, I tried to convince the editors at Nature to create one slot for a paper in Nature so that it could serve as a fourth-tier journal, but they weren't having any of it.
In those early days, we had a lot of success with those two-tier Frontiers systems.

2024-02-16 02:24:17

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@npub19d9…f02p @npub1vvs…k2yk @npub1jzg…hc3a
Wikipedia is very gatekept. It has very strict curation criterion. (If you've ever tried to edit something, such as add a new page or add text without appropriate citations.)
What I have found interesting is that the preprint space (the Rxivs) seems to be fine within-field, in large part because experts within the field do their own peer review in things like journal clubs. But that doesn't translate across fields well at all. And it certainly doesn't provide safe science for non-scientists (politicians, journalists, clinical practitioners) to judge what to trust and what not to.
Your list doesn't include a curation process.

2024-02-15 20:01:30

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@npub19d9…f02p And whither peer review and gatekeeping?
It probably doesn't matter for you, or me, or @npub1jzg…hc3a or @npub1vvs…k2yk or many of the folks on this mastodon community, but I wouldn't want ol' Elon to be able to publish willy-nilly.
Even SFN has publication checks to make sure that big pharma wasn't using their conference to claim secret drug effects without review.
How is your current suggestion different from the ..rxiv groups (arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, psyRxiv, etc)?

2024-02-08 23:31:04

This wordcloud stuff is fun.
https://shiny.rcg.sfu.ca/u/rdmorin/scholar_googler3/
Yeah, OK, I buy this one for me: 😀
https://neuromatch.social/system/media_attachments/files/111/898/222/713/104/386/original/ba7d8002afe76af6.png

2024-01-18 19:24:39

#Cosyne needs to decide if it is a journal or a conference. 😡 They ask for 2-page "abstracts", but then review the 2 pages as if they are a full paper. 2/3 reviews we got back included statements of "I don't understand why they didn't do X", where X was (a) Figure 5 of a 10-page paper ("abstract" included figure 1-3) or (b) a 3-year $500k project beyond the actual submission. The one good review was for a project that could be completely described in 2 pages. That's not an abstract.

2024-01-14 17:12:41

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@npub19d9…f02p @npub1jzg…hc3a @npub13hn…fzrs
Do you mean that's not what most people mean because it's one among many psychological effects or do you mean that's not what people mean because it's a clear and well-posed question?
My suspicion is that consciousness will end up being like motion or information. Motion pre-Newton meant "change". After Newton, motion is physical motion (well-defined scientifically) and everything else is metaphor. Information pre-Shannon meant some nebulous ideas about meaning. After Shannon, information is the ability to determine one signal from another (well-defined scientifically).
There are a host of computational processes that seem to be lumped together in the concept of consciousness. But whenever we look at any of them specifically, they become amenable to neuroscientific inquiry and often have (at least partial) answers already.

2024-01-14 15:12:45

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@npub19d9…f02p @npub1jzg…hc3a @npub13hn…fzrs
This all gets easier if we accept that we can't measure introspection and shift instead to an action perspective. At that point, someone expressing "I remember yesterday" or "I see red" is taking a vocal action. So now, when we talk memory, we have to talk about it in the shape of how the memory affects the action.
The question now is how does the information process change under vocal actions that appear as "conscious" and vocal (or other) actions that don't.
A very interesting consciousness perspective (comparing vocal actions of perception vs not) is as second-order representation and attention to self as an explanatory process evolved to understand others' actions turned on oneself. (q.v. Michael Graziano's work on this.)
PS. Also, there are a host of consciousness hypotheses that argued for consciousness as a post-hoc monitoring process rather than a present moment action process. (Jeffrey Gray's book for example.) It's an interesting perspective that argues very much against the moment-by-moment process. Translating this into an action perspective moves the "consciousness" of memory into a longer term question of correcting errors and strategy controls.
PS. We need to be very clear what aspects of consciousness we are talking about. Philosophy tends to mix the perceptual recognition of qualia with the ability to explicitly plan an outcome and logical reasoning as a single thing called being "conscious", but those are three very different processes.
Hmmm. Actually, now I wonder if there are any known shared properties between them. I'm going to have to think on that.

