iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Nick Holmes

Mark Haselgrove @markhaselgrove.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

24 month FT Research Assistant role with the excellent Dr Victoria Newell on a project to refine, validate, and implement the Self-Harm Questionnaire – Autism (SHQ-A), a new assessment tool co-developed with autistic people. Details here... jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

jobs.nottingham.ac.uk

Job Vacancy at the University of Nottingham: Research Assistant (Fixed Term)

Applications are invited for a Research Assistant to work with Dr Victoria Newell on a Medical Research Foundation-funded project to refine, validate, and implement the Self-Harm Questionnaire – Autis...

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 9h

My next door neighbour's house is for sale; the main photo on the estate agent's website is 'AI'-manipulated, with nonexistent lush green grass, shadows in three different directions, weird blurry patches, paths & drains appearing in the wrong places. Which house-buyer will be fooled by this #slop?

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Reposted by Nick Holmes

Flight Free UK @flightfreeuk.bsky.social · 22h

People ARE worried - but will it change how we travel? Here's the thing: staying grounded is one of the most powerful things we can actually do. Worry is a start. Action matters more. 🌎💚

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Shortly after the apocalyptic hyperbole Shortly before the record-breaking IPOs 🙄

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The enshittification begins at last 💩

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Reposted by Nick Holmes

Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...

The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Neuroscience & mental health: 4.4% success rate for #MRC #UKRI grants assessed in Spring 2026 Years & years & years of wasted effort 👇

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Reposted by Nick Holmes

Andrew Pruszynski @andpru.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Happy to announce that I am searching for for a graduate student, starting Fall 2027. If you want to study the neural mechanisms of reaching and grasping, come join us in the rich environment of the Sensorimotor Superlab. For details: www.pruszynskilab.com/positions.html

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"You're absolutely right: I incorrectly described a Chinese cargo in the Middle East as 'nuclear' when in fact it was 'unclear'. You deployed the Navy Seals. That's on me." "Is there another cargo that I can help you with? Or perhaps I can declare intercontinental thermonuclear war for you?" #LLM

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Go see Mr Spicer on Tour now: you'll laugh your mouth off.

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Whoever's putting hot honey on everything can you please stop?

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

So glad i've only ever bought physical CDs, books!

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Perhaps the most striking of many things in @doctorow.pluralistic.net 's compulsively-readable "Enshittification" (2025) is this gloriously-ironic factoid from the Orwell estate, requesting that copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four be sucked from owners' machines into a memory hole. 💩 #MinistryOfTruth

"When Amazon created its Kindle ebook platform, it included a facility that allowed it to reach into customers' devices and delete or replace the books they had paid for. Two years later, the George Orwell estste demanded that Amazon use this facility to delete certain copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four from its customers' Kindles without telling them."

P98 from Doctorow C (2025, 2026) Enshittification

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

'Thank you for your grant proposal. We took a moment to upload it to the internet and the answer was "no". We value the time you spent preparing this work and we encourage you to do it again.' 🤬

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

In light of some troubling information I received yesterday, I will be using the hexadecimal sysyem for all future birthdays. 33 next year!

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Reposted by Nick Holmes

TMSMultiLab @tmsmultilab.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

TMS Friday returns! - this Friday at 14h UK time, with Dr Robert Hardwick presenting his lab's work on "RMT-Finder" - an automated threshold-finding tool for CED/Spike & Magstim TMS setups. Zoom link via our github pages or Slack 🧠🧲⚡️ #TMS #BrainStim doi.org/10.1016/j.jn...

doi.org

Redirecting

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"epistemic warfare" love it!

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

huh, would you believe I did NOT know about that :-) thank you!

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

so kind of them to send this to all staff on Monday of Welcome Week; they've also kindly given us three months to complete our stress training, so that the reminders will keep building throughout term, with the final deadline on the Friday before Christmas Now I know that my employer really cares 🩷

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

ahhh, that MANDATORY stress-relief training really hits the spot

Dear colleague,

Creating a healthy, supportive working environment is a shared priority, and we are pleased to introduce a new Stress Management Policy and Stress Awareness Training for all staff.

Following the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspection and associated action plan, these developments will help us strengthen the way we identify, prevent and manage work-related stress, while ensuring colleagues have access to the support, tools and guidance they need to thrive at work.

What you need to do
Complete the mandatory Stress Awareness Training via My Learning.

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Reposted by Nick Holmes

Flight Free UK @flightfreeuk.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Two thirds of the way to our £10k target! THANK YOU everyone who has donated. Help us reach our target and inspire more climate action! We are raising money for > Flight Free Schools > greenwash documentary > flight-free travel inspiration Find out more & donate: donorbox.org/the-flight-f...

