Dorothy Bishop

Crane ready for action at Botley Road

With Oxford–Didcot services being suspended for a week from Sunday so the new Botley Road rail bridge can be installed, we’re taking a look in this thread at what’s happening. The crane is now on site, with all the key sections ready in the Beckett Street station car park.

Great to see new editors for Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.
link.springer.com/journal/1093...
Major problems in 2024, but I have confidence in ability of new editors to turn it around.
deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/10/what...

increasingly feel we need to bring religion back - not for me personally, I'm good, but lots of people could clearly do with Some Form Of Guiding Light In Their Life

I was in Kolonaki yesterday and the sun was shining, casting shadows everywhere. Here’s the open door of a mid century apartment building, metal with square glass windows crossed by a large grid of bars. The light shines through the closed half of the door, and I took the picture through the open half, the white marble entrance edged with black marble, the stairs, the shadow of the square glass windows and bars.

Square shadow.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography #Architecture #StraightFromTheCamera

Awesome to see more journals promote replication studies. They are an essential but too rare part of scientific discovery. If an effect can't be intersubjectively established, we do not understand it well enough to consider it scientific knowledge.

The racial animus is completely out in the open here. What will happen to the Haitians? Will ICE fly 15,000 or so people back to Haiti? Or will they just stash them in concentration camps with poor food and medical facilities? This is a recipe for a massive humanitarian disaster.

and lots of people without children whose taxes pay for schools

A British Museum photo showing the reverse side of a silver stater coin from the ancient city of Eretria on the island of Euboea, Central Greece. The coin is roundish in shape, and in the centre there is a relief image of an octopus within a recessed square. The octopus has a bulbous head with a small round eye on either side. Beneath the head, eight arms curve gracefully, symmetrically arranged with four arms on each side, curling into a tight spiral at the tip. Diameter: 26 millimetres. Weight: 8.670 grammes. Dated circa 500-480 BC.

Ancient Greek silver stater (coin) with an octopus on the reverse side. 🐙

Minted in Eretria, Euboea, Greece, 500-480 BC.

Photo: British Museum www.britishmuseum.org/collection/o...

#Archaeology
#ReliefWednesday

Over in the UK there are concerns about a pause in research funding 😞

(IMHO/stray thought: if you’re making a planned transition there isn’t a need for a pause, so something is up.)

French embassy only serving water and juice to attendees until the evening's speeches are over, a misunderstanding of what Brits look for in a drinks reception of such proportions that I can only assume the declaration of war will come overnight

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya talks 'replication crisis' at Duke panel, omits funding cuts Throughout the second Trump administration, the NIH has frozen billions of dollars in research funding to universities. Those cuts were not the topic of discussion at a Duke Clinical Research Institut...

NIH - "The research arm of MAHA”

Director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, calls for a greater emphasis on applied research, especially in connection with Make America Healthy Again.

#AcademicSky #MetaSci 🧪

The NIH budget bill passed the House. Now, it's bundled w/ DHS funding in the Senate. We are likely to see a fight this week.

New from me: things to know about the budget bill, NIH presidentialization, free speech, why science has been quiet, & more.

At "Can We Still Govern" @donmoyn.bsky.social 🧪

Just started doing new data analysis and I know I keep saying this, but: I really, really don't think people appreciate how much this moral panic was a deliberate and extremely expensive invention.

‘I’m part of this country’: Windrush man left homeless by Home Office inaction George Campbell, 69, slept in bus station as officials questioned his right to live in the UK after hospital stay

The continuing scandal of the Windrush scandal
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

there are legions of bad actors who treat publishing as a game. All the outlets I know of who encourage inclusivity are swamped (and many who don’t). See arxiv new requirements for validation

Research Notes of the AAS in particular, which was set up to handle short, moderated contributions especially from students, is getting swamped. Often the authors clearly haven’t read what they’ve submitting, (Descriptions of figures that don’t exist or don’t show what they purport to)

it is the same playbook everywhere. “vote for us! we will make you great again by punishing the people you hate! do not pay attention to the fact that we’re also shoveling your money into the pockets of the uber wealthy and building a giant boot to step on your face too (preferably forever)”

Lindsey Graham: "If you're protesting, Donald Trump does have your back"

(He's not talking about in the United States)

Freuds Bar entrance

St Paul's Church in its modern surroundings

The semi-derelict St Paul's Church in Jericho, more recently known as Freuds bar, has been acquired by Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. The ‘Greek revival’ style church, a centre for the Oxford Movement, was closed to worship in 1969, became a bar in 1988, but closed during Covid.

hope someone comments about this on Pubpeer

Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) of LeftHandedness Across Global Populations Left-handedness, a prominent phenotype affecting approximately 10% of the global population, has long been hypothesized to possess a polygenic basis influenced by complex gene-environment interactions...

@clydefrancks.bsky.social found what is potentially (likey?!) the first fully hallucinated GWAS paper, of “left handedness”… the Manhattan plot has the wrong number of chromosomes, and genes labels with one wrong chromosome placed in a second wrong chromosome… wild…

Is it because they like being able to see?

Your brain thinks your cat is a baby.
Science says that’s…completely reasonable.

#CatScience #ScienceOfCats #Neuroscience
#BrainScience #PsychologyFacts
#ScienceCommunication #SciComm
#CatsOfInstagram #CatLovers
#CatParents #DidYouKnow
#FunScience #NerdyButCute

A juvenile great horned owl roosts in the saddle of cottonwood tree in Longmont, Colorado. In this vertical color photograph one sees the main trunk of the cottonwood tree with its huge dark brown and gray bark with grooves and tons of texture. In the lower left part of the frame an owls head is sticking up looking at the camera. The owls large yellow eyes jump out against its own camouflage and the color of the tree bark. Its right side of its head and upper body are in the shade. Photo by Kort Duce

A young great horned owl roosts in the saddle of cottonwood tree in Longmont, Colorado.

#BirdOfTheDay #BrownIsBeautiful #EastCoastKin #bird #birds #owl #owls #birdphotography #photography #photograph #photographs #photo #photos #nature

oh no not gavin williamson, the most beloved tory mp since er suella braverman, seriously is Kemi paying Farage for this service

Can't see this happening on Question Time...

mood

Ah, the joys of AI. This is why we can't have nice things....

blog.arxiv.org/2026/01/21/a...

So basically we have a solid center left majority under PR, or a knife edge possibility of hard right government under FPTP. The country really can't afford the luxury of political parties' vanity when it comes to electoral pacts.

#Downfall newly added on the BFI. The annual subscription a mere £60 ish for access to the most wonderful, joyous, odd mix of films all year long.

www.bfi.org.uk/film/b8202b6...