Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 1h

λx λs . P(x)

Marjorie James Keenan @unenthusiast.com · 4h

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

rm -rf ~/

hammancheez @hammancheez.bsky.social · 4h

"The chancellor approved it"

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Silvia Pineda-Munoz, PhD - Climate Ages @climateages.bsky.social · 1d

A 126,000-year-old butt-drag just made fossil history.
A tiny rock hyrax scooted across the sand of ancient South Africa, and that moment was preserved in stone.

Even the smallest acts can echo through time.
🧪 #SciComm
buff.ly/dcGWTR4

The 126,000-Year-Old Butt-Drag That Rewrote What Counts as a Fossil

How a small animal’s odd habit turned into one of the most unexpected stories ever preserved in stone Some discoveries make headlines because they’re dramatic: new...

climateages.com

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 2d

just going to leave this here

academic.oup.com/ej/article/1...

Publishing While Female: are Women Held to Higher Standards? Evidence from Peer Review

Abstract. Female authors are under-represented in top economics journals. In this paper, I investigate whether higher writing standards contribute to the p

academic.oup.com

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

Monsterpiece Theater!

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

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?

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

(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... )

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.

www.theatlantic.com

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

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.

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

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

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

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?

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ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 7d

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

Yvonne Lam @yvonnezlam.bsky.social · 7d

It's core to the entire tech project to believe that technical solutions will fix social problems.

Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Blade Wielding Bisexual (Lordean arc) @shengokai.blacksky.app · 7d

This. Absolutely this. They believed their technical solution would solve a social problem. It’s the same ideology that drives Mastodon albeit repackaged in a less “open source” centric shell.

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Reposted by Bridget Copley PhD

Kevin J. CREATURE @kevinjkircher.com · 7d

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.

sites.stat.columbia.edu

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

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.

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

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?

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

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.

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

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!

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 7d

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.)

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Reposted by Bridget Copley PhD

Deanna Kreisel 🌱 @doctorwaffle.substack.com · 9d

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

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?

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Reposted by Bridget Copley PhD

Efthymia Kapnoula @effiekapnoula.bsky.social · 10d

📢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

SPONSORPSHIP for INPHINIT PREDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP - SPOKEN LANGUAGE GROUP

at the BCBL- Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain) www.bcbl.eu

www.bcbl.eu

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Reposted by Bridget Copley PhD

Richard Compton @rcompton.bsky.social · 11d

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...

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 11d

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

John Hawkinson @johnhawkinson.bsky.social · 11d

Skipping to the near end, after seeing @kyledcheney.bsky.social 's comments,

Young is really upset about masks: "It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable."

w/r/t Todd Lyons's claims about masks.

Reposted by Bridget Copley PhD

Claire Zagorski, MSc, EMT-P @clairezagorski.bsky.social · 12d

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:

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 12d

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

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Charles B. Chang @cbchang.bsky.social · 13d

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 🐦🐦

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Bridget Copley PhD @moppety.bsky.social · 12d

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

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Duncan Mackay @theduncanmackay.bsky.social · 23d

#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.
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#PlaymobilÖtzi
#PlaymobilInfestation

Playmobil figure kitted out as prehistoric iceman Ötzi.

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