iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

If you're happy to share the data, we'd love to see what we can do with it.

Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Not formally. I have played around with some ideas and we're hoping to work on it properly next year (trying to find more funding so we could get a PhD/postdoc to work on this!). And we're planning some multi-agent studies in a minecraft enviroment.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

I wonder if I could run our foraging model on data from ants. That would be fun.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

I now want to watch Twin Peaks again.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

our next project will be to do a mroe indepth analysis of errors to find out what *isn't* being captured. [If anybody has a good idea about how to elegantly model the stimulus boundary, please let me know!]

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Delighted that our new paper paper on visual foraging is now out (w/ @scienceanna.bsky.social ). We find that our generative model does a pretty good job of acocunting for human behaviour over a range of metrics. [journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/arti…

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Reposted by Alasdair Clarke

Anna Hughes @scienceanna.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Roll up, roll up: @riadsala.bsky.social did some more thinking about our model of visual foraging: doi.org/10.1371/jour.... It now has some shiny new parameters (absolute direction!) and it's not bad at distinguishing individual differences in strategies too. #PsychSciSky #VisionScience

doi.org

FoMo: A unifying theory of visual foraging

Author summary Foraging is an important behaviour for humans and other animals, helping them to find food, habitats, and mates. It can involve searching both through visual space (such as searching fo...

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Sorry to have missed it... hope all who could make it had a nice time catching up! And I look forward to hearing more about it all.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

well said. I'm a little envious of the breadth and depth of topics you get to cover in your stats course. I always find myself having to keep going over the basics (y=bx+c) again and again.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Yeah, I hear your pain when it comes to running and keeping track of a lot of model variants. In terms of efficiency, I think I read that Stan now has much faster support for some forms of accumulator models. Might be worth looking into.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

I've finally found time to read the rest of it (and we plan on disucssing te paper in our journal club on Friday). One question I have is: why didn't you implement a multi-level version, so tht you can just fit one model per data set? A bit like the Clarke et al (2025) JEP:Gen model?

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

So a + Delta indicates a negative change? [or I'm just being dumb on a Monday]

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

I'd assume current - previous.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

I'd assume it means angular difference? Am I right?

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Reposted by Alasdair Clarke

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 29/01/2026

Just learned about this study looking at methodological trends in psych and econ over time: online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art.... Matches my perception well: Nobody in psych bothers to (explicitly) try causal inference unless they conducted an experiment, not a lot of theoretical work either.

Figure 1 from the paper.
Econ: from 2008 to 2024, methods aiming for causal inference have increased, theoretical work has decreased.
Psych: Mostly experimental or descriptive correlational work.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

I've been strugging to find good modern British TV. [So have started re-watching good British TV from 15 years ago]. [Saying that, I suspect that is true of my TV watching habits in general. I suspose I am getting old]

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Reposted by Alasdair Clarke

Professor Caroline Edwards @theblochian.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

And so it begins... 3 UK universities (Essex, Sussex & Kent) have just gone public about walking away from their Elsevier Read & Publish deals, despite Jisc's recently announced agreement. Expect to see more of these over the coming months. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/three-m... #OpenAccess

timeshighereducation.com

Three major research universities opt out of new Elsevier deal

Complaints over ‘price increases’ and open access models spur UK institutions to walk away from offer from publishing giant, despite nationally negotiated agreement

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

This is the best paper I have read in ages (disclaimer: I haven't finshed reading, so I may end up hating it). I've been thinking a lot about very similar problems, so great to see somebody else doing all the hard work so I don't have to :)

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Reposted by Alasdair Clarke

Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

argmin.net

1000 Hurts

Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

A lot of parallels with the current mess in the UK Universtity sector.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Seeing stories like this always cheer me up about my relatively unsuccessful career in academia. I think I had about 3 emails waiting for me.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I agree 100%. This would be a great first step. Is this position clearly articulated in the UCU page? Has this point been made to parliment by anybody with a sizeable platform? Am I missing sensible op-eds in the FT? Does anybody in Labour view this as something they could do?

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

oh, I agree entirely. But the pensioners say "they should go get an apprenticeship" Or just work.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Has anybody offered up a good defense of the current UK university secor and how it can be stabalised? The only solutions I can imagine are large increase in student fees (unfair, and punatitve on young people?); large increase in funding from government (seems unlikely), or drastic reform?

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I agree entirely. I've had (older, richer) relatives tell me that "too many young people go to university". It takes a lot of self control to avoid going on full on rant mode. Not looking forward to having to make small talk with such people over Christmas.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

I am currently an ex-member - I got fed up of all the endless calls to strike. I don't see any hope of improvement in the sector until we get a government that values (higher) education. Perhaps if the UCU shared their counter-proposal, it would encourage disillusioned ex-members (me!) to rejoin.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

For starters, in the future, do we see our students as campus-based, or commuting (or online)? I don't mind which, but I'm pretty confident that trying to do both will please noone.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Where can I find the UCU's Future Plan and alternative (costed?) proposal?

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

Urrgh. I just spent an hour trying to get tikz working with quatro. Frustrating partial success. I can make figures appear, but they look *really* ugly. Maybe i know somebody who can help, as Claude.ai wasn't at all helpful.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

One idea I've been thinking about is cutting grid approximation. I'm very unsure though. It would free up time (I only have 10 weeks!), the coding is a bit clunky, and it confuses students. But if I cut grid approx, my lecture on Probability doesn't connect to anything.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

Two takeaways: i) yes, your book and module is hard for most students. but ii) students will still find it a struggle even if you make it easier.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

When I started teaching Bayes, I ran my module as a reading course based on your textbook. Since then, I have reduced the amount of content every year. Yet my current students still tell me it is their hardest module.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

But, this doesn't work when our students lack the confidence to question the AIs (and who can blame them given the amount of marketting the tech companies are doing)

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

The AIs can give good advice on how they should be used:

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

While this isn't a huge surprise, what I find despressing is how confidently wrong the AIs still are. When asked, they even admit that they're wrong, and that they are likely damaging educational outcomes.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

Interesting to note that Claude (Sonnet 4.5) gets the Clarke & Hunt (2016, Psych Science, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...) Focus-Divide Dilema wrong.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

This looks interesting, @scienceanna.bsky.social, we should have a read. I wonder if there any connections between this and our work?

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Coud say the same about psycholigists having a preference for under powered studies.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Huh, I wish I had heard that this event was on. Would have loved to have attended.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

I would be interested to know the extent to which any reviewers ever look at my supplementary materials. (sometimes, based on their comments, it feels like they don't care) I'm pretty sure the people on the grant panels in charge of handing out the money don't care. :(

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

in theory, I love all this stuff. in practise... I have extremely limited resources. My employer doesn't care about this stuff, and neither are any of the academics who peer-review my publications. It feels hard to justify all the time spent on model testing

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Why remove? Well, if none of your models converged, and you misreported your p-values, wouldn't that be a good reason to remove your dep.var. ?

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

The more we looked into this, the worse it looked. But, I doubt anybody cares or anything will be done. [PI from a top uni, paper published in a Nature journal,... makes a mockery of the system]

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

The most recent example we found was one in which the researchers had removed their dep. var. from the repository upon publication.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

It's still pretty problematic.. I frequently come accross papers in which the authors boast of their open data, but keep their OSF set to private and ignore any requests for access.

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Alasdair Clarke @riadsala.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

Cold War is easily one of my fav films. 90minutes of perfection.

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