Bridget Copley PhD

Monsterpiece Theater!

70s TV was truly wild.

Not exactly culture, but I missed a chance to learn about the Roman Empire on my first watch of Cinderella when she said to the mouse "I'll call you Octavian...Gus for short". Watching as a mom I guffawed. How did this land when it was first in theaters?

Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die Which is too bad because we really need to understand how the immune system reacts to the coronavirus.

(It makes me think of Ed Yong's Covid article on the immune system where he keeps saying "look, the immune system is really complicated": www.theatlantic.com/health/archi... )

Ah, yes, this is interesting. So A's value influences B's value and then B's value influences A's value and so on for many, many metabolites. Sure, this kind of thing can in principle be modeled with causal modeling (tho: many variables!). Again it's an extremely(!!!) complex causal situation.

Or is the issue the methodologies of evaluating causal claims from non-interventional evidence?

Can you say more? I mean, for me influence is causal, period, so I suspect that we are using the word "causal" in different ways?

at my most charitable, i have said that tech people believe that they can do a kind of currency exchange of fundamentally social problems into technical puzzles, and that belief motivates and underwrites all sorts of elaborate arbitrages that obscure basically human dilemmas as "technical" details

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

The claim being evaluated for these genes is whether they can have *any* influence at all in what is an (extremely!!!) complex causal situation.

These claims are harder to evaluate than the stronger claim "presence = bad/absence = good", hence the need for big studies.

But the soil can still influence whether the plant lives or dies, as we can find out from looking at many plants in different soils and considering all the other influences.

With the genes, the study asks if they are potentially influential - for each gene: is it like soil? Or is it irrelevant?

Climate and soil: exactly. But also, climate and soil can influence whether the plant grows well, making it more/less likely. Influences are causal. But it's a complex causal situation: lots of things influence how the plant grows. So yeah, just because the soil is poor doesn't mean the plant dies.

By "direct cause" do you mean something that if it's present you get the disease and if it's absent you don't? If it is what you mean, you're certainly right about that.

Strong claims like this (presence = bad / absence = good) are easy to evaluate and in this case are false, as you say!

May I jump in here? I work on causal language for a living so maybe I can speak to this point. (And apologies if you are already aware of what I'm saying, could be useful for the audience.)

Screen cap of parodic version of William Blake's "The Tyger" that begins: Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright (Not sure if I spelled that right) What immortal hand or eye Could fashion such a stripy guy? What the hammer that hath hewn it Into such a chonky unit? Did who made the lamb make thee, Or an external franchisee?

In honor of National Poetry Day, the greatest parody rewrite of all time:

📢PhD fellowships

The Spoken Language group at #BCBL (Spain) offers sponsorship for the #INPhINIT Predoctoral Fellowships

Potential PhD projects can be related to:
🗣️Speech perception
🧠Language learning

ℹ️Info about the position and application process: tinyurl.com/2kcfsjr3

📆Deadline: October 30

Phonetics phonétique spectrogram Praat

Poste de prof substitut en phonétique / Visiting assistant professor of Phonetics

www.rhu.uqam.ca/AffichagePro...

🗣️💬 #linguistique #linguistics #phonétique #phonetics

www.rhu.uqam.ca/AffichagePro...

I love me a good squalid. Moreover "disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable" is chef's kiss

Hi! Did you know that you aren’t pronouncing axolotl correctly?

Suppression of indigenous languages by the Spanish is one of the Four Wounds of Colonization. This is a small subversion of colonial power you can use!

Axolotl is a Nahuatl word, and it sounds like this:

amen (and in my dreams, "not-yet-disabled")

CityU's logo with tagline: "Innovating into the Future"

It's ✨ academic job application season ✨ & I hope you'll consider applying for and/or spreading the word about CityU's ongoing search for faculty in computational linguistics, psycho-/neurolinguistics, & experimental linguistics: open-rank and rolling!

www.cityu.edu.hk/hro/en/job/c...

#langsky 🐦🐦

Every time I log into bsky there's been another shooting.

Playmobil figure kitted out as prehistoric iceman Ötzi.

#OTD 19 September 1991, walkers in the high Ötztal alps on the Italian border, found a body melting out of the ice. It turned out to be the remains of a c.5200 year old man preserved with all his kit.
Of course, it was essential to replicate him in Playmobil.
1🧵
#PlaymobilÖtzi
#PlaymobilInfestation

#NSFGRFP, just signed, recommend to other u.s. academics (easy to do and can’t hurt, even if it doesn’t help?) #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky 🐦🐦

It depends on whether the soup is in a metal can or one of those ready-to-eat pouches because they don’t have hands and so can’t operate the can opened to get the soup in a microwave-safe bowl first.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪

Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students.

I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers We align the aligners

Who aligns the aligners?
#philsky

Excellent read and pairs well with @ebharrington.bsky.social’s writing on shame as an essential weapon for fighting the broligarchs..

I come home from the dentist and my husband is watching videos where they drill into guitars 😬

*instead of tylenol, which is safe for children

Children are going to die because instead of tylenol, some parents will give them aspirin, which can cause death in children with fever. God. More stupid deaths.