Luigi Petrucco

@vigji
4 Followers
153 Following
98 Posts
postdoc in systems neuroscience at Iurilli lab
in IIT Rovereto (Italy). Former PhD student and zebrafishologist in Portugues lab in Munich.
Websitehttps://vigji.github.io
Google Scholarhttps://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FQDeRWQAAAAJ&hl

@yoginho I appreciate your blog post as it provides context to why you're so frustrated. I'm fine with calling people out, but the manner in which you did it I take issue with. Shouting at someone in repeated posts claiming their worldview is dangerous and delusional and without merit, even if you're correct (!), is not a fruitful way to start a conversation. It's human behavior to avoid such an attack. And even as a passive observer it's unpleasant. So I'm calling you out ;)

And to be sure, I wouldn't care if you were a troll or kook but your ideas are fascinating and I want people to pay attention. I listened to you on Brain Inspired (after this exchange) and it was one of my favorite episodes of the 50 or so I've listened to. I loved in particular the part about limitations of dynamical systems thinking for brains/organisms, and the idea of organismal closure. I'm very sympathetic to your critique of computationalism, too, particularly because functions the brain carries out are ill defined and much of its function is almost surely not algorithmic, in my opinion.

In the podcast, however, you acknowledge the utility of the computational approach for exploring many things the brain does and appreciate that we can (and maybe already have) achieve great insights with that framework. The problem is that some proponents started to confuse the map for the territory, as it were. Much more even handed than this exchange with Blake, and much more likely to get people to listen and discuss!

@NicoleCRust

I love how Springer-Nature has hopped so unapologetically onto the grift train that they are trying to sell unframed "posters" (read: silly certificates of merit) to their authors for 189 bucks.

If you are drafting figures for a scientific paper or presentation, remember that https://scidraw.io/ exists: a repository of free SVG cartoons for science.

#SciDraw is supported by the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre – @SWC_Neuro

All content on SciDraw is shared under creative commons license (CC-BY) unless stated otherwise.

#inkscape #SVG #science

SciDraw | Scientific Drawings

SciDraw is an open repository of science drawings. Browse and contribute!.

In new research now out in Neural Networks, we introduce supervised pruning of vision-DNNs to improve prediction of human similarity judgments or multivariate brain activity. The method identifies those nodes (or feature maps) whose pruning produces an embedding space that improves the prediction of human behavior. Relevance of image elements is indicated via heatmaps. Led by Priya Tarigopula. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2023.08.049
Why Insect Memories May Not Survive Metamorphosis

The reshuffling of neurons during fruit fly metamorphosis suggests that larval memories don’t persist in adults.

Quanta Magazine

Is Nature a predatory journal?

- humongous publication fees
- poor reproducibility
- aggressive marketing strategies

It checks out in my book!

#impactfactor #science #journal

In which Adam Mastroianni argues that psychology is so poorly theorised than even outright fraud by hyperprolific research stars has causes no loss to our collective knowledge - almost like 100s of papers with 10,000s of citations don't represent true knowledge anyway

"The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies", he says in a memorable phrase. Meaning, "everyone knows that many studies don't replicate, but exactly which ones doesn't seem to matter"

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss

1/

I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is

The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies

Experimental History
I'm reading this booklet on the University of Padua, founded 801 years ago, when a group of students and professors (apparently unaccompanied by management) migrated from the University of Bologna in search of greater freedoms. I'm fascinated by the measures that the University took to be "universal" (i.e. to deserve its name). And by the woman who broke through centuries of prohibition to make it truly universal. (1/N)
Introducing Neuropixels Ultra, a new probe with >10x site density: an implantable voltage camera capturing complete planar images of neurons' electrical fields in vivo! ⬆️ spike sorting yield, ⬆️ detection of small fields, and ⬆️ cell type identification.🧵
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.23.554527

barely a day goes by when I don't think about @jennybryan's excellent tweet:

"All models are wrong, so why not start with one you actually understand?"