Maxine Sherman

EUROPEAN DECLARATION OF CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION No academia as usual during Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide in Palestine Faculty and staff in European higher education and research call on their academic leaders to end bilateral agreements with Israeli institutions and companies complicit in grave violations of international law (jus cogens), including illegal occupation, segregation and apartheid, genocide and the violation of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. We call on the European Union to uphold its own legal obligations and immediately end the EU-Israel Association agreement in view of Israel’s breach of Article 2. Under the Agreement, the European Commission has granted over €2.12 billion in European research funding to Israeli institutions, including institutions complicit in grave violations of international law (notably the Israeli Ministry of Defence). In the absence of principled action as outlined above, we declare our conscientious objection to collaboration with Israeli institutions and companies complicit in grave violations of international law and we pledge our support for the right of the Palestinian people to life, dignity, and self-determination.

If you are an academic in the European Union, please consider signing: "to end bilateral agreements with Israeli institutions & for EU to uphold its own legal obligations and immediately end the EU-Israel Association agreement in view of Israel’s breach of Article 2."

uppsaladeclaration.se/europe/

Please consider sharing this with your followers @ucu.org.uk @jeremycorbyn.bsky.social @zarahsultana.bsky.social @pscupdates.bsky.social

Help Get Abdelrahman from Gaza to Ireland to Study For the past four years, I have been working to secure a postgraduate study opportunity abroad. When the war on Gaza began two years ago, it shattered those efforts and dreams, and survival itself bec...

Abdelrahman Al Gherbawi is so close to being able to begin his postgraduate studies in Ireland - he has his visa, the university have waived his tuition. Now he needs to fundraise his living and evacuation costs. If you can, please help by donating here: #Gaza #Palestine
chuffed.org/project/1514...

Introducing hMFC: A Bayesian hierarchical model of trial-to-trial fluctuations in decision criterion! Now out in @plos.org Comp Bio.
led by Robin Vloeberghs with @anne-urai.bsky.social Scott Linderman

Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

#PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

For anyone who is not yet taking part, join the full cultural and academic boycott of Israel bdsmovement.net/get-involved...

NYC Mass Shooting Was Nearly Impossible to Prevent, Experts Say

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

Sad to hear that Margaret Boden, pioneer in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, has passed away.

Just a few days ago, someone reactivated the post below. I warmly recommend watching the video.

Thank you Margaret for founding and shaping our field.

www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/re...

YouTube video by CSER Cambridge Professor Margaret Boden - Human-level AI: Is it Looming or Illusory?

Did you all know that Margaret Boden founded the first School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences in 1987.

No?

Well, now you do 😌

Btw, listen to this great talk by her. I'll be adding this to the resources from our 1st year students in Intro to AI.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPRA...

Open letter from UK university staff: Request for biometric deferral and safe evacuation of incoming Palestinian students and scholars from Gaza to UK Universities More than 40 students currently trapped in Gaza with full scholarships to UK Universities are asking for a safe route to come and study. We, the academic community hoping to welcome these scholars, ca...

If you are UK academic please consider signing this open letter to Starmer, Cooper, Lammy and Falconer calling on them to do what France, Italy, Ireland and others have already done: defer the req for biometrics & enable the safe passage of students in Gaza to the UK
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The “appalling scenes in Gaza” have been enabled by the arms, surveillance & diplomatic cover Keir Starmer’s Labour government have provided to a genocidal apartheid state.

He still refuses to call it a genocide because he is complicit in it.

Keir Starmer belongs in The Hague.

The betas look about right to me. For example, for the pilot data +1 imagery corresponds to ~42ms drop in RT, which matches the slope in the figure

This is the most appalling sophistry. I don't even know where to start, but here are some of my personal highlights:

1. "AI-shaming" is classist because AI allows everyone to "pass" as part of the bourgeoisie, which would be a good thing that Marx would like

4. Being beholden to Big-Tech empowers the people. Also, Big Tech and its beneficiaries are definitely not part of the privileged class and it is definitely in my interest to be replaced by AI.

