Tim Byron

I’m glad the union is already involved and hopefully they have some teeth. It all sounds pretty unfair, and the end effect is cruel, dangling that carrot in from of you…

That is pretty shit! I know someone who was in a similar situation whose contract was apparently held up by the uni’s Chief Financial Officer taking weeks to sign off on the paperwork for no particular reason.

Subjects I’ve taught at uni:
History and Philosophy of Psychology
Australian Popular Music
Genetics and Bioscience for Psychologists
Singing and Vocality
Learning and Cognition

What I have learned playing live music is that knowledgeable audiences only notice about 10% of the flubs you make, and only are bothered by about 10% of the flubs they notice - they’re not there to identify flubs, they want to learn stuff/be entertained etc.

That’s very interesting to read about! Psychology’s approach is inevitably very much about the average of what people do, and so the individual quirks of people are very interesting but hard to study with psychology tools.

Why do we get snippets of songs stuck in our heads? And are earworms more common with OCD? Most people experience earworms at least weekly, especially if you listen to a lot of music.

I wrote this recently for the Conversation about what research says about why and how songs get stuck in our heads.

theconversation.com/why-do-we-ge...

I have switched to Ecosia on PC but hadn’t got around to doing so on mobile - but this motivated me to do that now, I’ll try DuckDuckGo with that…thanks!

I would not be surprised at all - prominently featuring paid ads in search is obviously at the heart of Google Search’s business model. Google Search has got so bad that it seems obvious to me that it’s ripe for replacement by a leaner meaner competitor.

That AI summary being the first thing most people see when they search for anything is the worst. I await Google inserting subtle ads into it, as they surely must to make it financially worthwhile…

AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don't Exist -- And They're Being Cited in Real Journals Academic articles from authors using large language model are creating an ecosystem of fake research that threatens human knowledge itself.

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

Because Fox Sports clearly chose to spend money on a kinematics analysis setup rather than Ultra Edge/hot spot…

Hey that’s me!

So *not* grapes on ceiling? Phew…

There is the OnlyPosts feed which only shows posts and not reposts. This is my default, only because it makes bluesky more manageable.

Generally, research does find that, on average, people are not in a great mood when they do effortful conscious thought. But it’s definitely fun for me! I think I have learned a bunch of cognitive tools for doing so effectively, thanks to school/uni/extensive reading etc.

Speaking as a cognitive psychologist here, one theory on judgement/decisions is De Neys’ Logical Intuition model, which argues that there’s two intuitive systems that work in parallel - a heuristic system and a logical system - only when they conflict do we typically start thinking consciously.

“Murujuga also holds the world’s oldest known depiction of a human face, believed to be at least 30,000 years old.”

I usually do get to see those comments as a reviewer (in music psychology) and agree it is important to see - I notice that the editor for one journal appears to manually compile that for reviewers (thanks to them!), so it may not be a feature of some of the programs they use as backends?

How odd - I’ve not seen that before. I have seen people putting in, say, Elsevier as the author but not that…

Citations managers are very ‘garbage in, garbage out’ - if you don’t put in the info it won’t spit it out. So the citation managers won’t miss author names but the people inputting it will. The classic GenAI thing is Frankenstein references made out of 3-4 actual references rather than missing info?

This is also a problem for me for exactly the same reasons, and I needed to get a USB hub. It is also surprisingly hard to find new laptops with appropriately large internal hard drives these days, due to the move to SSD.

A screenshot of the headline of an article by Carl Wilson, reading, "Criticism's Biggest Strawman: What was 'poptimism,' and why are people still saying terrible things about it?" It's illustrated by a picture of a straw-stuffed scarecrow in a field, wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt.

Once & for all, let's specify what "poptimism" was & wasn't, and why many people can't stop blaming it for every cultural change of the past 20 years. Most recently the esteemed Kelefa Sanneh, who's often (wrongly) said to have started it! Today in @slate.com
slate.com/culture/2025...

Can you think of examples of books, films, TV shows, etc. featuring earworms or other types of imagined music? Please share them here! musicinmyhead.org/inner-music-...

Barraged in the past few days by emails, meetings, and notices about funding cuts, AI, and fraud on massive scales while also grading student assignments showing huge increase in genAI usage. Feels like a complete existential crisis for research and higher education.

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Sung from Mr Freeze’s perspective: Wouldn’t It Be Ice?

Was about to say at least we didn’t get the Mike Love-written equivalent to ‘The Universal Coward’ but ‘Student Demonstration Time’ does exist…

How visionary Beach Boys songwriter Brian Wilson changed music – and my life Brian Wilson, leader, songwriter and producer of the Beach Boys, has passed away at age 82.

Nice to see @hellodrjadey.bsky.social in the Conversation talking about Brian Wilson, and I was there when they met: theconversation.com/how-visionar...

Cale's tribute to BW from 1974 is perfect to share this evening

I never worked with David Huron, but he had a tremendous impact on my life in the world of #musicscience. Wrote this for others in the music cognition community who want to share in his memory.

davidjohnbaker.rbind.io/post/2025-06...