Janel Le Belle

Guess What Moderate Democratic Voters Aren’t Anymore? Moderate. Two new polls suggest that moderate Democrats, too, want higher taxes on the rich and some measure of economic populism. Moderate isn’t what it was in 1992.

Moderate Democrats with columns in newspapers are constantly saying the Democratic Party is way too liberal on "social" issues. Moderate Democratic voters in real life do not feel this way. With some polling data from @gelliottmorris.com and @dataforprogress.org. newrepublic.com/article/2074...

We are a very stupid country

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/o...

She's not taking any excuses and neither are we. Georgia, the state is on the line. Tuesday, March 10th-no "I forgot," no "my vote doesn't matter," no "I was busy." None of that! Get up and VOTE for Shawn Harris. On March 10th, you can make a difference! #GA14

AI error or not, Iran school bombing is a permanent stain on America’s soul | Will Bunch A debate on AI in warfare obscures the truth about an Iran school bombing. U.S. humans are to blame for this war crime.

They had names. They had beautiful faces. And they had the same dreams as your kids - crushed when American "precision" bombs slammed into their Minab elementary school, killing 175

Don't blame AI for this. Blame the sick humans who see war as a game

My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/iran...

Open PhD/Postdoc position (start: Oct 2026). Topic: AI/LLMs and child language/communicative/cognitive development. The exact project will be shaped with the candidate. Join our team @univ-amu.fr at the intersection of computer and cognitive science (& right next to the Calanques!). Send me your CV!

In an Intense Election Year, New Post Office Rules Could Trip Up Voter Registration A change in how mail is postmarked could lead some voters to miss key deadlines, including voter registration. Advocates worry the people most affected will be those already facing voting barriers.

Many states require that mail ballots be postmarked by a specific day. But due to new USPS rules, voters may need to put their ballot in a mailbox days in advance.

There's something deeply obscene and broken about the fact that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bombing elementary schools in an illegal war of aggression, and there's still a sense among the opposition that it has to be explained in terms of gas prices in order to get American voters to care.

Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico?

In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony.

It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small!

rdcu.be/e5H8G

Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

I’ve spent years, decades, obsessing over the Bush Administration’s Iraq WMD lies, writing about them, debunking them.

I can think of no lie about Iraq WMDs told by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al that comes even close to the enormity and absurdity of this lie from Donald Trump.

Current NIH leadership want you to think they are using rigorous, consistent & scientific processes to screen studies to align them with agency priorities.

But the process that they have put down on paper is a sham.

It’s important to know NIH is not following its own guidance. Here’s why:

🧵1/

As I get older I'm coming to increasingly radical views like "you have to do things to get good at them" and "you have to think about problems to solve them"

This is a real video from the official White House account on a war that is currently killing people. I don’t know how the US is going to come back from this.
The post was “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. 🇺🇸 🔥”

If you took $1 billion and gave it to the endowment of a different small college each day, they could each provide a free college education to several hundred students per year in perpetuity. Instead we are using that money to bomb schools and kill students in Iran, for no clearly stated purpose.

A new app alerts you if someone nearby is wearing smart glasses | TechCrunch A hobbyist developer's new app, which can detect nearby smart glasses, comes amid resistance to always-on recording and listening devices that invade people's privacy.

The recording light can be hacked and turned off. There is now an app to let you know when the glasses are being used nearby

techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/n...

ICO writes to Meta over 'concerning' AI smart glasses report Videos, including of glasses-wearers using the toilet or having sex, are sometimes reviewed by a Kenya-based subcontractor.

Last year when I was checking into a hotel, the desk person was wearing Meta glasses. I kindly asked them to take them off. They were annoyed. I said, “I do not consent to you looking at my credit card and ID with Meta glasses on.” My instincts were correct: www.bbc.com/news/article...

“It seems like they woke up on Saturday morning and decided that they were going to start a war.”

So the school full of children (hit twice!) was one of these “precise locations”? The framing of this as a victory for AI is certainly a choice by the Washington Post.

NIH Office of Extramural Research announcements of feedback sessions for NIH-wide strategic plan for March 16 and April 8.

IMPORTANT---IMPORTANT---IMPORTANT

NIH is seeking input for the NIH-wide Strategic Plan. Open to everyone but Registration is Required!

Your chance to listen and get your 2 or more cents in.

grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

Nancy Youssef, ..guil @ X.com @nancyayoussef The preliminary Pentagon cost estimate of the war in Iran is $1 billion a day, a congressional official told me. 12:20 PM • 3/4/26 • 44K Views

Preliminary Pentagon cost estimate of the war in Iran is $1 BILLION a day. So far.

𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆
Another mega paper that deserves close attention.
Lots of implications, including emergence and evolution
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
#complexity

Can’t wait for this one! 🚀🌞🪨👽🛸

What’s the best way to work as a team across continents on some of the biggest challenges in #neuroscience? Our researchers and colleagues at the @intlbrainlab.bsky.social reveal 20 lessons from their partnership: www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Article about the new falling cat research!

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

kind of crazy that if you have enough money and don't like what you see in the media, you can just buy up every film studio, news station, and social media app and change it

Excellent advice right here.

Superagers' 'Secret Ingredient' May Be The Growth of New Brain Cells Not only do our brains appear to generate new neurons into adulthood, but those of superagers contain far more brain cells in development than those of healthy peers, new research has found.

Superagers' 'Secret Ingredient' May Be The Growth of New Brain Cells

www.sciencealert.com/superagers-s...