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Reposted by Steve Smith

Ravi Menon, Ph.D. @northernthrux.bsky.social · 3d

I often think about the fact that all the universities in 🇨🇦 together did not produce 11 Nobel Prizes in that period (or since). Not from a lack of brilliance, but from a lack of steady funding and the insistence on significant teaching loads and mind-numbing committee memberships for all faculty.

Kevin J. CREATURE @kevinjkircher.com · 4d

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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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Sep 7

I think your scanner's A2D scaling is set a little high :-)

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Aug 23

We had published a similar plot in the early UKB brain imaging paper from @fmrib-karla.bsky.social - so this is just a quick update on that. My how the y axis has grown up!

www.nature.com/articles/nn....

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Aug 22

Yes and maybe:

It's easy to screen them out (ignore those associations) given that all the non-brain-imaging variables are organised into nice categories.

One might also want to include body size variables as confounds, (though we do by default already use overall head size as a confound).

Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Aug 22

Latest processing of UK Biobank brain imaging data - now with 82,000 usable first-scan datasets. Correlating brain IDPs with 13,000 non-imaging variables gives a rich manhattan-stye plot. 324,000 Bonferroni-significant associations.

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Reposted by Steve Smith

Chris Havergal @chrishavergal.bsky.social · Aug 20

Many UK universities likely to walk away from journal agreements after publishers put forward proposals with “year-on-year price rises” rather than cheaper deals demanded by national negotiators, @davidprosser.bsky.social tells @jgro-the.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/news/busines...

‘Business-as-usual’ offers from publishers raise walk-away fears

Disappointing offers which ‘miss financial reality’ faced by UK higher education have heightened speculation that institutions will ditch proposed deals

www.timeshighereducation.com

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Reposted by Steve Smith

Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · Jul 3

Where is the money going? In the case of for-profit publishers it's very clear:

Your open access fees fund corporate profit margins.

Profit margins for large academic publishers can far exceed those of household names like Amazon and Apple.

chart source: bit.ly/4leULKi
#scipub #academicsky

Chart shows profit margin for Elsevier is 38%, for Springer-Nature is 27%... this is in comparison to companies like Apple (25%), Amazon (5%)... There are non-publishing companies like Microsoft with big margins (34%), but overall the chart shows that academic publishing companies have surprisingly large profits when compared to more "famous" large companies that are household names. "Source" line says "yahoo finance, RELX investor presentations, Spring Nature Annual Reports

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Jul 6

How about if the journal inserts a hidden message into a paper sent for review, with instructions to the LLM to write a coded message in the review, so the journal can tell if LLM was used by the reviewer?

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Reposted by Steve Smith

Cerca Magnetics Limited @cercamagnetics.bsky.social · Jun 26

Congratulations to Holly Schofield and @curlyryes.bsky.social for being chosen from over 350 papers that were published by @imagingneurosci.bsky.social in 2024.

Holly accepted the award at OHBM in Brisbane and Ryan celebrated the win from Dublin!

www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/scienti...

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Jun 24

Indeed - and apparently I'm only allowed to view the award from three pre-specified angles.
:-)

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Jun 11

It's *easier* than that - just publish in an OA journal that lets the author keep the copyright :-)

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Reposted by Steve Smith

Tim Soutphommasane @timsout.bsky.social · Jun 11

It's Pride Month. On the weekend, we were delighted to have a Pride breakfast celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer members of the University of Oxford. And then proceeded to join the Oxford Pride parade. The weather was wet -- but that didn't dampen spirits

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Reposted by Steve Smith

Paula Croxson (she/her) 🏳️‍🌈 @paulacroxson.bsky.social · Jun 10

🧪 Scientists are pushing back against the gutting of US research funding. Now scientists outside of the NIH and members of the public can sign on in support of the Bethesda declaration: www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...

More about the Bethesda declaration: apnews.com/article/nih-...

Bethesda Declaration — STAND UP FOR SCIENCE

Support NIH Staff Now!

www.standupforscience.net

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Jun 5

I guess the main difference between social media and the BBC is that you won't see "popcorn" on any BBC pages today?

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Jun 5

YOU know what I meant :-)

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · Jun 4

Indeed - and Oxford Labour just as bad, concreting over every bit of green they can, destroying the countryside for future generations.
@cllrsbrown.bsky.social
@maryoxford.bsky.social
@annarailton.bsky.social

George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · Jun 3

What did we do to deserve this government? It promised change, and many people voted on that basis, in good faith. But the change is from bad to worse. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Revealed: 5,000 English nature sites at risk under Labour’s planning proposals

Exclusive: Planning bill includes mechanism for developers to ‘pay to pollute’ valuable ecosystems, experts warn

www.theguardian.com

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Reposted by Steve Smith

Oxford University Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (OxCIN) @oxcin.bsky.social · Jun 2

🏳️‍🌈Happy Pride Month from OxCIN! 🏳️‍🌈

If you're in Oxford, come and say hi at our inclusive research-themed stall at the Pride festival in South Park this Saturday!

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · May 29

We present a method for disambiguating subject-varying aging rates from fixed baseline effects, in single-timepoint data.

If estimating a single brain age delta per subject, baseline effects dominate.

With multiple modes of brain aging, some modes do reflect aging rates varying across subjects.

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · May 29

For those curious about how it works at IN: editors can't see their own papers in the reviewing system. So I don't even know who the Handling Editor was (or the reviewers) - but thanks to them all for helping improve the paper.

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Steve Smith @fmrib-steve.bsky.social · May 29

Happy to see my first first-author paper in Imaging Neuroscience (along with @fmrib-karla.bsky.social and @nichols.bsky.social):

Characterising ongoing brain aging and baseline eﬀects from cross-sectional data

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...