Daniel Borek

looks like an awesome setup for brms

The General Inquirer in the time of LLMs: a BERTopic tutorial – CSS@IPP — Tutorials and resources A. Morin

Here's what they don't tell you about topic modeling: preprocessing determines everything. Corpus homogeneity, document length, and context windows matter more than algorithm choice. BERTopic won't fix bad inputs. No model will.

I am doing a short workshop in this symposium (quoted below) for folks in and around Leipzig. Here's the abstract. I really indulged myself with this one.

A Guerilla Approach to Scientific Workflow:

The preprint is now out : arxiv.org/abs/2601.21016

I especially like to use a data dictionary to add labels! :)

cghlewis.com/blog/dict_cl...

cool R trick for those unaware: the {labelled} package can be used to set variable labels which are automatically used by some other packages, including {ggplot2} and {gtsummary}

Love this. “Spontaneous” has always really meant “we don’t know why X is happening”, a perspective tied to the dominance of structured task paradigms for studying cognition, behavior, and brain activity.

The mechanics of conspiratorial reasoning and why it works. Next time you see a neat story, ask what has to be assumed for it to hold.

Everybody should read this book

🧵“How do seemingly ordinary people become agents of state murder?” This is one of the guiding questions I ask students in my graduate class on genocide/state violence. With recent events, it is a question many Americans are asking.

I do not have a definitive answer, but here is a reading list: 1/

This book is a wonderful, synthetic and richly illustrated journey through the natural history of the vertebrate brain 🤩

A big thank you to the authors 🙏

"A major theme in the evolution of the telencephalon has been the emergence of novel pathways...

1/2

These women helped to shape quantum mechanics — it’s time to recognize them An astute book redresses our collective perception of a field that became known as ‘boys’ physics’.

These women helped to shape quantum mechanics — it’s time to recognize them www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A hitchhiker’s guide to information theoretical measures in psychology Niels van Santen, Yves Rosseel, Daniele Marinazzo https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmp.2025.102969 Highlights • Information theory and psychology have a rich history • Information theoretical measures can be disconnected from information theory • These measures complement variance-based measures of variability and association • They are more general with respect to interpretation and possible data types • There are many extensions towards the investigation of higher-order interactions. Abstract In psychology, as in other sciences, information theory can be used as a tool to complement more standard regression-based methods of data analysis. It is important to see the potential of information theoretical measures as statistical tools without implying a connection to their origins in communication theory and engineering. The use of these measures may provide us with additional insights due to their sensitivity to non-linear relationships, their flexibility to the mixing of data types, and their more straightforward generalization towards investigating higher-order interactions. We briefly reintroduce information theory and compare several measures such as mutual information and co-information with correlation and regression-based methods for the investigation of variable dependence.

A hitchhiker’s guide to information theoretical measures in psychology

by @nielsvs.bsky.social with me and Yves Rosseel

authors.elsevier.com/c/1mOwr53na-...

osf.io/preprints/ps...

To anyone who is conversant with the vast literature on the various phases of the affective life a treatise on this subject may appear to be a presumptuous undertaking. To one who is intimately working in this area it may even seem improbable that the stage can be set for any definite organization of the available materials. There is, on the one hand, a wealth ofij^^a^ya^red over a large territory, and there is, on the other hand, an^obscurr^ of focus which has led to a confusion of results. A perusal of the literature will reveal numerous theoretical writings and a far-llung line of research on many phases of feeling. But the serious student of systematic psychology may well stand aghast at the lack of standardization of terms, at the failure to obtain any substantial agreement as to what the feelings or the emotions are from a scientific angle, and at our lamentable inability to apply what we have learned from carefully controlled investigations in this sector of the mental life.

But wow - here's the beginning of the preface for Ruckmick 1938. I'm always taken aback when I read something from so long ago (here ~90 years) lamenting about the same things we're still lamenting about today. That's one reason I love these old books - they are so great for perspective.

From the GradSchool community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the GradSchool community

Some really good tips here. Wish I had learned number 3 earlier, or ever for that matter 🥲

www.reddit.com/r/GradSchool...

They don’t have a deficit of attention; they simply focus it on irrelevant things, even if the cognitively know what they need to achieve their long-term goals. This happens when they’re not motivated by factors like novelty urgency challenge interest and passion (INCUP).

I think there is a lot to unpack: I think sometimes the adhders might be good at planning but really bad of execution, the perception of time is either now or never (or planning too much as they really feel that they can squeeze it): Anna Anzulewicz try to study now time perception aspect I think

I would treat the avoidance of harder task and time blindness (I will have enough time to finish it later) as an separate symptoms

It is also not always about being pleasant in the ADHD hyperfocus, it just really hard to break from a specific behavior/switch tasks doesn’t even have a lot of value for a person at this moment;

There also issue with perceiving/finding objects, if you move/put a jar behind another jar in the fridge, there is a high chance that the person with ADHD will have more problems with finding it than another, more neurotypical person

There’s a hypothesis suggesting problems with dopamine uptake in ADHD are linked to difficulties in assigning value and importance. Essentially, for ADHDers, the most important thing is what they see last, what has a looming deadline or is new, rather than what’s long-term important.

Episode #34 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On balanced neural networks – with Nicolas Brunel

theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn34

Cortical neurons seem to receive about the same amount of excitation and inhibition. One of the founders of this key idea in 1990s explains.

We propose applications to physiological networks, climate, and finance

Combo of two papers on partial information rate decomposition now out!

journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...

Mini thread below 👇

We built the openESM database:
▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place
▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software
▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python

Find out more:
🌐 openesmdata.org
📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

#EconSky
AI-assisted Programming May Decrease the Productivity of Experienced Developers by Increasing Maintenance Burden https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10165

"… find that productivity indeed increases.

… the increase in productivity is driven by less-experienced (peripheral) developers.

… 1/3

AI chatbots are sycophants — researchers say it’s harming science Nature asked researchers who use artificial intelligence how its propensity for people-pleasing affects their work — and what they are doing to mitigate it.

"Artificial intelligence (AI) models are 50% more sycophantic than humans, an analysis published this month has found." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in structured cycles - Nature Neuroscience The human brain cycles through a repertoire of brain networks on a 1-second timescale during rest and tasks. This cycling appears to allow periodic engagement of essential cognitive functions, with th...

Large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in structured cycles

🧠🟦 🧠🤖

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How to develop good research questions - Nature Human Behaviour Designing good research questions goes well beyond the standard definitions of clarity, focus and tractability, and even beyond ‘novelty’ in the strictest sense. This Comment describes the iterative c...

How to develop good research questions

#CogSci #Neuroskyence

www.nature.com/articles/s41...