Das Kaffee-Tall.
We're having a run of fun talks this week at McGill.
Rich Krausliz today on higher visual function in the colliculus (4pm at the Neuro).
Then, on Friday, @crisniell.bsky.social will talk about visual coding in mouse and OCTOPUS(!!!).
Ooooh I like easy money :-)
Even that's not so clear-cut. It's effectively swapping locals for Americans.
I--and a lot of other junior folks in Canada--are angry that we're totally out of the running because we came here "too soon."
The paper itself has an example of this!
Table 2 shows a huge asymmetry in preregistered papers. (9:1 "only positive"), but these can't have been selected based on +significance--that's the whole point!
Any effect must be telling us something about a) topic choice or b) abstract writing!
"tears in the snow", surely!
Dear #Neuroskyence friends,
Can anyone recommend a good database for (macaque) connectivity? I'd love something like CoCoMap, but it seems to have succumbed to bitrot.
e.g., "Let's train a bunch of Highly Qualified Personnel by having them doing a bit of research (whatever it is), then go do something else" is certainly some kind of policy.
I'm just not convinced that a) Canada has deliberately chosen it or b) figured out that this is the right way to do so.
This is certainly how it works out locally (e.g., at the level of a lab). Heck, an NSERC Discovery may not even cover a postdoc salary on its own.
What's not clear—and is annoying—to me is if these are intentional policy choices or something that the systems just stumbled into.
Seems apt for a *wandering* spider. It’s not called a staying-put spider after all!
Hope your trip was fun!
Are we even sure the labour is actually cheap?
Lower salaries alone aren't necessarily a great value, especially if things move slower or there's more waste (and some reagents are $$$).
Training is obviously important, but actually *doing* the work is too--and better doing yields better training!
Amazing! Thanks!
Not strictly for an online game, but....
My kiddo has decided that my alter-ego is named "Dr. Philemon Noodle", who is some kind of scientist who travels around with his lab on a train. Can you flesh out Dr. Noodle's backstory for me?
Take a quick break and fill out the Canadian Common CV -- you'll feel better immediately!
In that vein, it strikes me as silly to talk about “the” dimensionality of the brain.
Sensory cortex needs to represent a vast universe of possible stimuli; motor cortex is driving a very finite set of effectors.
PLOS Bio has been our go-to when other journals pull this nonsense!
Me too -- I caught myself staring down a 5 year old on the Metro who was wearing a batman shirt! (Wrinkles don't seem to matter, FYI).
I wonder if there's also a semantic part? I struggle to see the flip in the whole image b/c it's so obviously Batman.
OTOH, the crops flip readily enough.
Other answers already mention avoiding boilerplate code/other drudgery.
Drudgery sucks, but I'm not sure avoiding ALL of it is 100% good. I get lots of good ideas, as well as a sense for the tools/data while doing mundane stuff. I doubt it'd be as good if Claude 1-shotted all my initial plans.
I'm less convinced there's part of the visual field we *know* we can ignore.
It might be irrelevant to the experimenter's task but you'd still probably want to react if a real live spider (snake, tiger, phobia-of-your-choice) popped up at the unattended location.
I still think audition is tough! Echos, HRTFs, weird non-linearities in the speakers, and the whole system is just so much more sensitive to latency!
(Even vision is surprisingly hard to do well, especially with modern consumer stuff, but it's a cakewalk compared to the others)
The catch is that delivering olfactory* stimuli is a nightmare: gotta sort out all kinds of chemical and physical issues before you even get to the brain part!
(*I assume taste inherits a lot of those too)
Worse, the giant squid does not have a giant axon!
It would have been so fun to record spikes with jumper cables too....
"Müller cells are a tool of Western oppression"?
@michaelhendricks.bsky.social
It feels like something that Allen Newell would have written about, but Go in particular might not have been as well know in the 1970s...
It's sort of hinted at the end of this paper:
github.com/mrkrause/New...
Admittedly, there are two counterexamples but one of them ("olfactory cues") didn't actually seem wildly out of scope to me.
I'm not sure I love that framing either.
One doesn't necessarily have to *be* a perception scientist---whatever that may be---to have a result that's mostly of interest to perception scientists. I wish they had some examples of in-scope vs. out-of-scope titles.
I'd argue an easy way to support "early-career" folks is not to lump everyone together.
Depending on who's talking, it could mean anything from undergrads to untenured profs--and they all want and need different things. The baked-in idea of a fixed, linear career path is also bad too!
