Ross Parry

Too many British universities are obsessed with being world-class They should try being efficient and effective first

Britain’s vast array of universities educate more than half of the country’s youth—but mostly in old-fangled ways little altered from the days when only the very wealthy could attend. The mass system needs much more efficiency and innovation

Gown and out: are British universities broke? Also on the daily podcast: China’s amateur footballers and the politics of Superman

UK universities “more broke than a university student who just spent summer inter-railing around Europe”.
www.economist.com/podcasts/202...

Yeah, cool. Let a government agency do peer review. God forbid we'd actually have scientists independently critique the methods and interpretations of important research.

More kids are beating cancer. Improving the rest of their lives is next. “There’s an entire population of kids who didn’t exist before. Now we need to figure out how to best support them,” one expert says.

85 percent of children diagnosed with cancer are alive at least five years later, according to the National Cancer Institute. Survivors can face lifelong complications from their treatments — something oncologists are working to improve.

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

Great to see you in Rome, @albomp.bsky.social and congratulations on your re-election!

In uncertain times, your renewed mandate brings both continuity and fresh momentum to the EU–Australia strategic partnership.

So let’s deepen ties in trade, defence, and security.

→ europa.eu/!4gmbxN

An important message…

Motor learning refines thalamic influence on motor cortex - Nature Imaging and optogenetics in mice provide insight into the interplay between the primary motor cortex and the motor thalamus during learning, showing that thalamic inputs have a key role in the executi...

Our paper is out in Nature.

By examining various inputs to the motor cortex during learning, we found that thalamic inputs learn to activate the cortical neurons encoding the movement being learned.

Tour de force by Assaf in collab with Felix and Marcus. Congrats!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Recovery-oriented psychiatry: oxymoron or catalyst for change? This Personal View provides a normative and conceptual analysis of the intersection between the recovery movement and psychiatry. Although recovery emerged as a grassroots social justice movement emph...

Recovery-oriented psychiatry: oxymoron or catalyst for change?

Paywall: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Physical affordances beat digital simulations every time

Dr. Anthony Fauci urges Americans not to accept "Normalization of Untruths".

Please repost! Our deadline is fast approaching for a 20-month postdoc position leading an fMRI project on the neurodevelopment of metacognition and curiosity. Join a great lab with fantastic collaborators! 🙂

A l'@uparisnanterre.bsky.social nous faisons appel à nos étudiantes et étudiants pour des rôles de relais ou de médiation dans différents domaines.

Par exemple pour l'international, l'informatique ou les bibliothèques ⬇️

I like penguins. They are the basasses of avian evolution. Wings adapted to swimming like flippers. Torpedo shaped body to limit drag. Metabolism built for surviving extreme cold and counter shaded colouring for underwater camouflage. #penguinbadass

It's shocking how little is known about the brainstem red nucleus. In our new paper “The human brainstem’s red nucleus was upgraded to support goal-directed action” out now in @naturecomms.bsky.social we show that current thinking on the red nucleus is in need of a serious upgrade. rdcu.be/ehbOy

Where I depart from Bender is to shift the focus from the LLM onto the recipient user.

The real danger for me arises from the behaviour of the ‘recipient’ (the human reader) who ascribes patterns and meaning where there are none - who mistakes 'pseudo-language' for real language.

Here is how I have been comparing the two big hype phenomena in AI and robotics, in my recent talks. Spoiler alert: the hype is unfounded.

Trumpty Dumpty sat on a Wall (Street)
Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall (on the stock market)
All Trumpty’s henchmen and all Trumpty’s friends
Made billions from insider trading again
#Trumpland #TrumpTariffs

i don’t even like the term “hallucination” to describe what LLMs do, because it grants the key premise that must be denied: that these string-prediction automatons cognize anything at all, rightly or wrongly

Now out in JNP: journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

Information and data will never deliver creativity | Hanne De Jaegher

Information and data will never deliver creativity
— Life, information, and the search for meaning

New piece over at @iai.tv

In which I quote Colwyn Trevarthen and David Bowie.

iai.tv/articles/inf...

#OncoSky #CanSky #ThanksCancer!

Senator Jim Banks (R) isn’t sorry he told a fired federal worker “he probably deserved it”.

He went on to say the worker was “complaining about losing a left-wing woke job in the federal government that should have never been a job to begin with”.

The job was helping people with disabilities.

Trump imposes tariffs on uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands near Antarctica Australian prime minister surprised after remote external territories – including islands home to penguins – targeted by US president

Those penguins had better pay up.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

THIS IS HUGE! Researchers at McMaster University have discovered a NEW peptide antibiotic that targets a broad range of disease-causing bacteria INCLUDING those RESISTANT to existing antibiotics. This discovery marks the first potential new class of antibiotics in NEARLY 30 YEARS. 🧪🧵⬇️

I swear to God we will be in the final stages of the apocalypse and people will be posting on LinkedIn “this is what surviving that drone attack has taught me about b2b sales” or “robot dogs attacking my children has given me new insights into cybersecurity culture”

This image shows details about the journal article linked in the post. It was published in the journal Cortex, and the title of the article is: Cognitive neuropsychological and neuroanatomic predictors of naturalistic action performance in left hemisphere stroke: A retrospective analysis.

Drs. Simon Thibault, @aaronlwong.bsky.social & @laurelbuxbaum.bsky.social published new research in the journal Cortex. This study in people w/ left hemisphere stroke shows that naturalistic action impairments arise from both praxis & attention control deficits.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Oculomotor learning is evident during implicit motor sequence learning - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Oculomotor learning is evident during implicit motor sequence learning

Learning a new movement with your arm relies on learning to move your eyes! Check out our new paper www.nature.com/articles/s41... @ubcrhsc.bsky.social @drrubino.bsky.social @jandrushko.bsky.social @ubcosot.bsky.social 🧪

Introduction to Bayesian Thinking and Bayesian Modeling Workshop Intro to Bayesian thinking and Bayesian modeling workshop materials. Hosted on the Open Science Framework

Introduction to Bayesian Thinking and Bayesian Modeling Workshop osf.io/gftv4/ via @cos.io by @kcourey.bsky.social

@ricesocsci.bsky.social

Uncertainty estimation with prediction-error circuits - Nature Communications How the brain integrates sensory input and predictions to adapt to change is not fully understood. Here authors build a neural network model to show how prediction-error neurons compute uncertainty of...

How should you combine sensory inputs with your internal predictions? Well, use uncertainty directly computed by your prediction-error circuits. Cool? Check out our Nat. Com. paper with Loreen Hertäg and @k47h4.bsky.social . www.nature.com/articles/s41...