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aster

@aqperkins.bsky.social
12 followers 19 following 1 posts

(they/them). Ph.D. in Neuroscience. Views my own.

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Reposted by aster
Scott Delaney @scott-delaney.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
In August, Jay Bhattacharya said “Training future biomedical scientists” was the 1st priority for his version of NIH. But talk is cheap. Let’s see how JB’s doing. 🤔 NIH supports trainees mostly via fellowship (F), training (T), and career development (K) awards. Here are funding curves for each.🧵
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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Whenever I’m reminded of Google and the company’s greenwashing, I also think of their Google Urban Forest outside Santiago, Chile.
A photograph showing a fenced off area with twenty dried shrubs. The photo’s caption reads, “The Google Urban Forest was built about 10 miles from central Santiago to offset the air pollution caused by the company’s data center. The forest is currently closed to visitors, and contains mostly dry shrubs.”
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 24/03/2026
There are very good reasons why our strongest scientific norms prohibit deliberately* deceptive data fabrication. Such behavior is literally career-ending. How anyone can endorse working with a system that does this, let wish to add it as a co-author? *not truly volitational but act as if etc.
Given Claude’s contribution to this paper, I wanted to have Claude as co-author. Unfortunately, current arXiv policy forbids this. The justification is that LLMs can’t take responsibility. This is a good point. So I added to my acknowledgments:
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Constantinople lab @constantinoplelab.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving
Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...
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Constantinople lab @constantinoplelab.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Our lab will be boycotting biotech vendors that have contracts with ICE (e.g., Fisher, Agilent), and telling them why. If you google “vendorname usa spending”, you can see purchases for specific depts including ICE on usaspending.gov. Please talk to your labs and email your vendors!
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 10/12/2025
"there is little reason to doubt what the aim [of the massive investment in AI] is: to embed knowledge in machines—knowledge that previously belonged to the people working in these domains." 🧵
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 07/11/2025
A week after the arXiv was forced to tighten down on submissions because of overwhelming volumes of AI slop, bioRxiv is throwing the doors wide open.
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Alvaro Iturralde Zurita @alvaro-itu.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Undetstanding well your data is a key part of your analysis. It takes time. There are already too many papers out with poorly understood data that was run through a statistical model just to get a significant result. Adding llms to mix is just adding fuel to the fire.
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Zeb Larson @zeblarson.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
That U.S. academics didn't collectively develop strong labor consciousness is really going to bite them in the ass as universities bend the knee to this administration. Politely worded letters to presidents and trustees are not going to count for much of anything.
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ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 13/08/2025
we have the clarity to say it's obscene that a 21 year old named "big ballz" challenges government employees to prove their work isn't bullshit that a chatbot can do, but we apparently don't have the clarity to say the same when it's geoffrey hinton or bill gates talking about healthcare & education
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Erin Rich @erinlrich.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
Happy to have some good science news - our new study with @aqperkins.bsky.social is out in @plosbiology.org! dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
dx.plos.org
Orbitofrontal cortex computes gaze-dependent comparisons between attributes rather than integrated values
When choosing between options with multiple attributes, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is thought to integrate across those attributes, aiding in value comparisons. This study shows in monkeys that OF...
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 06/08/2025
"Asked to generate intervention plans for struggling students, AI teacher assistants recommended more-punitive measures for hypothetical students with Black-coded names and more supportive approaches for students the platforms perceived as white" www.chalkbeat.org/2025/08/06/a...
chalkbeat.org
Annie and Lakeesha struggle in school. AI teacher assistants treated them very differently.
A Common Sense Media study found that prominent teacher assistants that use AI generated recommendations that appeared to be rooted in racial stereotypes based on students’ names. About a third of tea...
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 07/07/2025
and yet, we'll use behavioural and cognitive sciences language to mislead people into thinking AI models equate human cognition
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 25/06/2025
New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/
nature.com
Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature
An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
Teaching "A Critical Introduction to AI Images" this semester as a visiting prof at RIT's Humanities, Computing and Design department. Here's the reading list I have so far.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 01/01/2025
i genuinely try to be open about the usefulness and advantages of llms and try entertain ideas I deeply disagree with. and there’s a current trend that attempts to occupy a middle-ground position where people claims to find useful use cases while at the same time claiming to be critical 1/
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Dan Hassler-Forest @danhf.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
In 2010, anti-copyright activist Aaron Swartz hanged himself after being prosecuted to the full extent of the law for making copyrighted academic publications freely available. Today, academic publishers are insisting those copyrights be lifted to feed the corporate AI slop machine.
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aster @aqperkins.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
Isoflurane is a beautiful name for a baby girl
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