2023-12-18 16:20:14

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub13ey…kkr5
But we are making progress with the weather! Weather predictions are vastly more reliable than they were a few decades ago. Even if the brain is chaotic, that doesn't mean it's not understandable. And it doesn't mean it's not manipulable (a word I like better than "controllable").
It may mean we need to think about controlling it on different levels.
Moreover, we control brains all the time. As Bill Newsome has been saying in his public talks --- There are two ways to get him to get up and run out of the room. You can either manipulate all of the neural firing and molecular states to move his muscles in the right way. Or you can tell him "your wife's on the phone and it's an emergency." Both of these are ways of controlling brains.

2023-12-05 04:40:33

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@npub15sw…x855 I believe there is data that astrocytes can affect neural firing and could potentially provide neural competition. (Maybe something like this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17536-3)

2023-10-12 02:37:46

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub16vc…z487
The fact that 50% of the submitted grants are "not discussed" is a testament to the problems with the grant system that are, IMHO, more serious than the problems in the journal/paper publication system. The amount of time wasted on the grant competition is terrifying and a huge inefficiency in the grant system. With papers, we can at least put the work out as preprints, and the effort is not wasted.
The "not discussed" review came from the idea that grants are a simple contest, so all you need to determine is which to fund. I got into science just as the old system was being replaced. In that old system, grants were very large (25 pages of research proposal, really!), grant review was seen like paper review and every grant was provided a set of things to change/fix (think "major revision" from peer review). There was a very real sense that if you fixed the problems, you would get funded. This meant that if you started the process 2-3 years early, you could survive on one grant. Lots and lots of labs had one grant for decades. Once they were funded, they would start the renewal process in year 3, and could reliably know whether they were going to be funded in year 5 (when the cycle ran out) or whether they needed to scramble. In practice, most labs could safely live on one grant.
But this was deemed that it "took too long to get a grant funded" (as if science works on that kind of fast timescale) and people shouldn't have to wait in line to get funded. So they nixed this.
PS. Our recent T32 (months of work) and our recent U01 (months of work) were also "not discussed". The amount of work I could have done on real science instead of writing grants is ... I can't even...
PPS. Here's an interesting suggestion of a "good enough + lottery system" .https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000065 @npub16nf…q6as

2023-10-02 14:59:21

UMN biomedical engineering has positions. This is an opportunity to join our amazing (cross-departmental, but extremely collaborative) neuroscience community here!
The Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Campus invites applications and nominations for full-time tenure-track or tenured positions at open rank, depending upon applicant qualifications. Candidates with demonstrated expertise and accomplishments in BME/bioengineering are invited to apply. Areas of interest include but are not limited to Cancer Bioengineering, Cardiovascular Engineering, and ***Neuroengineering***. Within these areas, immune dynamics, systems and synthetic biology, and large data analytics are of particular interest.
http://apply.interfolio.com/131760

2023-08-08 16:49:32

For those who like audiobooks. 60% sale until 1/Sept/2023 on Changing How We Choose: The new science of morality.
https://www.audiobooks.com/promotions/promotedBook/646609/changing-how-we-choose-the-new-science-of-morality?refId=91292

2023-06-03 15:13:18

Are there better preprint servers than #bioRxiv? Every time I try to post something to #bioRxiv, I have to fight with them that a paper doing new analyses on real data is a "real paper" just because we also do a good job of placing our results in the literature.
Moreover, #bioRxiv has an explicit policy that new theoretical insights are "not suitable for posting" (meaning they don't think theory is a real contribution to the literature), which is bad for science. What are the better other options?
It's almost (almost) as bad as fighting with editorial desk-rejections at a real journal.
#neuroscience #preprints #sciencepublishing #theory #experiment