Another wonderful lab dinner in the books and a big welcome to our new graduate student Laura!

Thank you to EnvisionBOX (@wimpouw.bsky.social, @jamestrujillo.bsky.social, @babajideowoyele.bsky.social, and @sarkadava.bsky.social) for hosting an excellent summer school in Amsterdam on computer vision and advanced multimodal techniques. We learned a lot and had a great time!

This is the beauty and wonder that we are being told has no value—or is even antithetical to American values. Well they're wrong, as anyone can see if they simply take a moment to imagine, truly imagine, what superpowers science gives us to see into worlds where we could otherwise never tread.

In an age of triumphant managerialism, we must remember that giving researchers support, autonomy, and freedom results in miraculous things. Another point is that the government required AT&T to invest in basic research to avoid being treated as a monopoly. 1517.substack.com/p/why-bell-l...

Autonomic physiological coupling of the global fMRI signal www.nature.com/articles/s41... "The global fMRI signal is a substantial component of the arousal response governed by the autonomic nervous system."

SaveNSF is a coalition of concerned scientists and allies who are working to save funding for scientific grants through the NSF. The mission is to support and advocate for the continuation of vital research and innovation. Join: www.savensf.com

Federal research funding cut? Don’t stop now. Two quick-response grants can help: Spencer Foundation – bridge funding for education researchers: bit.ly/4jvA7oi RWJF – racial & Indigenous health equity research support: bit.ly/44VUJ4D #SRCD #ChildDevelopment

Ever wonder what a neural network would look like in a novel organism w/o selection for specific structure and function? New #preprint with morphological, behavioral, electrophysiological, and transcriptomic analysis of a new kind of Xenobot with a nervous system: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

@garyseconomics.bsky.social The key message is growing inequality drives poverty - agreed. But, what's the 'why care' for those harder to reach circles you mentioned? It feels like they need to hear a self-interested - or macro hook like (e.g. cpag.org.uk/news/cost-ch...). What's the best hook?

1. @alisongopnik.bsky.social, Cosma Shalizi, James Evans and myself have a new piece in Science on "AI" Large Models, pushing back against much of the collective wisdom about what they can and can't do. Official below, unpaywalled at henryfarrell.net/large-ai-mod... . So why this now?

I want the grad students funded and protected. I want the campuses vibrant and bustling. I want our society to understand that the well-being of scientists is critical infrastructure for the future. I want science culture to finally admit that too.

This is a room where we turn very modest salaries and budgets (and lots of coffee) into new knowledge, life-saving innovations, and technology that feeds business growth. It's literally the loom that spins hay into gold but these numpties are suddenly worried about the cost of hay.

The whole "$1 NIH dollar generates $2.50 in output" sells science wildly short. Scientific discovery and technological development is the foundation on which our entire society is built -- and that includes all the businesses that operate within it. The throughlines are shorter than you think: 1/n

This framing is their framing, and NYT took the bait. The correct and accurate framing is: “Deep cuts to medical research threatens progress on cancer and heart disease research, costs the economy $80B, and threatens 300,000 jobs across red and blue states”

Found this gem in an arcane NSF doc...key to know: The Constitution and law SUPERSEDES exec orders! "In the event of a conflict between policies issued at a lower tier versus policies issued at a higher tier, the higher tier policy will take precedence" nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/Resear...

once again thinking about this passage from David Lynch's book Catching the Big Fish

Beautiful blog post from @psychologytoday.com on our recent @pnas.org paper!

Ouch!

Happy Dinner for One viewing to all who celebrate, same procedure as every year! youtu.be/5n7VI0rC8ZA?...

Researchers tracked babies’ heart rates and found a decelerating heart rate was associated with the production of words, showing that the autonomic nervous system, which regulates heart rate, interacts with speech production. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Look maybe our research subjects cry or soil themselves at relatively high rates but at least we in #DevPsychSky are never left wondering whether babies are faking the data by asking ChatGPT #SoBlessed

And I’ll point out that in the case of success stories like Bell Labs or many tech research shops, the advances did not come from big vision but anarchic autonomy, researchers told, “Do whatever you want.” The breakthroughs were rarely in anticipated directions. 8/n

First paper from the lab is officially published in PNAS! We demonstrate ongoing fluctuations in heart rate coincide with vocal production and word formation in 24-mo-old infants. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 1/4

Howdy everyone! I’m an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston. My lab focuses on how the systems within and around infants change over development to support the production of language. For the latest and greatest about my lab’s progress please follow: BorjonLab.bsky.social