Long time no post! I’ll restart blogging by posting about some science and meta-science I recently read about. This post is about the sciency parts. Echolocating bats A study in PLoS Biology about echolocating bats found that the bats move their ears in a way that enhances the acoustic cues they need for localizing sounds.… Read More Recent science findings
Two very different articles I read recently made me think – both essentially question the fundamental approaches of current neuroscience. One is a preprint on biorxiv by Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording called ‘Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?‘, and the other is an essay by Robert Epstein entitled ‘The empty brain‘. The first paper‘s… Read More Neuroscientists – take this!
I wrote this for the new blog of my graduate school, go check it out at gsnmunich.wordpress.com!
I came across a few articles yesterday centered around pay gaps between men and women. This is the 21st century, and still, women are not paid the same as men. 13.9%! From this number, the Fawcett Society also calculates the Equal Pay Day – the day of the year from which onwards women effectively work for… Read More Pay gap musings
For the second time in a row, I attended the interdisciplinary college, a spring school/workshop/conference medley, which again brought together students and experts from psychology, cognition, artificial intelligence, robotics all the way to neuroscience. This year’s topic was transitions and transformations – dynamic interactive systems. The format was up to 5 simultaneous courses, which mostly… Read More IK 2016
In a time where BigData (whatever that means) becomes more and more prevalent, the ability to find meaning in data by visualising it is a great asset. Indeed, it is something that I continuously try to learn and improve, and I’ll tell you about some inspiring visualisations as well as some lessons I have learnt on the… Read More Data visualisation
I came across a review for Randall Munroe’s book called Thing Explainer, thought it sounded good, bought it, and yes, it’s fun, instructive and hilarious! In it, he explains complicated things in simple words, or in his description: ‘things are explained in the style of Up Goer Five, using only drawings and a vocabulary of the… Read More Up goer five, or how to write in simple words
Ten days ago, I spent most of my weekend on twitter – because I was following #OpenCon, the twitter stream that kept coming from the OpenCon 2015, a conference on open science/data/access/education help in Brussels. They also had a live webcast, but for some reason Gema did not allow this to be viewed in Germany, so… Read More #OpenCon highlights
Here’s the last post from my SfN experience – poster presenting on Wednesday afternoon. Many friends and colleagues I met had already told me beforehand that they would not be there anymore, so I did not expect huge crowds. Nevertheless, I was pretty busy from 1-3 pm. Thanks for everyone who came by, and special… Read More Poster presenting and leaving
All day, I wandered among the posters whenever I could, and indeed learnt some cool stuff about the differential processing of external and self-generated vestibular systems, a topic very dear to my heart! However, I’d like to tell you about the panel I attended over lunch, because this issue is important: ‘Proactive strategies to increase… Read More Tuesday highlights