Tom Johnstone

Cutting international bachelor programs threatens psychological science » Eiko Fried Two days ago, four Dutch universities announced discontinuing their English-speaking psychology bachelor programs (1, 2). I will briefly explain (1) how this decision came to be, (2) why this is such ...

Four large Dutch universities, including Leiden University where I work, have decided to throw international psychology bachelor programs under the bus in an effort to appease the rightwing government.

Here's my blog why this is a terrible idea.

eiko-fried.com/cutting-inte...

That’s a wrap on LVK Melbourne 2025!
OzGrav was honoured to host this incredible gathering of colleagues from LIGO, Virgo & KAGRA here in Australia to collaborate on the future of gravitational wave science.
A huge thank you to everyone who attended and contributed.
#LVK2025 #LIGO #Virgo #KAGRA

The magic, memory, and curiosity fMRI dataset of people viewing magic tricks - Scientific Data Scientific Data - The magic, memory, and curiosity fMRI dataset of people viewing magic tricks

We now publish rich fMRI data in Scientific Data where participants viewed magic trick videos. Curiosity, memory, and reward manipulation are available: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is a result of incredible effort by Stef Meliss (first author). Congrats!!

All Academics take note. This also means stop working from home on time 😊

eLife won’t get an impact factor, says Clarivate Clarivate, the data company for scholarly publications, has decided to continue indexing some content from eLife in Web of Science, after reevaluating the open-access biology journal’s unusual prac…

#eLife will not have a IF score, says Clarivate ➡️ retractionwatch.com/2024/11/13/e...

This will be the ultimate test of how much we care about an absurd metric vs the *actual* quality of the journal I personally love eLife, had a fantastic experience both as an author and as a reviewer 🔝⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Will Chinese scientists make or break the uprising in academic publishing? A new publishing model is causing ructions in academia, and it could be China who decides the winner.

This raises a fundamental question on the future of scientific publishing: Do we let it be decided by corporations like Web of Science?
No universities should be using WoS as the arbiter of what academic staff get credit for & what doesn't count.
sc.mp/40gpq

Challenges involve range of expertise needed, among others. Engineers yes, but not sufficient. Need expertise in human participant research, clinical expertise as well.

We have these type of open-access facilities in Australia with the National Imaging Facility anif.org.au/what-we-do/o...

What makes a good theory? June 20-24, 2022, the Lorentz Workshop “What makes a good theory? Interdisciplinary perspectives” (organised by Berna Devezer, Joshua Skewes, Sashank Varma, Todd Wareham, and myself) to…

You can also watch here the workshop keynotes that inspired all the work presented in this special issue.

"just" is doing a lot of work there.

Can everyone please see below and refrain from posting about this platform on Insta/Threads? Or tell them it's boring and full of old people here or something. Let's keep this place informative!

Nice piece. Technology evolves quickly - there will be digital platforms & services in a few years that no one right now has even contemplated. Good luck for legislators and/or courts to keep up.

So they'll need to either define "Social Media" or have the courts define it when the first legal cases happen. Either way, it strikes me one of 3 outcomes:
1. Undefinable - law is junked
2. Everything needs age verification
3. Continuous innovation to fit loopholes
Is 2 the real govt aim?

Excellent! Many thanks!

List of Australian (or expat Aus) academics, journos, scientists, exciting HDRs

Currently being built - if I’ve missed someone @ me handle

bsky.app/profile/did:...

Simply unbelievable! The incompetence to allow this to happen in the first place.

Academic Level B/C position at Swinburne in Melbourne, Australia! Join our collegial department & access our high-density EEG, MEG, MRI, psychophysiology labs. We are a member of @NIFAus, embedded in Melbourne's world-class Biomedical Research sector. www.workforceaustralia.gov.au/individuals/...

Congratulations to the winners of the Nobel prize! I hope their stories, particularly KK's, force us to confront the misogyny, bias and assumptions about "impact" and "excellence" that very likely limit the recognition of similar innovations that could improve our world.

While I am happy about who has won this award (and TBQH, even happier about its application during the ongoing pandemic), I can't help but wonder how many other innovations we have refused to acknowledge because of who the innovators were/are.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Fuck yeah. Keep thinking about her story and that of Donna Strickland, 2018 Physics laureate, who was an Assoc Prof at the time. Her university, Waterloo, couldn't explain why she wasn't a full professor.

Have to wonder what we're missing out on with our current system of faculty evaluation.

Is there a way, beyond blind hope that ownership stays in the "right" hands, to avoid this? Are there ways for the scientific community to ensure that years of contributions to building a platform aren't ultimately wasted or trashed? How can we safeguard our collective inputs?

Sometimes the new ownership adds resources & supports, rather than dictates, how the platform evolves [e.g. Github?]. Other times, it seems clear that the platform has been fundamentally changed and/or is now operated by companies many consider destructive to scientific progress [Mendeley, X].

Being X'ed: A risk with Open Source & Open Science. We've all experienced being part of a community in/around an Open Source platform or software, perhaps contributing to its development, only to see it sold to a company focussed more on profit than community or science. Is this avoidable?

Home | The Visual Learning Lab at UCSD Lab webpage for the Visual Learning Lab at UCSD, lead by Dr. Bria Long, Ph.D. Launching in July 2024!

Hi Bluesky! I'm recruiting graduate students and postdocs to launch the Visual Learning Lab with me at UC San Diego in Summer/Fall 2024!

The lab will focus on how we learn to derive visual meaning, integrating methods from developmental psychology, machine learning, & vision science.

Important statement from Steve Lindsay: Society journals should ensure comptuational reproducibility of work they publish. It's a low bar: can someone else run the provided scripts on the provided data and get the same results. He proposes a pilot study: open.lnu.se/index.php/me...

My recent talk on some of the many ways researchers can use Open Science Framework (OSF) was written up as a case study. You can read it here: digitalresearchservices.ed.ac.uk/research-in-...

#openscience

A simple statistical framework for small sample studies bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Many psychophysics & brain mapping studies use small samples. This often deeply confuses editors & reviewers trained on population statistics. It can also make it difficult to preregister & interpret such studies. Here we attempt to change that:
doi.org/10.1101/2023...
#neuroscience #visionscience

Saw an interesting thread from a well-known data sleuth yesterday. He was claiming that fraud was the primary reason for "replication crisis" and that it's very widespread in science. Now that's a view I never held myself which kinda explains why we diverge on many other matters of science too 1/N

I've made the document above open for comments. If you'd like edit permissions, please send me a message/email. Thank you!

Will also be incorporating Best Practice guidelines from SPR, OHBM, INCF.

The aim will be for all materials to be Open and available on osf.io . I'm aware that many awesome people here and on the former platform have created great Open materials that I can incorporate. Hopefully I'll be able to give something useful back. All suggests, comments welcome and appreciated.