andrea e. martin

Reposting this as I see too many decoding papers reporting (and struggling to interpret) spurious lower-than-chance decoding accuracy that is probably due high-pass filtering...

Portrait of a smiling man wearing a blue shirt on a dark teal background. To the right, text reads: “Congratulations to Matthew Goldrick, Northwestern University. Winner of the 2026 Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building.”

Huge congratulations to Matthew Goldrick @mattgoldrick.bsky.social, recipient of the 2026 Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building!

This honor will be celebrated at #CogSci2026 with a dedicated symposium.

Visit cognitivesciencesociety.org/elman-prize/ to learn more

if you look into the activity of any brain, usually many different rhythms can be seen. is there any systematic relationship between their frequencies? there are proposals (often by physicists 🙃) that rhythms are organized according to specific ratio, e.g. the golden ratio or simply factor 2.

stop using AI to do your research. it hallucinates too often. if you want an answer to something, post something arrogant on the appropriate subreddit. something like: "this item performs 10% better than everything else. only idiots deny this." this will bait nerds into doing your research for you.

Light in the snow ❄️

#SundaySilence

Photo of the #moon, taken from a bedroom window in Derbyshire (#Canon R5, RF200-800 at 800mm, 1.4x extender, f/13, 1/200s)

September 2024, the moon was looking down on us, like it has for the last 4.5 billion years...

Light micrograph of a cross section through a closed (unravelled) leaf of Marram grass, Ammophila arenaria. The deeply grooved leaf is thrown into folds. The folds conserve water and withstand salt, and prevent excessive evaporation. Round vascular bundles are visible inside each fold, serving to transport food and water through the leaf. They look like smiley faces. The large "eyes" are the xylem, which transport water. The "mouths" are the phloem, which transport sugars produced during photosynthesis. The spiky, curved structure is a natural adaptation to drought conditions, helping the leaf to roll up and conserve water. Spines on the surface discourage animals from eating the leaf. Marram grass is important in coastal ecology, since it is one of the commonest grass species in Britain to stabilize sand dunes.

Marram grass leaf, different stain

Marram grass leaf. Light micrograph of a cross section through a closed (unravelled) leaf of Marram grass, Ammophila arenaria. The deeply grooved leaf is thrown into folds. The folds conserve water and withstand salt, and prevent excessive evaporation. Round vascular bundles are visible inside each fold, serving to transport food and water through the leaf. They look like smiley faces. The large "eyes" are the xylem, which transport water. The bright blue "mouths" are the phloem, which transport sugars produced during photosynthesis. The spiky, curved structure is a natural adaptation to drought conditions, helping the leaf to roll up and conserve water. Spines on the surface discourage animals from eating the leaf. Marram grass is important in coastal ecology, since it is one of the commonest grass species in Britain to stabilize sand dunes.

Mother nature is a raver.

Lowering the temperature allows transitions from the ‘sol-sol’ to the ‘sol-gel’ region, which manifest with a jump in the total volume fraction of the protein-rich phase.

The interplay between biomolecular assembly and phase separation.

🔗 buff.ly/lvTQhIM

"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality."

-James Baldwin, from Notes on the House of Bondage (The Nation, 1980)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

The LingComm Grants are back!

These grants started in 2020, as "hey let's help get lingcomm projects going during lockdown"

They've since run in 2022 and 2024, and thanks to generous folks we've always given out more than expected

But they only work if people apply!!! Please share this!!

It's annoying that we already had so many existing problems to solve before these assholes created a bunch of new ones for no reason

File under: ambiguity

h/t @scarequotes.com

“We’ve invented a magic computer. It uses all of the earth’s resources, we’ve spent trillions on it and it’s the sole growth area of the US economy.”

“What does it do?”

“We were hoping you could tell us.”

ripple researchers probably open this article with sweaty palms, because ripple detection with 77% false positives for standard processing sounds pretty bad... 😨

I worry every day about my mother, a Chinese-American who is legally blind and extremely hard of hearing and in her eighties, who speaks with a clear accent.

It will not MATTER to a fucking ICE officer that her accent is because she was born in Hawaii.

My fellow Asian Americans, we are not white. They cannot tell us apart. They do not think we belong here, no matter how many generations we have lived here.

In the 1870 census, Boise, Idaho was almost 50% Chinese. Just...think about that. Think about Boise, Idaho today and what you think about it racially.

What happened after that was, to put it bluntly, repeated violence against the Chinese population in the West.

Anytime I see numbers showing that Asian people are less underwater than others, I wish we were actually fucking teaching the history of Asian people in this country.

Instead, maybe people are told that Chinese laborers built the railroads in the mid-1800s and then... like, nothing at all.

I know we're all seeing 87 unhinged things per day, but "guys if our multi billion dollar product doesn't start being useful for something, literally anything, the people might not appreciate us wrecking the planet over it anymore" is a truly bananapants thing to say out loud

Median time under review (time intervened from submission to acceptance) of articles indexed in PubMed with a female first author (n = 2,562,262), a male first author (n = 3,405,821), a female corresponding author (n = 975,010), a male corresponding author (n = 1,946,469), a female first author and a female corresponding author (n = 757,878), a male first author and a male corresponding author (n = 1,357,835), all-female authors (n = 650,280), and all-male authors (n = 2,146,799)

Female scientists have to wait longer for their articles to be reviewed than their male colleagues. An analysis of 36.5 million papers in the life sciences shows that for females it took 115 days to reach a decision, compared to 101 days for men journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... @plosbiology.org

"female-authored articles spend longer under review than comparable male-authored ones"

YouTube video by Andrew Perfors Part 1: How do LLMs work?

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊

Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap.
dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-D...

Github page: github.com/dbrang/EEG-D...

snow on branches ❄️

Mood

"Every bombed village is my hometown" - James Baldwin And every dead child is my child. Every grieving mother is my mother. Every crying father is my father. Every home turned to rubble is the home I grew up in. Every brother carrying the remains of his brother across borders is my brother. Every sister waiting for a sister who will never come home is my sister. Every one of these people are ours, Just like we are theirs. We belong to them and they belong to us.

I wrote this poem as an homage to Baldwin and to hear it being sung across the world or read in protests has been my own guiding light of hope.

Worrye not about 'being productive,' for thou art not a product. Thou art a star daunsinge yn a hopeful skye. A signal blinking across centuryes and worldes. Thou art a song performid just once and perfectlye.

By my count, this is the 6,743,288,609th time that my intuitions about the implications of some theoretical idea I had turned out to be wrong when that idea was instantiated in a model (and the model was run).

This is why you model folks. Pass it on.

Alaska Art Student Arrested for Eating Another Student’s AI-Generated Art in Protest A University of Alaska student was charged with a misdemeanor for eating another student's AI-generated art in protest.

eat the slop www.artnews.com/art-news/new...