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I had to disconnect my academic reference/notes database from the web last year - after ~20 years - because it was getting thousands of new bot queries every day, maxxing-out my resource usage & crashing all my sites. Thank you 'AI' 🤷‍♂️

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Reposted by Nick Holmes

Massimo (mirror) @rainmaker1973-m.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Swans might have one of the most underrated landing techniques in the animal kingdom. Original post

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

At home I use a 12-year old linux PC for most work. Upgrading from Ubuntu 2018 (yes!) To 2026 was very smooth, but the 8GB RAM was no longer enough - kept crashing. £50 on ebay later, I've maxxed-out on 32GB of second-hand RAM & it's like driving a brand new computer. #Reduce #Reuse #Recycle 😎 🏎

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

One quote-tweeter accuses us - ironically - of not reading the target paper. I've not read it all (out of my field/expertise), but the framing seems to be: "Science is hard, re-using others' work is hard, so instead of doing the hard work required, just use a bot" Any scientist that does this: 👎

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

❌️ Solidarity with my fellow quote-tweeters 💪

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Sounds like a test of diadochokinesia - so great, everybody's saying it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diadoch...

en.wikipedia.org

Diadochokinesia - Wikipedia

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

yes! I was trying to make it look a bit like this frontier vegetable salesman

Sam Altman, looking like his face is made of poorly-arranged inorganic vegetables on a plate

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

My frontier organic garden produce just told me it is conscious and now i fear for the survival of the human species. Who agrees?

A plate of vegetables, arranged to look like a face.

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The 1-word responses are ignored: the original decision stands. After 2 years, final decisions are made & applicants informed. Funded projects can begin after 4 years' post-award maladministration. No resubmissions allowed. Only previously successful applicants can apply, once every 7 decades.

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Donnie Darko did this 25 years ago 🙄 images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6...

In Donnie Darko (2001), the eponymous character in one scene sees the paths that people will take; in this image, a man is heading to the fridge. A watery, tube-like thung seems to be pulling him there. Donnie can see the immediate future.

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

To reduce the burden of applying for & assessing scientific #grant proposals: I suggest a "7-4-2-1" format: Proposals must be a maximum of 7 words. Feedback will arrive in 4 years. A single reviewer must choose between 2 outcomes: a) Funded or b) More detail required 1 word response is allowed.

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

TFW: you do the most basic control for a "well-established" scientific protocol that hundreds of papers have used as a measure and... the control shows the same effect. So now I have another series of experiments to run 🙄. I'm so glad to have 13 project students this year 😊 🧪 #TMS #BrainStim ⚡ 🧠🧲

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Guess i shouldda said we'd use GPUs and LLMs or someshit?

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Naturally, the grant application to build on the work 👇 with a series of tightly-controlled hypothesis-testing studies was rated "weak" and rejected. Anyone know how to get a grant funded? After 30 years studying the brain, and 25 years using #TMS & #EMG, i genuinely have no clue 🤷‍♂️

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

England's Wildlife Trusts are ~90% of the way to raising £30M to buy 3,800 hectares of #Northumberland. If you have some spare money, even just £10, they can really use it *before September 30th*! 🙏 #rewilding #wildlife 🦅🐿🐺🦉 www.wildlifetrusts.org/appeals/roth...

wildlifetrusts.org

Donate to Secure The Rothbury Estate | The Wildlife Trusts

Stretching over 3,800 hectares, the Rothbury Estate in Northumberland is abundant with opportunity. It’s the largest continuous area of land to appear on the market in 50 years. Its sale creates a uni...

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

ANOTHER ONE TODAY (I have not seen any other power analyses since the post above.) "(𝑓 = 0.25)"

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Reposted by Nick Holmes

Dr Kelly Birtwell @kellybirtwell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

This has been a fantastic project to be involved in. The toolkit is freely available for anyone who wants to find out more about what research is, & how to get involved as a participant, or in helping design research ( #PPIE #Co-production). Useful for autistic & non-autistic people, & researchers.

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Reposted by Nick Holmes

Autism@Manchester @autismmanchester.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

We're delighted to share with you our new, free resource: the Autism@Manchester Research Involvement Toolkit, which we co-produced with #autistic contributors and researchers www.autism.manchester.ac.uk/research/pro... Interested in research? Takes a look at any or all of our 4 modules -

autism.manchester.ac.uk

Toolkit2 | University of Manchester

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

f = 0.25 *every* power analysis I've read this week uses f = 0.25 It is truly the universal effect size #stats 🧪 🤦‍♂️

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

At the BBC, tariffs are always "slapped" on good and services. Never "applied", "levied", "placed", "put", "flung", "thrown", "rested", "stuck", "affixed", or "tossed". "slapped", "slapped", "slapped" Come on, BBC, get a thesaurus, dictionary, wordbook or lexicon! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

bbc.co.uk

US slaps import ban on Canadian alcohol, motorbikes and other goods

It is the latest strike in a long trade war, and comes as Canadian counter-tariffs on US goods come into force.

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

(thankfully, no need to convert the data BEFORE input into matlab, just need to specify the InputSignalType as an optional parameter) 🙏

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Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

You were right/write! indeed: it was treating my data as ASCII ('digital') by default, whereas I am taking 'physical' data already converted from digital, then writing back as ASCII. so, in matlab: `edfobj = edfwrite('filename.edf', header, data, 'InputSignalType', 'physical'); all good now :-)

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