Moritz Negwer

@moritz_negwer@mstdn.science
988 Followers
2.6K Following
13.8K Posts

Neuroscientist by training, tinkerer by nature. Now scanning transparent mouse brains with light-sheet microscopes. Microscopy, clearing, data crunching, tinkering.

Working as postdoc at @radboudumc with Nael Nadif Kasri and Corette Wierenga, looking at neuron-distribution differences in mouse models of ASD.

Married, father of two. Toots in English, German, Dutch. Boosts a lot.

opted into tootfinder for full-text indexing. Check it out: https://www.tootfinder.ch/index.php?join=1

The Coffee Conundrum — 40% German

I can't imagine Germany without Kaffee und Kuchen, just as I can't imagine Britain without tea. Unlike the British though, Germans aren't judged on how they make their favourite hot beverage. Is this why coffee in Germany can be so hit & miss?

40% German
@spiralganglion @catsalad @fraggle Zwischenablagenverunsicherung (or Einfügeangst) might work
The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver.
There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper.
His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t. 
His name was Peter Putnam.
He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr,
and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech,
were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.
“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,”
Wheeler said in 1991.
And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.
https://nautil.us/finding-peter-putnam-1218035/
Finding Peter Putnam

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

Nautilus

🎓 Today at @SURF, during the Digital Sovereignty course for board members, directors, and decision-makers in education and research, we had the pleasure of speaking with @Karlitschek and @fabricemous from @nextcloud!

We explored visions, asked deep questions, and learned from their experience. We’re moving into position to have the right conversations and be in control of IT 💚👌

💻 Digitalization is not the heart ❤️ of organizations, but the lifeblood

#DigitalSovereignty #Nextcloud #OpenSource

anyone need some maps or cad done remotely? i need to make some money lmao

If you drive in #France and suddenly see something milky on the roads, it's not a new farmers' protest. It's called "lait de chaux".
This #whitewash consisting of lime and water is a try to protect the bitumen in the roads from melting due to more and more heatwaves: https://www.franceinfo.fr/environnement/evenements-meteorologiques-extremes/vagues-de-chaleur-canicules/canicule-du-lait-de-chaux-repandu-sur-les-routes-pour-eviter-la-chaleur-du-bitume_7326369.html The streets are about 10 degrees cooler due to the white colour.
This week-end, we will have up to 37°C.

#climateDiary #ClimateAdaption #ClimateCrisis #white #colours #heatwave #road #roadSafety

Canicule : du lait de chaux répandu sur les routes pour éviter la chaleur du bitume

Dans l'Allier, un mélange d'eau et de chaux est répandu sur les routes pour faire baisser la température du bitume. Les opérations ont commencé avant la vague de chaleur du vendredi 20 juin.

Franceinfo

"The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse."

Great post on the impact of GenAI on students' ability to learn how to write and therefore how to think

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-death-of-the-student-essayand

The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition

One professor's reflections on the end of an era, as AI tools such as ChatGPT have murdered the student essay (RIP). Here's why that threatens the future of human cognition—and how to save ourselves.

The Garden of Forking Paths

A beautiful pair of Solitary Rugose Coral fossils.
Eroded into perfect cross-sections, you can see their internal structures.
County Donegal, Ireland.

Cormacscoast.com walking tours

#wildatlanticway #walkingtours #discoverireland #keepdiscovering #fossil #irishfossils #coral #rugosecoral #Ireland

It’s live: The Anti-Autocracy Handbook- The Scholars’ Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding. The need for this is self-evident given current events around the world and in particular in the U.S. The team of authors includes experts from relevant fields and several authors with first-hand experience of living under autocracy.
 
a pdf of the handbook is freely available for download at the short link https://sks.to/autocracy and there is an associated Wiki that will continue to be expanded and updated.
 
