when a random saturday afternoon musing about geometric series ends up making me learn about dynamical systems, iterated maps and Julia sets... resulting images with no additional contex :D they are gorgeous. I can stare at them all night.
yup, that's what happened the one time I tried it too so no bueno
Yup, 100% on the same page. This semester I'm teaching a 600 student intro to cog psych lecture, and a small 7 person masters seminar. Performing is the right term for the first; although I also find myself enjoying that a ton too, but for completely different reasons.
Other folks who were surprised to find they enjoy teaching once they took a permanent faculty position? When I was younger I thought it's going to be a "necessary evil" part of being an academic. Research is still what wakes me up but I am surprised at how much I enjoy working with students
in the past week & I'm honestly looking forward to how their theses shape up. These are the moments that make me love my job, even if teaching is not my main driver. I hate the prep work for it, but I'm growing more and more fond of the actual interactions with students, both 1-to-1 and in seminars.
I supervise 3 bachelor theses per semester. Last time I was on sick leave; the one before was my first. At the time there was no information about me on the department website, so I got the students who didn't choose anyone. This time it's so different! I met 3 super bright and motivated students 1/
Yeah, I'm typically much more motivated to submit issues to public projects on github since it's open and you can also get a sense of whether it's common or something weird to your setup. Sending bug reports over email always feels like yelling into a void (even if a response comes).
Hi @cos.io thanks for the pointer and I have done this in the past. But the issues are so frequent nowadays that it will be quite tiresome to report them all. Judging from other threads around here, I am not alone in this
It is really unfortunate, because the work OSF does is important, but this has been my experience too over the past year. And it seems to get more unstable over time. OSF was never fast and responsive but it used to be fairly reliable at least.
I just had another weird experience - I click on a link from a paper to OSF, I can see all the files, but then I try to download them - "Unexpected error. You have no permission to perform this action". Two minutes later and several refreshes waiting for a page to load, it downloads 🤷 @cos.io
Join our lab in Geneva, as a postdoc working on #workingmemory, with both Jarrod Lewis-Peacock and myself !
Dr. Vergauwe and Dr. Lewis Peacock are an great mentors and scientists. I highly recommend Postdocing with them in Dr. Vergauwe's lab. A great opportunity!
Last year I was studying Group Theory just for fun but I never saw any use for it in my math psych work. Until now, which to my surprise proved not only useful but crucial in a problem I’m working on. when kids ask “when am I going to use any of this” in class the proper response is “you never know”
A preview of something fun coming up soonish - when are signal detection models or sets of random variables shift-representable?
Despite the already high bar, this brand new video by @3blue1brown.com is my favorite to date by far. What a beautiful lesson in building curiosity and intuition.
Not sure if that's the intended answer on this Captcha "Pick all creatures that can shelter in this item", but it's the one I'm going with
"What crisis? It's always been this bad! Stop the unhelpful criticism!"
What a strange take. Hopefully it will become less strange as I read the actual full paper.
Might be time for my 4th rewatch of BG. Every 5 years is a good rhythm
First time? Lucky you. I wish I could watch it for the first time. Though with my poor memory and the fact that it’s been at least 5 years since my 3rd rewatch, it might be time to do another
My favorite similar experience is when I hold onto an idea long enough to write it down only to find myself thinking the next day "I swear this made sense yesterday".
Very neat. I've been looking for an easy way to do the same in Quarto posts and this seems like the perfect solution.
My favorite move is the initial preparatory message "I will try to get back to you in two weeks after..." only to follow up 3 hours later with "nvm, i'm done". Much better than the inverse which I used to do. So now the wait is either expected or is replaced with a nice surprise :)
Anecdotally they are widely spread. There's also been some recent surveys published in Nature that show a widespread mental-health crisis especially among postdocs and junior faculty, who are also disproportionally burdeoned by review request just by numbers alone (many fewer senior faculty)
Why do people ghost referee requests? I’m sure there are other reasons, but burn-out, stress and depression are common ones (speaking from experience).
As another professor with ADHD and way too many commitments, I have implicitly trained all my collaborators that my response time is a bi-modal distribution of "I get excited and drop everything to do it right away" or, you know, the other extreme.
This experience also stresses how important it is even more than before to learn proper tools for collaborating on code and version control. In my case the entire project has a github repository, so the entire history is traceable and documented both for transparency, but also for safety
And this is just one small part. It helped me formalize some of the ideas which I bounced back and forth as a conversation. And other colleagues are seeing similar results. Here's just one example from a post yesterday by a mathematician on reddit: www.reddit.com/r/math/comme...
For example, section 7 of this ongoing draft was entirely generated by Claude Opus 4.6 agent in a single prompt in VS Code copillot: venpopov.com/logit-probit...
It designed the questions, the simulations, ran the code, reviewed the output and iterated until ready. And I *agree* with its decisions
But more importantly, this intellectual work it does also enriches me as a scientist - it exposes me to ideas and techniques I was not aware of, even though they might be standard fare in other fields. We are way beyond the stochastic parrots of 2023.