3. Appropriately feeling bad for passing off AI-generated content as your own is a "mental condition"

2. Author claims this quote supports the view that "AI-shaming" is racist when the quote is obviously articulating the view that AI itself is racist

This is the most appalling sophistry. I don't even know where to start, but here are some of my personal highlights:

1. "AI-shaming" is classist because AI allows everyone to "pass" as part of the bourgeoisie, which would be a good thing that Marx would like

It's a thrill to see this project, led by @neuromorphicboki.bsky.social, see the light of day. It's led me to rethink how emergence and consciousness relate, and it's been an honour and pleasure to work on it with Boki and team (@thomasandrillon.bsky.social, Lionel Barnett, Olivia Carter).👇🏽

Depends on what you mean by "many", I guess. But very few Israelis refuse to serve and the number that burned their draft papers recently was very small. +972 said 10. Perhaps it's more, but it's still the tiny minority

Unfortunately polling doesnt support this. There's support for mass expulsion/ethnic cleansing & the genocidal statement "there are no innocents in Gaza". Older polling showed Israelis felt the gov action in Gaza was "about right". Much of the anger relates to other things, eg the Israeli hostages

Living in Gaza, accepted to Cambridge — blocked by Home Office Young Palestinians overcome unimaginable challenges just to apply to university, only for the British government to make unfeasible visa demands

This is disgraceful. Students in Gaza accepted to many universities (not just Cambridge or Oxford!) being blocked by the UK Home Office's unreasonable and inflexible demands. www.thetimes.com/world/middle...

Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction.

But...

🧠📈 🧪

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?

That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience

A 🧵 1/n

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia

Our demands, see link

Hello & HAPPY FRIDAY, as promised an open letter by my lovely colleagues and myself. Everybody, feel free to sign this even if you are not NL-based and ‼️ share ‼️ (anonymous signature is poss):

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Madleen freedom flotilla crew

Photo of the crew holding their hands up after being intercepted and attacked by the genocidal Israeli navy — and kidnapped

Every person aboard the Madleen is a hero.

The genocidal Israeli state's attack on unarmed activists aboard a UK-flagged vessel delivering aid to Gaza is a flagrant breach of international law.

The UK must sanction Israel, end all arms & surveillance, & expel its ambassador.

#madleen #flotilla #gaza #greta

Take one minute: go to bit.ly/IsraelOnNotice and send a letter to the Israeli government, UN officials, and diplomatic missions demanding that Israel abide by international law and refrain from attacking, sabotaging or otherwise interfering with the #Madleen and her mission.

The first preprint from Clémence Compain's PhD 🎉 She showed that on a low-stakes numerosity task, people can reduce their decision bias on instruction and do so non-trivially, in a manner distinct from simply "trying harder". Well done Clémence!

with @anilseth.bsky.social

A Stage 1 registered report with Zoltan Dienes: "Reversing the Rubber Hand Illusion with demand characteristics and phenomenological control." A test of whether PC can reverse typical RHI effects, with stronger illusion responses for asynchronous than synchronous conditions.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

ABSTRACT Generative AI (GenAI) summarisers, tools that provide concise summaries of digital texts, are increasingly marketed to higher education students as time-saving aids for engaging with complex academic materials. As their prevalence grows, so does their potential impact on students’ reading practices and learning outcomes. Through an exploratory literature review, we demonstrate a significant gap in scholarly discussion and empirical research examining the extent and effects of AI summariser use among students. We explore the marketed promises of AI summarisers, hypothesise about their likely use cases, and consider concerns surrounding their impact on students’ engagement with academic texts. Our analysis is grounded in contemporary higher education literature on digital reading practices, scaffolded learning, and the development of critical thinking skills. This paper informs policy and practice by proposing a critical research agenda that addresses key questions about the prevalence, impact, and implications of GenAI summarisers in higher education. By stimulating scholarly discussion on this emerging technology, we aim to provide a foundation for evidence-based recommendations on the responsible integration of AI summarisers in academic settings, relevant to an international audience of educators, researchers, and policymakers in higher education.

This paper makes important point that we're not talking about impact of AI on reading enough. Marking work that's full of AI is demoralising but in some ways, the threat AI poses to comprehension is bigger than the threat to what students produce...

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

#AcademicSky

The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of Al in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of Al, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.

🚨Our paper `Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science' is now forthcoming in the journal Computational Brain & Behaviour. (Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...)

Below a thread summary 🧵1/n

#metatheory #AGI #AIhype #cogsci #theoreticalpsych #criticalAIliteracy