Mike Schmidt

This one hit me in the feels today

It's clippy again!

"Machine vision systems—which have neither bodily states nor conscious thoughts—can predict with remarkable accuracy how humans will feel about the things they look at." 👀🔥

The perceptual primacy of feeling (PNAS Jan 2025) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#neuroskyence #vision #affectsci

What's it like at some agencies right now? I'm fresh off a conference where I got to speak to a bunch of people still at some important agencies. What's the climate like? Why are you staying? Generally the responses felt like this, and we are all Maggie:

Open Tools | Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics We are doing science in the open. Our data and tools are openly available to the community.

All of our neural dynamics tools, software, protocols, datasets, and even hardware plans are now available in one convenient place!

Check it out and let us know what you'd like to see next: www.allenneuraldynamics.org/tools

🧠📈

Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression - Nature Mental Health In this clinical trial, a single dose of intravenous ketamine delivered during surgical anesthesia had no greater effect than placebo in acutely reducing the severity of depressive symptoms in adults ...

There's also doi.org/10.1038/s442..., where ketamine vs placebo was masked by anesthesia during surgery, so there shouldn't be any placebo effect. But it was "surprisingly high" anyway. They've reanalyzed the data to look at the opioid system as a cause in doi.org/10.1016/j.ja....

All four hardcover volumes of Fundamental Papers in Complexity Science

So very excited [these](www.foundationalpapersincomplexityscience.org) arrived today!! I doubt I'll ever get through them all, but I always get inspiration and ambition from the complex systems perspective.

I found joy today,
not cold, but slightly chilled,
emerging from the shade into the warm sunshine.

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

Today I lost an NIH grant training clinicians to do research about intimate partner violence with perinatal women.

More women are murdered in the perinatal period than die of obstetric complications.

I didn't just lose a grant. We lost an entire cohort of people building careers to prevent that.

From 2010 to 2016 (latest data I have ), NIH research contributed to EVERY drug approved by the FDA

In a new Science study, cryo–electron tomography captures the in-cell architecture of the mitochondrial respiratory chain, illuminating how the coordinated action of molecular machines drives life’s fundamental energy conversion.

Learn more in this week's issue: scim.ag/3FA3Ygq

I think we have enough evidence to now argue that AI is not getting exponentially better, or even linearly better. It is asymptotically converging on a level of inadequacy, and even that is only happening because the data thieves are still stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.

Last year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.

Have not been able to tear myself away from exploring these just received spatial transcriptomics data from the septum and surrounding nuclei in human 🧠. Fascinating to explore since there are no comprehensive spatial gene expression data across these regions yet available in human brain.

I currently have two fully-funded PhD opportunities in my lab - both providing a chance to work on the incredible LEAF data set that we have been collecting the last couple of years (220 children followed longitudinally from 10-30 months on measures of attention and early EF). Please share!

RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore WASHINGTON—Addressing the ongoing outbreak in Texas that has infected at least 124 state residents and killed one child, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed Thursday to mak...

RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore

Now accepted at Nature Computational Science:

Nicole shows how #Bayesian #hierarchical #models can explicitly model major #source of #population #stratification in 10,000 ABCD subjects.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

This looks like amazing new work from my colleagues at Stanford demonstrating the opponent interactions of DA and 5HT in reinforcement learning.

𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘅 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝘄𝗼-𝘄𝗮𝘆
𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗿𝗼–𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Interesting paper but top-down causation seems to be way of capturing how micro-level entities respond to *aggregate state* of all other micro-level entities
#complexity
ht @evanthompson.bsky.social
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

💯

Hallucination is totally the wrong word, implying it is perceiving the world incorrectly.

But it's generating false, plausible sounding statements. Confabulation is literally the perfect word.

So, let's all please start referring to any junk that an LLM makes up as "confabulations".

I need this!! Now, how highly should I prioritize reading this paper, and which to-do list should I put it on?

Try the sites listed at www.sci-hub.pub, but before you do, learn about the context at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub to determine your comfort level with the legality of "stealing" publications your tax dollars funded.

🚨New WP🚨
We examine news sharing on 7 platforms:
1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news
2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning
3)But low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE, even BlueSky!
osf.io/preprints/ps...

I finally got a chance to watch that talk last night, and I agree it was excellent. We've been debating different regression schemes for training similar classifiers for a long time and this discussion was helpful. Thanks for sharing, Deon!

Good news everyone! A new version of graph-tool is just out! @graph-tool.skewed.de

graph-tool.skewed.de

Graph-tool is a comprehensive and efficient Python library to work with networks, including structural, dynamical, and statistical algorithms, as well as visualization. 1/N

#networkscience

"Reproducibility is hard" - nice piece by @petebachant.me on trying reproduce one's previous work.

A VERY PRETTY brain connectome diagram.

Took me two solid days of data munging and coding but I finally figured out how to create these gorgeous connectome/circle plot diagrams. This is the Yeo 7-network brain parcellation, with major connections in a group of healthy adults.

Students should study the humanities not because it makes them better workers but because it rips you open and breaks your brain and changes everything you thought you knew. I *promise* you this. I *promise* it has this ability, no matter how smart you think you are. I have seen it countless times.

Figure 1 from the paper describes the methods.

@frauleindoktor.bsky.social shares the details and writes insightfully about this spontaneous engagement in doi.org/10.1016/j.bp....