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eelkespaak.bsky.social
@eelkespaak.bsky.social
190 followers 200 following 8 posts
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cordhenning.bsky.social
«If you object that we’re not in a zombie movie because there are no brain-eating cannibals, let me reassure you, there are.»
– @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social
Turns out the zombie apocalypse isn’t as fun as they said it would be – Rebecca Solnit on our dangerously disconnected world
A population numbed, dazed, present-but-not-present – had it happened overnight it would be a sci-fi horror movie. And if you looked up from your phone for long enough, you might notice it’s started a...
www.theguardian.com
November 11, 2025 at 3:41 PM
eelkespaak.bsky.social
🚨🧠🚨 POSTDOC POSITION 🚨🧠🚨 in my lab: www.ru.nl/en/working-a... Connectivity in Working Memory. Deadline 12 Nov! Apply via website; please repost.
Postdoc Position: Neural Circuitry Underlying Working Memory | Radboud University
Do you want to work as a Postdoc Position: Neural Circuitry Underlying Working Memory at the Faculty of Social Sciences? Check our vacancy!
www.ru.nl
November 9, 2025 at 9:17 AM
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irisvanrooij.bsky.social
‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...
‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ | Radboud University
Since the widespread release of ChatGPT in December of 2022, AI has taken over much of the world by storm – including academia. Most of this happened with very little pushback, despite a myriad of iss...
www.ru.nl
November 1, 2025 at 10:26 PM
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dingemansemark.bsky.social
also massage therapy would arguably be a much better investment for everyone

why is our university sponsoring hype that deskills workers instead of actually making lives better?
November 5, 2025 at 7:41 AM
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abeba.bsky.social
me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you?

students: no AI

I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion
November 6, 2025 at 6:32 AM
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olivia.science
Finally one thing they are, due to being statistical models of text, these neural networks and other large language models are indeed designed to do: milquetoastify boringify language.

LLMs steal and drain off human creativity originality verve by merely copying.

english.elpais.com/technology/2...
The ChatGPT effect: We’ve all started talking like robots
The use of artificial intelligence is leading to a flattening of our language that is evident in the emails we write and the texts we compose. Studies have already confirmed this. Robotic verbiage era...
english.elpais.com
November 5, 2025 at 6:58 AM
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caasbrey.bsky.social
Harvard Gazette: Gazette: “You are the mother of two In ten years you have produced three novels and two short-story collections. Can you talk about your process and how you manage work and family?” Groff: “I understand that this is a question of vital importance to a lot of people, particularly to other mothers who are artists trying to get their work done, and know that I feel for everyone in the struggle. But until I see a male writer asked that question, I am going to respectfully decline to answer it.”
November 5, 2025 at 12:19 AM
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rogierk.bsky.social
Years ago I started the Green Young Academy with @sanlifaez.bsky.social & @anne-urai.bsky.social. Across meetings, zoom calls, pitches and even a meeting with the King, this grew into 2 projects launched today: A report on Universities' sustainability plans & a manifesto with sustainability pledges
November 4, 2025 at 2:44 PM
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initself.bsky.social
Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language.

tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬

1/n
November 3, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted
arora-borealis.bsky.social
Planning on running a RIFT study? In a new manuscript, we put together the RIFT know-how accumulated over the years by multiple labs (@lindadrijvers.bsky.social, @schota.bsky.social, @eelkespaak.bsky.social, with Cecília Hustá and others).

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
October 29, 2025 at 10:52 AM
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haegenslab.bsky.social
Check out our latest work led by @joeyzhou.bsky.social on alpha oscillatory networks in PLOS Biology!
➡️ journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
Do ongoing alpha activity fluctuations influence perceptual sensitivity or criterion?
Distinct alpha networks modulate different aspects of perceptual decision-making
Fluctuations in alpha-band neural oscillations influence whether we perceive faint stimuli, but how these oscillations relate to different perceptual processes is not clear. This study shows that alph...
journals.plos.org
October 23, 2025 at 7:27 PM
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apache.be
Prominente professoren en onderzoekers luiden de alarmbel over AI in het hoger onderwijs. Ze verzetten zich tegen wat ze “de AI-hype” noemen en waarschuwen voor het verlies van kritisch denken, een kunst die vooral niet uitbesteed kan worden aan “best guess machines”.

apache.be/2025/10/23/a...
Als AI-wetenschappers zich verzetten tegen AI in het hoger onderwijs
Deze wetenschappers en filosofen roepen op tot kritisch denken over AI.
apache.be
October 23, 2025 at 6:29 AM
eelkespaak.bsky.social
🧠 Regularization, Action, and Attractors in the Dynamical “Bayesian” Brain

direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

(still uncorrected proofs, but they should post the corrected one soon--also OA is forthcoming, for now PDF at brainandexperience.org/pdf/10.1162-...)
Regularization, Action, and Attractors in the Dynamical “Bayesian” Brain
Abstract. The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)sc...
direct.mit.edu
October 22, 2025 at 8:59 AM
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epares.bsky.social
Excellent piece.

We know how to improve writing ability: it's by doing more, not less of it.

