manes

This is vital. Writing helps us think. So many students are saying they turn to LLMs because they don’t know what to say, and need to hear that not knowing is normal as one starts to write.

Putting aside the ethnonationalism of this speech, the irony is that the Trump administration is the epitome of destroying rather than building. No political movement has ever shown more contempt for America or less vision for what it could be.

Naturalistic Movie Viewing Reveals a Distributed Network Supporting Audiovisual Speech Processing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.26.762007v1

Muscular and compact units of trouble. 

Oh hell yes, I'll take it! Wordle 1,957 2/6 ⬜⬜⬜🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

One thing that has genuinely shocked me over the past year is how many faculty are now using LLMs for nearly every part of their jobs. Not as tools to assist their thinking, but to offload the entire job itself. 1/7

Hey at least I’m not a woman on the internet (with a PhD). The sexism just burns. Sorry no alt text at this moment. Heading into a meeting. I’ll try to do it later.

I'm beyond excited to deliver this public lecture on What Makes Us Human this Friday, especially because it pays tribute to three brilliant women: @melaniemitchell.bsky.social @celiaheyes.bsky.social @aliciastoller.bsky.social Free to all! Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Ulugh Beg: prince, astronomer, and mathematician of the Timurid dynasty On October 27, 1449, Ulugh Beg, a Timurid prince, astronomer, and mathematician, died in Samarkand, marking the… #Akerix #AI #UlughBeg #TimuridDynasty https://akerix.com/on-this-day/10-27-ulugh-beg-1449 📷 Wikimedia Commons

What dimensions organize how we see social interactions? We learn them from 53,000+ human judgments of naturalistic social clips. They explain 2× the variance of pre-labeled annotations & better predict visual cortex, EBA, and pSTS New preprint w @lisik.bsky.social 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Plus, you couldn't pick three more generic gender-coded girl phrases.

Many comments on the great election victories in Brazil and Serbia state that the authorian right is in decline or that voters have rejected far-right authoritarianism. That is a wrong interpretation of what happened. Progressive movements mobilized and beat the authoritarian right. That's different

Here’s goofy Ted among the flowers. He’s going to be a calendar boy in January (among 200 others all year!) for the derpiest, most wonderful calendar ever - the National Great Pyrenees Rescue calendar.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who spared a thought for my country today, who amplified information about the coup d’état attempt, and worried about Brazil’s democratic future—the world’s democratic future. We won! Women won! The Amazon won! Young people won! Democracy won! Hope won!

Fifty years ago, McGurk & MacDonald dubbed the sound /ba/ onto a face mouthing /ga/ & 'most' people heard /da/. For the effect’s 50th anniversary, we surveyed 37 researchers in AV speech & multisensory perception: does McGurk still deserve its iconic status? 🧵

With 83% of the vote counted nationwide, Lula has stretched his lead to 2.8 million votes. That's a lead of 51.4% to 48.6%. That puts him on track for a victory that could be larger than his 1.8% win four years ago, which would be an immense comeback. He's even up in Minas Gervais now, by 0.6%.

Get fucked fash

Wait the #Ohio state #medical association endorsed the guy who stole money from #dementia patients over a #medical #doctor??? And these are people who are mandatory reporters of child sexual abuse…

48 years ago today Mark Mothersbaugh, with DEVO at El Mocambo in Toronto, Ontario, October 25, 1978 The band played a setlist that included cover songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones and their own songs like "Jocko Homo" and "Mongoloid." #punkrock #newwave #devo

If you've noticed a distinct dialect emerging in frontier AI models and struggled to understand what they're talking about, you're not crazy! We turned to psycholinguistics to investigate what makes the writing style so weird, and why this might be happening 🚨New preprint! 🧵

ImpactMediaFR: "The number of videos we have received showing the violence committed yesterday by far-right, neo-Nazi, and neo-fascist groups in several major French cities is STAGGERING. This is especially true in #Nice, where the accounts reaching us are SHOCKING. ..

Good Morning From The Drummer, My Friends.

Still needed to fulfill the undisclosed paid advertisement.

Holy cow! From nowhere! Wordle 1,952 2/6 ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Penne Lane

Barb will be missed. www.thetransmitter.org/evolution/re...

New paper alert! My PhD student Saija Niemi found out that short-term and longer-tern history biases are not always explained by the same underlying mechanism, as often assumed (at least for orientation judgments)! See paper for free: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... #visionscience

The final irony. Hundreds of articles ABOUT Jason Arday - fact-free, poor data analysis, often copying other people's work. A couple of articles BY Jason Arday - a few corrections, and still supported by academic publishers and peer review. Just tragic bias by our media

This piece by student journalist Naishu Vempali made me pump my fist in solidarity. I hope when I’m back teaching at UMass next year they take a class with me, where they can expect nothing but top quality human-grade feedback, interaction, and attention. dailycollegian.com/2026/10/chat...

Hate on billionaire industrial capital all you want but even in places where Democrats totally control state government, they are not making investments in the humanities in public higher ed.

Provocative new preprint examines 14 published meta-analyses claiming AI improves student learning and concludes... Not a single one provides a valid basis for its claims, citing widespread methodological flaws. osf.io/preprints/ed... Watch a webinar from yesterday about the findings:

A lot of things lining up right now. - Potential Dem wave election. - This ad going to close race states. - Vivek's ad against Acton defusing the "trans issues won this election" claim preemptively. - Talarico not supporting a trans sports ban - Polls showing anti-trans ads backfiring Good stuff.

There are a lot of problems with the push for three year degrees. The one I can’t get over is why would a young person hurry up to enter this labor market??? How do you sell that? www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

I feel seen

It's just a joke, it's just a joke, it's just a joke

Benny Feldman with the philosophy of language 🔥🔥🔥

I think it’s the latter. Looking at the crosstabs in that poll, Brown actually runs very slightly higher than Acton with Dems, with more undecided Indies. Vivek is doing worse with Republicans and more Independents have said “I’m not voting for this guy” than with Husted

What’s the relationship between different aspects of visual time perception? To address this question, I propose a classification in four clusters of twelve classic visual time phenomena. Comments/criticisms welcome, including by email. osf.io/preprints/ps...

We're just released our 17th Annual American Values Survey at @prri.org! There is a lot to unpack, but here are 6 major takeaways from me--especially how they pertain to the midterms. prri.org/research/dar...

Excited and proud to share this work, now published in PNAS. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... In this work, we identify neuromodulation as a high-dimensional reconfiguration signal that not only changes individual functional properties but also the statistical architecture linking them.