Jonathan F. Kominsky

My grocery store had Kosher salt on an end cap that I think might have been a Jewish food collection for Passover? (Who knows cause it also had honey (Rosh Hashanah) and chocolate syrup (I have no idea)) and anyway I stopped and gave it the traditional Jewish holiday “at least you tried” nod.

@niallw.bsky.social pointed out an error in a preprint of ours that contained a fabricated citation. The cause: we used Claude to fix an arxiv upload / compile error. It decided the best way to do that was to remove an actual citation and replace it with a fabricated one.

bsky.app/profile/ben....

Regolin (Last author) was I think Vallortigara's student, or at least they've certainly worked together before.

‘I saw the writing on the wall’: Austria offers safe haven for US academics as Trump wages war on universities Other countries benefit from the Trump brain drain as administration wages war on academia and research

I beat the rush, as it were, by moving in 2022, but the headline quote pretty much captures my feelings on the subject. Austria has done a good job of making me feel welcome, and my science has flourished here. It was a good move on a variety of levels.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

A screenshot of a Microsoft Word "word count" pane showing the following statistics: Pages: 5, Words: 1001, Characters (no spaces): 5428, Characters (with spaces): 6423, Paragraphs: 8, Lines: 75

Commentary with 1000-word limit.

Two hours of editing down.

This will be funny in retrospect.

It's just a Qualtrics survey but it's an incompetently designed one. I gave up on the second page

DeLauro was my rep for the seven years I spent in New Haven and she was normally good. Strong on issues that directly affected her constituents lives. This is a surprising and deeply disappointing failure of moral insight and political will.

I'm afraid it won't get you considered for our Ph.D. program this year regardless, we can only consider applications received through application I linked. It's also a topic far outside my expertise, so I might not be able to give you useful feedback on it, but thanks for your interest!

The Visual Learning Lab is hiring TWO lab coordinators!

Both positions are ideal for someone looking for research experience before applying to graduate school. Application deadline is Feb 10th (approaching fast!)—with flexible summer start dates.

If anybody out there is like, “kids so young would never do this without adult prompting!“

1) you really don’t know kids

2) when Reagan met with Gorbachev, I was in 5th grade & still managed to get my class to sign an anti-nuke petition

Don’t underestimate how much the kids are paying attention

Yeah, this is how it usually ends up in my experience. It is very difficult to fully control an eyelink through python, so you end up relying on a combination of EB and python. Tobii you can just control entirely with python and never touch their software at all.

It's something I've thought about but never explored in depth. Please send me an email, I'd be happy to talk about the program here and hear what kinds of things you're thinking about, but not with a 300 character limit!

From PsychoPy or from Experiment Builder? I have gotten custom calibrations to work, just with the Python interface in particular it was always a lot of trouble.

Eyelink Experiment Builder is very flexible but the interface is not intuitive and in my case it would often be faster to just code the experiment myself than deal with it, if I didn't need to spend extra hours fighting the calibration system for control. We just end up using Experiment Builder.

This is btw the one clear advantage of Tobii over Eyelink in my experience. Eyelink is always a bit of a struggle to use with Python, especially if you want to run a custom calibration (which you often need to run an infant study).

I honestly don't know because Tobii has a better Python interface, so I always DIY it. My PyHab system, for example, can use Tobii eye-tracking in place of manual gaze coding for habituation designs, and I have used PsychoPy to do fixation-location-contingent stuff in the past.

At @cogdevceu.bsky.social we have both Eyelink and a 120Hz Tobii. We use the Eyelink for more high precision measures, e.g. pupillometry, where sample rate matters. If we are just tracking fixation and don't need faster sampling than the display frame rate, the Tobii is often easier to use

ICE should not exist in the Overton window. The debate should be, at most, about how many former agents should face prosecution after its abolition.

Group

Poster

Talk

Giulia poster

Our lab is back from #BCCCD26 in Budapest 🧠👶
We really enjoyed the conference (and party!) and had a great time sharing our work, meeting old friends and making new ones! 🌟

Excellent analysis! Including e.g. Trump's own crude take, "You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms… they’ll find a reason to impeach me."

An incredible saga

A photo of downtown Budapest just after sunrise

A photo of downtown Budapest at night with an illuminated ice rink at right

In Budapest for #BCCCD26 and in a new hotel (to accommodate bringing a baby along) with a spectacular view of downtown Budapest

Applications still open until February 4!

Important note for US applicants: We do consider applicants with only a bachelor's degree and some research experience! You don't need a masters.

#CogSci #PsychSciSky

once again being driven insane by ML conference submissions

Yes I think wall-to-wall gelatinous shit is an excellent summary of the situation, well done child

Another pointless forever war for oil company profits.

My baby just made a spectacularly messy sound in his diaper that I think fully expresses my opinion on the topic. And gives me something to do, so that's nice.

Happy New year. In 2025 I became a dad and it has been an amazing experience. Also why I am posting this at 4:45 instead of midnight or, you know, an hour when people without small infants would normally be awake.

It is testament to how good the academic environment in the US was that it could do well on that market while at best tolerating foreign talent. I moved from the US to Austria and they practically rolled out the red(-white-red🇦🇹) carpet for me immigration-wise. Feeling valued is a draw, it turns out!

If A Christmas Carol were Jewish, how would it be different? Would it even be possible to adapt?

Tis the season