Katie B

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind — Emily Dickinson

Everyone says “Today’s PhD students are so accomplished I wouldn’t have gotten in today” as if it’s a good thing. It’s not. There are amazing young scientists out there today. But grad admissions is ignoring wide swaths of them because it’s been infected with the same credentialist bullshit of faculty hiring and grants.

“Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.”

In one of the most significant 1st Amendment victories in years, a 5th Circuit panel (only one of whom is a Trump appointee) rules that the Biden WH, the FBI, CDC, and Surgeon General violated Americans' core free speech rights by coercing Big Tech to censor on their command.

I'm tired of the lazy reporting on loneliness: "We have a loneliness epidemic, it's making ppl miserable & killing them. Probably due to social media, phones, suburban life, or smthg. Let's go back to meeting in real life!" No! Yes, we do spend more time alone:

So exciting to see human trials start on dopamine neuron replacement for Parkinson's disease! It’s NOT enough to stop these diseases from progressing; neuron replacement is essential to cure neurodegenerative diseases caused by neuron loss. prnewswire.com/news-releases/…

I’ve been a hospital chaplain now for eight years at hundreds of deathbeds. I want to tell you something I’ve witnessed. Most people, at the end, realize they’ve spent a lot of their life hiding. Sometimes by choice, or because they could not safely choose to be themselves. ➡️

We are visualizing our data all wrong. Typically, academic graphs show statistical confidence intervals or standard errors. This paper shows that everyone from doctors to tenured faculty misread these graphs, assuming effects are larger. Show variability! jakehofman.com/pdfs/illusion-…

@MatjazLeonardis science.org/content/articl… suggests that some kind of error-correcting mechanism makes the two pairings particularly stable

Gradients of neurotransmitter receptor expression in the macaque cortex, out now in @NatureNeuro. nature.com/articles/s4159… Our findings: 1/7

Our review on connectome organisation across species has just been published: ‘Connectomes: from a sparsity of networks to large-scale databases’ doi.org/10.3389/fninf.… #comparative #connectome #evolution 1/3

As doctors interact more with #ArtificialIntelligence-related tools, patient protections that regulations and institutional policies provide will have to be reviewed: bit.ly/45YfWcp #neurotwitter #AI #MedicalEthics @AANMember @LidiaMouraNVL @DavidJonesBrain @neuroEHRdoc

If only we had some sort of brain-behavior mapping related to N=1 brain images we see in clinic when evaluating dementia symptoms!

Many small neuroimaging studies have probably reported false positive findings. Especially for traits related to cognition & mental health, thousands of subjects are required 🧠 New paper from our talented PhD student Shu Liu in @NatureHumBehav: nature.com/articles/s4156…

Here are the areas of hypometabolism on one of my patients. What are the symptoms? #endalz #getanFDG

"Most people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75" Why? 4 reasons and solutions:

A NYT article on the debate around whether LLM base models should be closed or open. Meta argues for openness, starting with the release of LLaMA (for non-commercial use), while OpenAI and Google want to keep things closed and proprietary. They argue that openness can be dangerous. But they are just protecting their commercial interests. I argue that closeness is *considerably* more dangerous than openness. Once LLMs become the main channel through which everyone accesses information, people (and governments) will *demand* that it be open and transparent. Basic infrastructure must be open. "Dr. LeCun also pointed to recent history to explain why Meta was committed to open-sourcing A.I. technology. He said the evolution of the consumer internet was the result of open, communal standards that helped build the fastest, most widespread knowledge-sharing network the world had ever seen. “Progress is faster when it is open,” he said. “You have a more vibrant ecosystem where everyone can contribute." "In Battle Over A.I., Meta Decides to Give Away Its Crown Jewels." nyti.ms/3Wf1yIc?smid=n…

After 27 years of UN climate talks, Big Oil finally succeeded in completing its hijacking of the annual meeting of 198 countries to act on climate @UNFCCC should be going nuts about it and acting (fat chance, probably) Top 10 reasons why the hijacking is complete: 🧵 #COP28

"This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play." - Alan Watts

On Mother’s Day let’s remind women it’s not a badge of honor to put other people first and neglect yourself. Let’s remind women self respect means your needs matter, too. The ‘Good mothers can do it all’ era is over and the ‘Good mothers model clear boundaries’ era has begun. May we raise women who are fully comfortable with disappointing people, saying no, and who confidently leave spaces where all they’re offered is emotional breadcrumbs.