Áine Ní Choisdealbha

My tinfoil hat is telling me it's because they want you unmuted to maximize their recorded data for training voice/sound models.

Credentialism has been the word of my year on the job market. I knew that credentials were no guarantee of success, that they're more of an adversarial shield - you might not say yes, but you can't say no to me on this basis. I did not expect them to mean nothing & to constantly hear about "fit".

Congrats Karla and so well-deserved! Anyone brave enough to tackle measurement of EF in early life has my admiration 😅 thank you for sharing your journey - I've been having a tough year on the job market and it's reassuring to know that others have found success even when the horizon looks hazy.

UCD Babylab members have been regularly writing short blog posts about our work. Newest post from Florencia Sandoval Gomez, a MSc student studying the body schema in infancy.

Every time I return to code I wrote previously I think "WHAT A MORON, what was I trying to do?", change it, then realise there was a logic to what I did before and that the code worked correctly and as intended. Think of the hours of work I could save if I had a little self-belief!

Today at roller derby practice I got complimented on my visible trap muscles and on my scent (residual perfume from yesterday), and I'm going to be floating on those affirmations all weekend.

Such a clever idea to recruit from a population about whom there is already so much social and health data!

I miss spring at UW! The cherry blossoms, the bald eagles and herons, the increasingly distracting party boat and seaplane noises right outside my office window on the cut...

Many years ago I was at a seminar by a former policymaker whose message was "always be alert when doing research for policymakers because they are going to want to box your research in so much it gives them the answer they want".
This is going to be a tiny box, if there's even a box at all.

The change in REF rules is a boon to the procrastinators among us. All this data I've never got around to analyzing/writing up, those papers, it could all be yours for the low, low price of a job
(the complete dearth of available jobs notwithstanding)

My wonderful UCD Babylab colleagues are hosting an event for parents of toddlers, to talk about play and share ideas about it. Feb 17th in Dublin city centre www.ucdbabylab.com/world-caf-2025

I want to know how much they paid the aide who had to wrestle a cat, let alone one known for scrapping with a fox, into that get-up.

The biggest source of innovation in academic publishing has been fraud-related every year since 1950 or whenever Robert Maxwell bought his first press.
Actually probably before, I'm not letting scholarly societies off the hook.

If anyone has a keen and talented undergraduate student who would like to work on infant EEG and motor development in Dublin this summer, please pass this along. Lots of other interesting projects available too - but I'm plugging mine!

Text in black 'Founding Generation Summer Fellowship Program - Undergraduate student? Apply to be a mentee!' against a pale blue background, ICIS logo on the top left.

#infantstudies Founding Generation Summer Fellowship now open for student applications! The program pairs promising students with researchers from around the world who conduct cutting-edge science. Apply by February 14.
infantstudies.org/founding-gen...

Agnes Mary Clerke - Wikipedia

Irish astronomer Agnes Mary Clerke died #OTD in 1907.

In 1885, she published A Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century. This book became commonly used for its discussion of the spectroscope.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_M...

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/searc...

#womeninStem

This better not provide any distracting haptic feedback.

Anyone else feel dirty uploading their tracked-changes manuscripts in the submission portals? I know it's encouraged but it really feels like inviting someone to look through the window at your madness.

Just finished my annual rewatch of Love on the Spectrum, sorry, I mean Pride and Prejudice (2005).

Maybe "the hungover postdoc" is a better name.

My mother calls hers the council-man because it takes off for a remote corner and makes itself busy cleaning the same spot over and over, out of sight of the boss who thinks it's actually working.

Can't be anything to do with the ingredient whose etymology is "water of life".

Meta's framing about current moderation being "just out of touch with mainstream discourse" feels chilling. Media companies and owners play a huge role in determining what is "mainstream", including mainstreaming the idea that caring about someone's genitals and promoting eugenics is mainstream.

🚨 My team is hiring an undergraduate intern (UK universities only) - a great opportunity, if I can say so myself!

Please share widely.

Want more info? See here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

"Pastoral care" is another one, a little more nuanced but probably something like "Can you act as an effective buffer for student concerns ranging from how to write an essay to how to deal with the existential dread of climate catastrophe?"

As someone who's been keeping one eye (and now to my great dismay, both eyes) on UK academic job ads for the past few years, the trends are interesting. "Ability to provide a positive student experience" is current, translation "Can you keep students happy as staff numbers are shaved to the bone?"

A 12-panel figure, with each panel showing the outcomes of a preferential looking task. In this task, participants were shown two stimuli (one neutral, one disgusting), and could freely look at each. Each graph shows the differences in dwell time between the two stimuli, as a function of time in each trial (10 seconds). Most panels show a brief initial bias towards the disgusting stimulus, followed by sustained bias away from it ("disgust avoidance"). The top row shows this for non-parent controls, across all four columns: regular bodily-effluvia, meconium diapers, milk-fed baby diapers, and weaning baby diapers. The bottom row shows the same categories, but for parents. This group shows no bias away from any of the disgusting stimuli! The middle row shows parents to exclusively milk-fed (i.e. very young) babies, and (surprisingly!) shows as much disgust avoidance as the non-parent control group.

Kids are gross, and parents constantly have to deal with their shit (literally). Do they habituate to disgust? 💩 🧠 🧪

In this new preprint, we show that #parents are indeed less #disgust avoidant than non-parents, but only after their (youngest) has started weaning. doi.org/10.31234/osf... (1/3)

New instructor, new derangement. Dance remix of My Girl to start, dance cover of the Sound of Silence to finish.
I suspect there's also a correlation between how good the instructor is and how weird the music is. Is it part of their training?

Infant low-frequency EEG cortical power, cortical tracking and phase-amplitude coupling predicts language a year later Cortical signals have been shown to track acoustic and linguistic properties of continuous speech. This phenomenon has been measured in both children and adults, reflecting speech understanding by adu...

This one has been circulating for a while as a preprint but it's nice to have it out! Well done to my colleague Adam Attaheri for taking the lead on synthesizing a huge amount of brain and language data.

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

I recently encountered this with a senior collaborator but I have to say, it's actually really effective! Forces brevity too.