iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Blaise Frederick

Communications Biology @commsbio.nature.com · 27/08/2026

🧠 Individual differences in arousal, indexed by a non-neuronal fMRI signal, are strongly associated with variation in functional brain network connectivity. Effects replicate within and across samples and are altered by catecholaminergic manipulation. PDF available: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

nature.com

Physiological arousal as a predominant source of individual differences in functional brain networks - Communications Biology

Individual differences in arousal, indexed by a non-neuronal fMRI signal, are strongly associated with variation in functional brain network connectivity. Effects replicate within and across samples a...

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Reposted by Blaise Frederick

Neuropsychopharmacology @npp-journal.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

#TWiNPP Janes et al. discuss evidence that the systemic low-frequency oscillation, a major component of the global signal,can distort connectivity estimates and also index arousal, craving, behavior & brain network function / @blaisefrederick.bsky.social @amy.janeslab.org @ckorponay.bsky.social

nature.com

A non-neuronal fMRI signal: both a confound and an opportunity for insight - Neuropsychopharmacology

Neuropsychopharmacology - A non-neuronal fMRI signal: both a confound and an opportunity for insight

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

If he's asleep, he's not talking, so arguably it's preferable.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Dr. Tianye Zhai’s careful and exhaustive new paper evaluating the effects of numerous fMRI denoising pipeline components, alone and in combination, just came out in HBM - check it out! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Benchmarking fMRI Denoising Pipelines

This paper benchmarked fMRI denoising pipelines on task- and resting-state, single- and multi-echo fMRI datasets, in a modern 1-step regression framework, with pre-whitening and time-shifted physiolo...

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

"Perceived" is not the right word here.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

It’s a failure if you consider the purpose of the acquisition was to make money. It wasn’t. It was part of the push to put right wing billionaires firmly in charge of every significant information source, which has been wildly successful.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

You can follow Trump or Jesus - not both. They’ve picked Trump, so it doesn’t matter what they call themselves - that’s all that matters to them. They’ll just bend everything else to fit that.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Seven Democrats helped pass DHS funding JUST LAST WEEK, www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/u.... Jeffries could have stopped them - keeping the caucus in line is his actual job, but he didn't do that. So he either didn't want to, or can't. Either way, he shouldn't be the minority leader.

nytimes.com

Democrat Who Voted for D.H.S. Funding Suggests He Now Regrets It

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

"And here's why we're not going to do anything about it."

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Schroedinger’s quantum fentanyl sensor. “Until we search it, fentanyl both is and is not present in the car - that’s probable cause.”

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

So basically a device that gives them probable cause to search any vehicle they want to.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Then after getting power, they take the occasional break from proposing bills to write Trump’s name on the moon or whatever to ram through something truly appalling. Why don’t democrats try to use that technique for accomplishing something useful? Looking concerned doesn’t seem to be effective.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Congressional republicans have done absolutely nothing other than political theatre for almost 50 years, and now they’re running the place. So it works to that extent

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Of course it won’t work. It’s political theatre. But it beats doing nothing at all, which is their go to.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

If Democrats had any sense, they’d propose a law enacting an immediate, emergency repeal of last year’s billionaire tax cuts to pay for Trump’s military adventures.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

Trump is just trying to maximize the price of the bribe he needs to get to give a pardon. It’s the art of the deal.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Trump is responsible for a lot of things, but the the conservative justices under John Roberts did that all on their own. If they hadn’t declared him above the law, allowing him to run for a second term after January 6, he wouldn’t even BE president. They serve ideology, not the Constitution.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

I don’t think they have the capacity to feel guilt. But some of them (not the usual suspects, natch) see his pol cratering popularity and are hedging their bets. If it all goes south for the fascists, they want to be a lower priority when it comes to trying to fix all the things Trump has broken.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

The flight logs are interesting. Most pages are ok but hard to read, and some are just completely unreadable, as if somebody worked very hard to make the scans of certain pages worthless. It might be interesting to figure out which dates those pages cover.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

They don’t wanna. And since SCOTUS has been very clear Trump is a king with unlimited power, they’re not gonna.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Yes, I'm not in academia for the fame, fortune and good times (ha!). If I had to go to work everyday to just have AI make stuff up for me, I'd probably go get a real job instead.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

By using the outputs of culturally biased models to simulate diverse populations, you’re more likely to get the results you want (if you’re looking to reinforce the status quo rather than, say, learn something about the world as it actually is).

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

And the cost of restoring the East Wing to exactly what it was needs to come from the Trump family and all the donors to that monstrosity. No government contracts or payments to them until it’s back the way it was.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

And it’s important that we see and understand that that’s what he’s doing, because - surprise! - he and his followers feel that way about more than half the people who were born here too. They’re already ramping that up.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

He’s very intentionally saying to all immigrants “You don’t belong here. You will never belong here. There is nothing you can ever do to change that.”

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

Prosecute them for bribery. SCOTUS says Trump is immune from prosecution, but bribery is still a crime and the donors knew exactly what they were doing. At least they can go to jail.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

That’s seems pretty hard to dispute.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

I agree with the sentiment, but I don’t think anyone can legally do both 1 and 2.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

An NYT reporter corrected a fabricated conservative talking point rather than just repeat it unchallenged? Haven’t seen that in a while.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

How is that inaccurate? The olives are literally directly below the sign.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Well, obviously yes, because it rains now.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

They have no interest in making their own lives better or more enjoyable. They are really only motivated by making other people’s lives worse.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

Living systems are extremely complex. If you could fully model them to a sufficient level of detail that you could predict what they’d do in every situation, that would be great, but we’re nowhere near that.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

All of the things listed exist and are useful, but “alone, or in combination with animal models” is doing a LOT of heavy lifting. “ChatGPT, alone or in combination with humans, can do anything humans can do”.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

I think it’s as simple as the fact that anybody still on Twitter at this point is fine with the way it is over there. Everybody who was bothered has left at this point.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

Repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. That would uncap the size of the House and make the distribution of Representatives more closely match the actual population of the US. It would also make the electoral college vote better represent the actual population vote.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

It is a travesty that this bill is even coming to a vote. Thank you for being there to stand up for your constituents.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Oh but he does care. He’s trying to maximize the number of people he hurts.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

And some don’t feel any need to obtain consent at all.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Because we're doing a data driven analysis using signals from within the brain, we don't have to make any assumptions about how the RRF or RV waveforms show up in the BOLD signal (the tacit assumption here is that the relationship is linear, which isn't a bad assumption though).

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

+/-3-3.5 seconds will almost span the range of normal delays within the brain (assuming you've already delayed the RRF and RV regressors to account for transit time TO the brain), but if you have pathology, or even normal aging, that may not be broad enough.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

So I think the approach in the paper is pretty good, but I think voxel specific regressors are better because they are parsimonious and minimize the loss of degrees of freedom. They can also deal with arbitrary delay magnitudes.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Hey - I know I'm a bit late to this... Adding a temporal derivative deals with small delays (up to maybe 3-3.5 seconds in either direction for LFO signals). As far as I've been able to determine, blood flow through the brain is non-dispersive. So don't know if a dispersive derivative is needed.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

If you won't fight for yourself, why on earth would a client think you'd fight for them?

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

_Everything_ pushes them further right.

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Blaise Frederick @blaisefrederick.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Check out this tour de force paper by @tsbolt.bsky.social showing the relationship between the autonomic nervous system and the global signal in fMRI!

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