Please share!
The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars' Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding

The Anti-Autocracy Handbook is a call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to scholars navigating the growing global trend of democratic backsliding and autocratization, in particular in the U.S. To this end, it sets out how autocracies often follow a common playbook, built around the “3 Ps”: populism, polarization, and post-truth. Leaders present themselves as voices of “the people” against “corrupt elites”, inflame societal divisions, and undermine facts to avoid accountability. This leads to a cascade of dangers for scholarship, including censorship, restrictions on funding and research collaboration, and even violence. The Trump administration serves as a contemporary example, with policies that curtail international scientific cooperation, revoke research grants, and suppress studies related to public health, climate change and minority issues. Because open inquiry and dissent are central to science and academia—qualities antithetical to authoritarian control—academia is often among the first targets of autocrats. To help scholars resist authoritarian developments, the handbook highlights both historic and contemporary measures aimed at attacking scholars, their institutional environments, and their scholarship. The handbook also sets out a framework for action based on personal risk level—low, medium, high, or extreme. This is designed to help scholars think about their own risk and purposefully choose actions in line with it. The handbook considers tools for enhancing digital safety and highlights the importance of ongoing documentation, preserving imperilled data, and creating distributed archives as a defence against erasure. It also calls on scholars to tell their stories—publicly or anonymously—to inspire others, maintain accountability and preserve a historical record. Accompanying the handbook is a living wiki that will continue to incorporate new developments and provide updates on global efforts by scholars to push back against authoritarianism and safeguard the democratic foundations that enable free inquiry.

Zenodo

Heute war ein Schulfest. Da gab es einen Quizstand. Eins underer Kinder (9) wollte schummeln, kam zu mir und bat, ob ich "schnell bei ChatGPT" nachfragen könne nach der Frage, ob die Legislative in den USA im Weißen Haus oder im Capitol sitze. Danach folgten weitere solcher Fragen. (Edit: Das Quiz warn nicht für 9jährige, sondern einfach ein Stand auf dem Hof, wo vor allem größere Kinder waren, aber kleinere Kinder turnten da rum und wollten auch mitmachen).

Wir haben später nochmal über diese Situation gesprochen. Ich habe gefragt, warum es nach ChatGPT gefragt hat. Die Erklärung war, dass der Lehrer bei einer Frage vorher mit den Kindern die Lösung mit Google und ChatGPT "gesucht" habe und nur ChatGPT hat sie richtig gewusst.

Kleine Anekdote, aber da steckt viel drin. Ich habe nochmal erklärt, was eine Suche mit Google eigentlich ist und das Google keine Antworten liefert bzw. eigentlich liefern sollte und dass sie eventuell ein Versuch einer KI gesehen haben, die dafür bekannt ist, besonders schlecht zu sein. Aber auch, dass ChatGPT gar keine Wissensdatenbank ist und halluzinieren kann. Das Kind war stark irritiert davon, weil im Sprachalltag von Kinder, Schule, Medien ChatGPT quasi als Superpower imaginiert wird und überhaupt nicht klar ist, dass ChatGPT nicht dafür da ist, um Wissensfragen zu beantworten.

Wir konnten das jetzt klären, aber sonst wird das wohl nicht geklärt. Das macht mich nicht besonders glücklich. Ich habe in den letzten Jahren nun schon mehrfach kurze Medienunterrichtseinheiten an den Schulen der Kinder zu Computer-nahen Themen gemacht. Aber das ist eben nur ein Tropfen auf den heißen Stein. Das läuft wirklich extrem schief gerade. Und hier ist auch nochmal eine Alterslinie erkennbar: Je jünger die Kinder, desto selbstverständlicher sind für sie LLMs in der Lebensumgebung, während die älteren Kinder sie als "neu" auch eher skeptisch betrachten.

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A beautiful pair of Solitary Rugose Coral fossils.
Eroded into perfect cross-sections, you can see their internal structures.
County Donegal, Ireland.

Cormacscoast.com walking tours

#wildatlanticway #walkingtours #discoverireland #keepdiscovering #fossil #irishfossils #coral #rugosecoral #Ireland