"LLMs do not improve one’s writing ability much like taking a taxi does not improve one’s driving ability. Students should hone their writing, thinking, and other academic skills at every opportunity."
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 13, 2025 at 8:13 AM
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lutzfernandez.bsky.social
I've updated my document that tackles four of the common arguments used to encourage teachers to use AI.

I hope this will be helpful to those educators wanting to push back on AI mania.
Resisting School AI Mania Help Sheet
Help Sheet: Resisting AI Mania in Schools K-12 educators are under increasing pressure to use—and have students use—a wide range of AI tools. (The term “AI” is used loosely here, just as it is by man...
docs.google.com
October 14, 2025 at 7:23 PM
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thetattooedprof.bsky.social
This is FANTASTIC. Thank you, @lutzfernandez.bsky.social, for doing this work and so generously sharing it
October 14, 2025 at 7:34 PM
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olaf.dimigen.de
🚨 New preprint: Invisible neural frequency tagging (RIFT) for the underfunded researcher:
👉 www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

RIFT uses high-frequency flicker to probe attention in M/EEG with minimal stimulus visibility and little distraction. Until now, it required a costly high-speed projector.
Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (RIFT) with a consumer monitor: A proof-of-concept
Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging (RIFT) enables neural frequency tagging at rates above the flicker fusion threshold, eliciting steady-state responses to flicker that is almost imperceptible. While R...
www.biorxiv.org
August 22, 2025 at 11:52 AM
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behrenstimb.bsky.social
Science is under threat in the US. @elife.bsky.social have commissioned a series of articles discussing the implications and what we can do. The first three articles are now live. More to follow:
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
Science Under Threat in the United States: How scientists and institutions should respond
Individual researchers and university leaders need to make the case for science to their elected representatives and to the public at large.
elifesciences.org
March 25, 2025 at 2:24 PM
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fleurzeldenrust.bsky.social
Moeten we überhaupt wel willen dat AI voor ons literatuur leest? Is dat niet juist wat we wèl moeten doen, en wat minder, ik zeg maar iets, zinloze administratie? @voxweb.bsky.social

www.voxweb.nl/nieuws/elsev...
March 24, 2025 at 8:57 AM
eelkespaak.bsky.social
Rapid connectivity modulations unify long-term and working memory: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...; a Spotlight together with @mjwolff.bsky.social, highlighting the amazing work of Matt Panichello, Tirin Moore (neither on bsky?), et al.; in memory of Mark Stokes.
Rapid connectivity modulations unify long-term and working memory
Panichello et al. recently demonstrated that working memory (WM) information can be maintained without active neural firing. Instead, it is stored in rapidly modulating neural connectivity patterns. T...
www.cell.com
March 20, 2025 at 2:55 PM
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carandinilab.net
Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of

Neuropixels Opto

Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics

Today in bioRxiv

960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors

By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(1/2)
A Neuropixels Opto probe with 3 blue emitters and 3 red emitters lighting up in succession, with corresponding neural activity in different layers of the cortex.
February 7, 2025 at 9:16 AM
eelkespaak.bsky.social
Great quote indeed. The implications (of the first half) for relying on LLMs to offload some of academics' work should be obvious.
irisvanrooij.bsky.social Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · Dec 31
Beautiful quote from logician and philosopher Susan Stebbing (from: plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum... )
What we ordinarily say, we say unclearly. We speak unclearly because we think unclearly. It is the task of philosophy to render our thoughts clear. … We cannot clarify our thoughts by thinking about thinking, nor by thinking about logic. We have to think about what we were thinking about. The philosopher considers a given expression, and analyses it in order to find another expression which says more clearly what the original expression said less clearly. This investigation is not linguistic. We must first know what facts are the case before we can fruitfully employ analysis for the purpose of clarifying our thoughts about the world. Accordingly, Logical Positivism fails, I think, in so far as it attempts to start from a priori assumptions with regard to the nature of language and the principles of symbolism, and, by means of these, to draw limits with regard to what we can think. Their mistake is that they seek to make everything clear at once. But it is not in this way that philosophy can develop. We must proceed step by step, beginning with propositions which we know to be true, not ruling out initially what does not fit in. (1933a: 86)
January 31, 2025 at 9:34 AM
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maddyjalbert.bsky.social
I am one of these NSF postdocs. NSF has frozen everyone’s access to their salaries and research stipends (that were already awarded) with no information about when they might be expected to be unfrozen. It still appears like we are expected to continue doing our work though.
astrokatie.com Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · Jan 30
Apparently all the PhD researchers holding prestigious NSF-funded research fellowships are having their salaries withheld until some unspecified time when the leadership figures out how to eliminate any grant funding that doesn’t align with the president’s political ideology.
benstemon.bsky.social Ben Stone @benstemon.bsky.social · Jan 30
It’s official: all funding requests made on Tuesday by postdocs for their salaries have been unilaterally rejected by NSF.
January 31, 2025 at 12:43 AM
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tobiasstaudigl.bsky.social
📢 New preprint from the lab:

We are very excited to report the discovery of an oscillation in the Central Thalamus using rare direct recordings of human thalamic electrophysiology.

The novel oscillation is tightly coupled to specific, natural states of consciousness.🧵
biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Jan 28
Thalamic oscillations distinguish natural states of consciousness in humans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.28.635248v1
January 29, 2025 at 3:05 PM