Blake Richards

The bureaucracy of science has grown so much, the system is collapsing upon itself:

Scientists have become administrators of grants rather than spending time on science.

Paid administrators are demanding even more administrative work from scientists.

Administrators are eating the science budget.

Yeah I think at this point re UBI while I have seen some debate about its effects in rich countries there's just now a lot of empirical evidence that we can actually simply transfer money to people in the global south and its really just... good. We should just do it. Justice and expedience align.

Robot Trucker Waabi Wades Into Robotaxi Battle With Billion Dollar Raise CEO Raquel Urtasan says the funds, including $250 million from Uber, will help get 25,000 robotaxis on Uber’s platform and launch trucking operations with Volvo.

CEO Raquel Urtasan says the funds, including $250 million from Uber, will help get 25,000 robotaxis on Uber’s platform and launch trucking operations with Volvo.

He's the worst kind of "public intellectual". His brand is basically arguing for perspectives that everyone knows are ridiculous or immoral with specious reasoning that can pass as cogent.

Interesting, I hadn't considered that...

Usually I'm at home at that time, but next time I'm travelling, I'll try to see if I get it!

Ottawa, Seoul agree to work on bringing South Korean auto sector manufacturing to Canada Non-binding MOU stems from campaign to win submarine contract for Canada’s navy

Score one for the red and white.

www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/art...

I've noticed that I regularly have a little sneeze fit of 4-6 sneezes at the same time every night (~7PM).

I would love to know the physiological reason for that! (Probably not something anyone could actually answer...)

Why the Paris Climate Agreement Matters in 5 Graphics One of President Trump’s first executive orders withdraws the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. These graphics show why the pact is crucial to curbing the worst effects of global warming

The US has officially withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. Here's a graphic guide to why the pact is so important

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal!
Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵(1/6)

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s over last year www.science.org/content/arti... #jobs #STEM #science #research

It's still freezing in Minneapolis, and crowds are streaming into downtown. Spontaneous anti-ICE chants breaking out on the sidewalk.

FocalCodec: Giving LLMs Ears and a Voice at Ultra-Low Bitrates | Mila Mila researchers introduces FocalCodec, a new method for compressing speech without sacrificing quality for more efficient multimodal LLMs.

Can we compress human speech for AI without losing its nuances? FocalCodec proves it’s possible.
By simplifying how tokens are learned, this model paves the way for more efficient multimodal LLMs.
Research explained by Luca Della Libera, Francesco Paissan, Cem Subakan, and Mirco Ravanelli.

Peut-on compresser la parole humaine pour les IA sans perdre ses nuances? FocalCodec montre que c’est possible.
En simplifiant la manière dont les tokens sont appris, ce modèle ouvre la voie à des LLM multimodaux plus performants.
À lire ici mila.quebec/fr/article/f...

Canada was founded on these choices.

At @elife.bsky.social you can now include explainer videos with every figure. Like going to a seminar while you engage with the paper. First example here elifesciences.org/articles/106...

Click the arrows next to each figure to get a video of @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social explaining it for you!

Psilocybin triggers an activity-dependent rewiring of large-scale cortical networks Psilocybin reshapes brain networks through activity-dependent plasticity, including a weakening of recurrent cortical loops that could underlie its therapeutic effects.

Cool looking paper out from @alexkwan.bsky.social's group on impact of psilocybin on routing:

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

@colin-bredenberg.bsky.social, check it out, curious to hear what you think about it in relation to the Oneirogen Hypothesis.

#neuroscience 🧪

I'm actually surprised it's not higher - it's not like reviewers and ACs are checking all the references.

This is a really fun story - thanks to @thetransmitter.bsky.social for telling it so well!

Mafia goon: Nice house you got here...it'd be a shame if something happened to it

Media outlets: Mafia goon rules out use of force. Expresses regret at the mere thought of it

Grumpy from Disney's Snow White and the 7 dwarves.

Let's talk about "grumpy lab person". Many labs have them. With an eye to keeping science at its most rigorous, they cross the line into criticism that's too harsh. They are the ones who risk killing your scientific spirit. They are reviewer 2. /1

I think we’ve got better and more culturally-varied street food than I could have imagined, cool jackets galore, and drugs that make us think we’re really fast and strong before they kill us.

A prefrontal cortex map based on single-neuron activity - Nature Neuroscience The authors mapped spontaneous and choice activity across mouse prefrontal cortex. The activity maps aligned with intrinsic connectivity rather than anatomical subregions, suggesting that connectivity...

Main postdoc study out! We can redefine prefrontal cortex regions with single-unit activity! Grateful to @carlenlab.bsky.social and @weltgeischt.bsky.social who made this crazy project real. Thanks to all co-authors, collaborators, and reviewers.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Again it is something that people in previous eras have commented on but I still find it just astonishing to witness in my own: fascism is somehow the natural ideology of loser men, just all of our most pathetic and contemptible instincts rendered into a worldview.

An underrated factor in "why don't people in wealthy societies have more kids" is changing societal norms that now expect even older kids to be chaperoned by an adult any time they are in public, and to be chauffeured by a parent as their only means of transportation

We Support Protesting Against Any Authoritarian Government Except Our Own "President Trump called on Iranians on Tuesday to keep protesting against their government and warned that those responsible for killing demonstrat...

"No peaceful demonstrator should ever be killed for standing up to their government. Unless, of course, they’re a suburban mom in an SUV that’s driving away from law enforcement."

That's how I interpreted it. :)

We should only fund research that will have huge impact and not fund research that won't. Fortunately, these are easy to distinguish.
- Populists anytime they look at government research funding

New eLife paper is out! We explore the link btw 2-phase perception/generation learning methods like wake-sleep, and what may happen in the brain under on psychedelics. Turns out hallucinations are consistent with hijacking phasic learning, essentially running both wake and sleep phases at once.

Thing is: I think they're a little contradictory, so I don't think both is truly possible. And, in my experience, CIHR always selects feasibility over excitement.