I read Vigilance by Robert Bennett a couple years ago and thought 'this is kinda over the top and a little unrealistic'

I owe that book an apology

it’s First Communion Sunday at Mass which means it’s time for my favorite thing in the world: TINY FORMALWEAR

The more realistic startups that offer to engineer your baby with a cancer of your choosing aren't getting funded though

Pride Flag

THREAD

All the Colours of the Rainbow

At Altmetric we look for where research has been shared and cited online. In addition to granting us permanent entry into Pride Month, the Altmetric rainbow matches different sources of attention to research that we find. What are they all?

Let's go:
1/24

Which output node is the burrito bowl

Would like to dedicate this post to the people who yelled at me for giving the Sabres 58% to make the playoffs in my season preview this past summer.

If you're gonna make something by Naomi Novik into a movie its gotta go Scholomance -> Spinning Silver -> Uprooted -> Temeraire

They Pay $34 for Burgers. Should Their Child Care Be Free? A free preschool center opening in one of New York City’s wealthiest neighborhoods raises questions about Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vow to expand universal child care.

yes. they pay more based on income in taxes for the thing that is then “free” for everyone. this is how public services work

@nygenome.org is hiring Genomic AI Fellows! (fancy postdoc positions) If you're interested in working at the interface of AI and genomics in a great environment please apply at: jobs.silkroad.com/NYGenome/Car...

That's about as safe as it gets, the bike lane up 8th is pretty well protected and there's very little conflict with cars in the circle if you wait for the lights

If all goes according to plan, in a few hours, a crew of astronauts will begin a journey that will take them on a loop around the moon. Here's a video that NASA put together to help people visualize the journey through space, first orbiting the earth before looping around the moon and flying home 🔭

this is so stupid. you simply cannot do behavioural research this way. the core question here is how humans act in this situation and at the risk of having to explain a methodological point so basic it should never have to be said, you need humans for that

I thought it was neat

sorry i never responded to your email, i didn't want to and then i forgot

I did a bunch of teaching as a postdoc at NYU alongside the contract faculty and so I think they have a decent deal and I totally get why they're striking cause it's worse than the deal they'd have gotten 20 years ago

As far as teaching gigs go the pays decent and the benefits are good but it's not as good as tenure track pay & benefits (even ignoring tenure) imo

The model here isn't adjunctification so much as 'were an elite school with real professors but we don't want them to have tenure anymore'

A bunch of the contract faculty are in NYU faculty housing for example

They're not adjuncts, they're 'clinical assistant professors' (NYU does have some adjuncts but they're mostly professionals teaching limited scope in professional schools to the best of my knowledge)

NYU's contract faculty all (or most? I'm not sure about all) get benefits

It's not a bad gig as far as teaching goes, it just isn't as good as tenure track

I just heard back from the reporter, and I am genuinely speechless. Is “we don’t care” the business model?

My motivation for perservering as a statistician even when it feels bleak comes from Ian Gordon: sometimes the best we can do is make sure that the research that gets done is better than it would have been if we weren't involved in it

Check out the newest work from our, from Fabricio Nicola @fabricionicola.bsky.social on mouse jumping and spinal cell types.

Excellent collab with @vulcnethologist.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Recent is "this was new when I first proposed this project 8 years ago"

At this point I think my peer review has gotten to the point where I couldn't be replaced by an LLM, but I could be replaced with copy-and-paste 'The authors should add their statistical methods to the manuscript and carefully identify where and how they aggregate data'

It's hard to properly benchmark for a bunch of reasons and leaking information into the test set is very common

Pretty much all of the network inference models that condition on some known network structure (which are the ones that get used for biology)

Pretty much the same reason all the gene regulatory network inference models don't work as well as people think they do

New paper showing that much of the apparent success of protein language models in predicting mutational effects is a mirage: These models mostly memorize sites. 1/
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to share this preprint that describes my latest work on using GPUs to accelerate processing of RNA-seq data.

The title says it all: "RNA-seq analysis in seconds using GPUs" now on biorxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... and github github.com/pachterlab/k...

Figure 1 shows they key result