I wouldn’t have wound up in neuroscience without “history of the human sciences” and “race and empire in Victorian England” as well as “algebraic combinatorics” and “complex systems”, all 400/500 level seminars (and no neuroscience).. the idea that 20yolds know their interest is IMO overblown
That’s the (historical) British system, and the problem is early specialization.. I couldn’t have completed majors in both Math and History with that model.. I spent my first year at the Residential College at UMich (no grades) and despite an emphasis on interdisciplinary study, I had to move to LSA
It’s worse than that for trainees.. when NYSPI got suspended one of the most talented researchers I know left to go into clinical because of repayment on the T32s.. the most recent blizzard hit and the grants actually cancelled were all training.. I’m partially early but there are large hurdles
I remember visiting for the first time for a grad student/post-doc only conference (iSLC) and all of the grad students owned houses and I was like 🤯
Pittsburgh
I will respectfully submit that you should push in the opposite direction, doing intermediate programs in STEM is (more) accessible, programs in language not so much.. you have success in both fields.. I’m curious why you think the STEM side is more important than the language (or other arts)
I’m very interested in the book, do not see a buyable version through Apple (given our family shared library that’s the route to go.. took about 5 years for Cyprian Broodbank’s ‘The Making of the Middle Sea” to become available (physical copy weighed about 6.5 lbs))
There’s something about those 90s single roll combat games (Warlords also comes to mind) that make initiating combat vaguely terrifying even when on paper you’re in total control
You might want to also check out the work of Amelia Frank, who also died way too young
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_...
Not just Hegseth, pentagon failed their 8th audit in a row and is now saying the target for passing is 2028
Why do you think the Pentagon has any idea what they actually have? This is an organization that’s managed to lose track of nuclear weapons on multiple occasions (not even talking broken arrow)
The thing I’m most thankful for over the past year is that both my RAs who applied to PhD programs got, and accepted, good offers.. and that our current student defended her proposal today
I played one in a few tournaments, probably lost a thousand dollars in value.. the beta and unlimited cards are not durable
I’m sorry if I put that flippantly, my point is appreciating the biases from a normal distribution assumption usually require some bespoke familiarity
Actual wet(ish) lab experience, or better phrased primary data collection, even if you aren’t good at it, puts a foundation in place for understanding how and why we have experimental error in a way that understanding the Gaussian vs the Gamma distributions does not
Seiko DF-1000
When you already have a Seiko Dayfiler DF-1000?
As someone who wrote the majority of my thesis on the train between Boston and New York, I’m deeply sympathetic.. I’d say turning off internet helps, but there’s something about progress occurring (you’ve reached New Haven!) whether one is getting anything done or not that is really hard to emulate
Au revoir Les enfants
Beyond grateful to be selected as a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow in Neuroscience! 🧠🤓
It takes a village, and this wouldn't be possible without my amazing team, mentees, mentors, collaborators and colleagues! Very excited to continue our work on the neuroscience of social learning. #SloanFellow
One major advantage of starting with LaTeX is that all of those decisions can be revisited easily, if you want WYSIWIG, LyX is open source and works pretty well
Until you start overfitting.. I don’t want to distract from your preparation, but have you looked at E.T. Jayne’s ‘Probability Theory’ or Aubrey Clayton’s ‘Bernoulli’s Fallacy”?
Indeed.. just to take luminance as an example (that crosses over).. with mice and circadian rhythms are they LD or DD, with monkeys I spend a month making sure the 5 colors I use are actually iso-luminant using a photometer, showing videos to people the answer is “we’ll just regress that out”
I’ve worked with rodents (SCN; circadian rhythms), awake behaving NHP (PPC/PFC; visual attention) and human psychiatric populations (social attention).. I think the main issue is not theory, but experimental consistency, which make comparisons difficult (and I agree crossover conferences is a start)
I can see if I still have the microfiche printouts or sufficiently detailed notes from 2003.. but I’d also look more at newspapers and broadsheets.. we as a lab have been looking at narrative recall, and are finding frequency of summary sentences is correlated with length of recall duration
Are you correcting for length of argument? I’d expect the frequency of a summary sentence would follow a power law.. ie. In a 5 paragraph essay, you get 5.. in a five chapter book, you get 5.. has that drifted so much?(Having reviewed the London papers on the relief of Gen. Gordon, I don’t think so)
You’re not going to cover credit assignment? I’ve always thought Fu and Anderson (2008) was an approachable framework..
I’ll note for vanity’s sake that we found neural correlates of that frame work in macaque parietal cortex
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17447083/
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
As someone who briefly worked as a copy editor, if you’re getting a rate these days of less than $5/page, it’s AI slop.. it’s a difficult job, and that hasn’t changed much over the years.. there’s a reason Ben Franklin became so rich because he produced such high quality printing proofs
Reminds me of the time I screwed up orienting a nifti file and got retinotopic maps on the frontal pole
One of my classmates, Sohrob Kazerounian, did his PhD with Steve then a postdoc with Schmidhuber.. they are familiar with each other’s work..
One thing I know they agree on is the under-appreciation of Shun’ichi Amari’s work
As a Steve PhD alum, and I’ve learned a ton from him (the amount of literature he expected is incredible, which I appreciate more as I get older).. I know he can be difficult to deal with, but I never really experienced it.. and trying to think about the brain under ART has been helpful
