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Matt Kirkcaldie

@matttkk.bsky.social

1.9K followers 660 following 250 posts

Neuroscientist obsessed with brain structure and comparative neuroanatomy. They’re not circuits. It’s not wiring. Cortex is a resonant mesh. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matt-Kirkcaldie [ image by https://mattcoyle.net ]

www.researchgate.net

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Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 22h

The point that needs to be hammered: of course there are fantastic profits to be made if you can get the public to pay for the facility for businesses to use. That’s the covert cost-benefit analysis which drives the political enthusiasm.
@andrewwilkiemp.bsky.social

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 3d

Sweetness Follows (just ahead of Drive)

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 4d

I think you may have misspelled “windy” there

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Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 6d

mind

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 6d

I hope the shame of Musk’s continued fellowship eventually penetrates and stirs you to action.

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 9d

what the heck is that thing @simongrove.bsky.social

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 9d

Ooh that’s a tough reach, for even the most committed pedant.

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 9d

Oops, didn’t realise it was so contested!

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 9d

An interesting aside is what it means to “recognize” a place - but of course that’s the whole question!

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 9d

Hmm - well unlike gif/jiff there’s at least a clear answer on this one!

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Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 9d

Insane video, is that a macrophage showing up at the end?
Also a note for those new to apoptosis - it’s from Greek “apo-“ and “ptosis” so you pronounce it appo-tosis, not a-pop-tosis.

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Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 11d

Report on Australian Higher Education finds:

🔹️ Council members have no lived experience of universities

🔹️ Council members have COIs with consultancy firms

🔹️ Council meetings are closed affairs that lack transparency

🔹️ Leaders' exorbitant salaries could not be justified

One submission said leaders’ salaries could not be “justified by the quality of executive decision-making, nor by the scope of executive duties. The core business of a university – teaching and research – is co-ordinated virtually entirely by ordinary non-executive staff”.

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Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 14d

I know they won the Nobel Prize and all, but I still think the discovery of how spatial awareness is assembled in vertebrate brains is underrated - the most exciting thing in neuroscience in the last 50 years. Literally seeing the brain build a map and use it to navigate, the basis of all behaviour.

Edvard I Moser @edvardmoser.bsky.social · 14d

1/5 How does the brain turn the low-dimensional, universal grid cell metric into the rich, diverse codes needed for memory in hippocampal place cells? 🧵
Preprint link 👇

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

Functional independence of entorhinal grid cell modules enables remapping in hippocampal place cells

A systems-level understanding of cortical computation requires insight into how neural codes are transformed across distinct brain circuits. In the mammalian cortex, one of the few systems where such ...

www.biorxiv.org

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Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 14d

Yeah, but if her thesis applied the principles of QM in analysing stellar spectra it’s based on QM, whether the phrase had been coined or no. It didn’t just spring into existence in 1925.

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 14d

What’s the basis of spectral lines if not quantum physics? Not sure you read the article.

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Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 14d

Fantastic, essential piece of scientific history, key work from an unheralded pioneer. We’ve only known that the stars are hydrogen and helium for a hundred years.

Elise Cutts @elisecutts.bsky.social · 14d

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:

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 14d

I have those PDFs which were on the CDs, I think about 20 issues from the early years, but it sounds like you’ve got those.

Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

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

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Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

でんか @k-hermit.com · 15d

POKEMON ‎🤍

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Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 17d

If you’re interested, here are a couple of discussions of its dot-com status and domain registration loophole:
kfitz.info/academia-not...
electronicbookreview.com/publications...

Academia, Not Edu

The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

kfitz.info

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 17d

As I posted elsewhere, it’s worth knowing that it’s always been a commercial for-profit site. Its “edu” address was granted in the very early days of domain registration before proof of status was required, and has never been rescinded. Their terms of service have handed away rights for decades too.

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 17d

@petergs.bsky.social

Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 21d

Since claims should be backed up, here are a couple of discussions of its dot-com status and domain registration loophole:
kfitz.info/academia-not...
electronicbookreview.com/publications...

Academia, Not Edu

The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

kfitz.info

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Matt Kirkcaldie @matttkk.bsky.social · 21d

It has always been a commercial for-profit site. Its “edu” address was granted in the very early days of domain registration before proof of status was required, and has never been rescinded. Their terms of service have handed away rights for decades too.

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Reposted by Matt Kirkcaldie

Raimondo Bruno @psychopharmres.bsky.social · 21d

We’re looking for Australian clinicians working with people who are seeking help with their substance use to share the stories of their wins. Find out more and complete the brief, confidential survey here: bit.ly/3GpQTXP

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