Randy McIntosh

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Best exercise show ever 😅

Faculty Lecturer - Department of Psychology Please refer to the How to Apply for a Job (for External Candidates) job aid for instructions on how to apply. If you are an active McGill employee (ie: currently in an active contract or position at ...

McGill is hiring a faculty lecturer in social psychology, in a (non-adjunct) permanent teaching position.

Please consider being my colleague, Montreal is really great: mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill...

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There is no evidence that ivermectin works as a treatment for cancer.

5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet Learn about how AI can be used to protect biodiversity, fight climate change, and just better understand our planet through 5-minute explainers covering academic papers on AI for the Planet. AI is not...

I just released the 10th episode of my YouTube series on how AI is used to help the planet. These first 10 papers cover a range of topics (conservation, energy, forecasting...) & methods (multi-modal, time series, uncertainty...) So in <1 hr you can get a wide overview of the field! #ccai #mlsky 🤖 📈

🚨 New Paper: Controlling the Human Connectome with Spatially Diffuse Input Signals

Now in press at Communications Biology!

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

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Revisiting the methodological foundation of lesion network mapping Lesion network mapping (LNM) links focal brain lesions to distributed neural circuits by projecting lesion locations through a normative functional connectome. van den Heuvel and colleagues recently s...

New preprint: Revisiting the methodological foundation of lesion network mapping.

doi.org/10.64898/202...

A thread.

We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump Having studied authoritarian states for over a decade, I would never exaggerate the severity of the threat we now face. But an American kleptocracy is exactly where president-elect Trump and his backe...

The other side of this is the erasure of good ways of doing things, the breaking of the threads holding together our integrity & social fabric. @sarahkendzior.bsky.social's🌲essay on how to be your own light in times of darkness. Write down what you stand for, what you believe, what you remember:

Today I am excited to introduce respyra - an open-source Python toolbox for respiratory tracking experiments in interoception research!

Now on PyPI (pip install respyra) with a preprint on PsyArXiv:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

GitHub: github.com/embodied-com...

I read cromulent and I hear cronut 😁

Another nice example of merging empirical data analysis with computational modelling to gain insights into brain biophysics.

How dynamics arise from the structure is my biggest interest. In this study, we started with a small step and asked how structure constrains dynamics. Spoiler: would that it were so simple… (1/6)

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Assistant Professor School/Applied Child Psychology Program Please refer to the How to Apply for a Job (for External Candidates) job aid for instructions on how to apply. If you are an active McGill employee (ie: currently in an active contract or position at ...

School psychology scholars: we have a job opening. We are Canadian and very nice humans. You can contact me for more info. mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/McGill_Caree...

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause.

I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does.

🧵/

sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

See you in Bordeaux @ohbmofficial.bsky.social 🧠! humanbrainmapping.org/i4a/pages/in...

🚨🚨🚨🚨

Woo hoo!🙌

Here is the deal when you lose talent like this.

They generally don't come back once you've fixed whatever pathology in your system caused them to leave.

Sometimes if the skills you are losing are fungible enough, you can survive, but even then there is substantial cost of "corporate Alzheimer's"

Symptom-specific links between internalizing problems and functional connectivity in adolescents: a network analysis - European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Previous fMRI studies have documented links between internalizing problems in youth and brain functional connectivity of the default (DN), frontoparietal (FP), and salience (SA) networks. Characterize...

Very excited to share that our paper “Symptom-specific links between internalizing problems and functional connectivity in adolescents: a network analysis” has been published in European Child & Adolescence Psychiatry doi.org/10.1007/s007...

Brain network modeling with The Virtual Brain derives pharmacodynamics of ketamine https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.24.707663v1

This is cool! We've been planning something like this as a sort of summer camp. We will definitely take some inspiration from your module.

Black-and-white photograph of Mattie Mayes standing outdoors in front of a wooden building with horizontal plank siding. She faces the camera, centered in the frame, with two window openings visible behind her. She wears a dark long-sleeved dress or coat with light decorative trim along the edges and cuffs, and a light-colored apron tied at the waist. Her hair is pulled back, and her hands are clasped together at her midsection. The image has a white border and shows light wear or fading consistent with an older print.

In the mid-1800s, Mattie Mayes was born into enslavement.
After she was freed, she eventually found her way to Canada and settled in Saskatchewan and worked as a midwife.
Beloved by those around her, this is her story.

🧵 1/6

Suicide is not the answer!! I promise you if you think no one would care if you are gone that’s not true. In Canada you can call 988 for immediate support. ❤️

This paper started as an exchange here in late 2024 and evolved over the next year into a tidy set of recommendations for labs hoping to build more collaborative coding communities. 🎉

Would love to hear if any of these (really not so "simple") rules resonate with you, and what else you've tried.

<em>Psychophysiology</em> | SPR Journal | Wiley Online Library Recent evidence suggests voluntary actions synchronize with exhalation, but generalization across diverse motor tasks was unclear. This study demonstrates robust exhalation synchronization for volunt....

Respiratory and Cardiac Phase Coupling With Voluntary Actions Across Motor Tasks

Shibata & Ohira - 2026 Psychophysiology

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#interoception #neuroskyence

Ten simple rules for building a collaborative coding culture

This was such a fun collaboration with @analog-ashley.bsky.social and team, including some of our own @sciencebanshee.bsky.social and @shen4brains.bsky.social And h/t to Alana McPherson for the infographic!

dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

✌️🙏