Neuroscience PhD. Looking for a pharma/biotech job! Interested in EA, Alzheimer's prevention, exercise mimetic, lab animal welfare

Albany, NY
Joined November 2022
This is a good infographic. I thinks lot of people equate the sort of catastrophe that would destroy modern civilization with the actual extinction of the human species. I suspect that humans would rebound from catastrophes and rebuild civilization if given enough time.
Many don't seem to fully grok how much worse extinction is vs catastrophic risk. It makes sense EAs are focused on extinction risks. I asked ChatGPT to make a diagram. And BTW, AI is likely not conscious and there's a good chance we are the only intelligent life in our galaxy.
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We're flagging a case of cross-paper image reuse, submitted to pubpeer. The 2014 paper caption says the image shows "EGFP expression in pAcISUBC transfected BuMECs" pAcISUBC is a human insulin expression vector constructed in the 2014 paper that does not appear in 2013 paper.
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Greg Fitzgerald retweeted
I'm going through findings now from the relatively simple system I developed for finding image duplication. AI helps with screening. Just found one in a Nature Medicine paper (see video). Fig 1 is labeled human tumor and Fig 6 mouse xenograph tumor, so there seems to be issue..
We ran our image duplication detection system on 1,000 papers. The papers 1. have one author who has a retraction according to @RetractionWatch, 2. are not retracted, and 3. have no image-related @PubPeer comments. We use AI to screen findings & suppress false positives... (1/3)
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The Metascience Observatory's fetchpdf tool is really good at downloading scientific papers in a 100% legal manner! Helps if you are on an academic VPN or network, but it can get virtually anything that is open access. There are also options to download xml, html & SI/SM. 🔗👇
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I stand by my statement! This is the best tool for fetching full-text articles (and their supplementary materials/repos) ever made. :)
PSA: fetchpdf downloader Unlike other codes for downloading scientific papers on Github that have gone stale, I'm constantly updating this as APIs change!! @gregsfitzgerald says "I cooked" on this. Give it a try, and please lmk if it works for you => github.com/The-Metascience-O…
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We ran our experimental image analysis module on papers by the fraudster Eliezer Masliah, who was a high-status Alzheimer's researcher before his downfall. We found a bunch of things, but nothing Mu Yang and Matthew Schrag didn't already catch. Some visualizations are useful tho!
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Great work, @moreisdifferent and @MetascienceObs! It is amazing to see agents being used to improve metascience. :)
Vibecoded a simple system for detecting improper image re-use within a scientific paper. An AI agent (Haiku) looks at findings along with captions & text to weed out false positives (many duplication are justified/innocuous). Nothing new so far but pretty neat for ~6 hrs work!
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I work at The Metascience Observatory (@MetascienceObs) on forensic metascience. Our founder Dan Elton (@moreisdifferent) just published what we've learned so far. One finding stands out, and it's not the one people will quote. 🧵
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Every number in a report has to come back from a registered tool, and every finding ships with a command that reproduces it. If a finding can't be re-run, it's a rumor. Most automated "AI detects fraud" work fails here.
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Plenty more coming --automated meta-analysis, the Bird's Eye Review Studio, and an expanded corpus of replication attempts. Read about it here: metascienceobservatory.subst…
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Greg Fitzgerald retweeted
Another great example of an oral vaccine. @RADVACproject is working on yeast-based oral vaccines.
The USDA has kept raccoon rabies out of the central United States for over 30 years by air-dropping fish-flavored ravioli from helicopters. Each one is a small packet coated in fishmeal with an oral rabies vaccine inside. Raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and skunks find them by smell, bite through, and swallow. Many animals that consume the bait develop immunity, helping build a protective barrier across populations. The bait is generally considered safe for pets and tested in many non-target species. The USDA's Wildlife Services has been running this since 1995. Without the bait program, raccoon rabies very likely would have spread much further west. A federal program you've probably never heard of is protecting your pets and your kids by feeding wild animals ravioli from a helicopter.
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I just read 'Unaccompanied Sonata', by Orson Scott Card (1979). You can read it here: sindark.com/LaTeX/unaccompan…). h/t @tracingwoodgrains for the recommendation. Here's my brief review... (1/3)
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'Unaccompanied Sonata' is compelling and well-written. It is a meditation on the power and purpose of art. If there was a statement about human nature, it is that artistic genius is irrepressible. Even if the artist himself is beaten down and brainwashed ... (2/3)
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... that artistic potential is still latent. Not only that, but those depredations meant to disempower the artist are reconstituted into something beautiful and defiant in the crucible of the artist's soul. (3/3)
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Greg Fitzgerald retweeted
In a meta-analysis of 210 biomedical AI studies that statistically compared models under cross-validation, 97% used invalid statistical tests. Here's our new preprint doi.org/10.64898/2026.05.17.… led by @tianchuzeng @kkli20111 @ZShaoshi @ten_photos 1/N
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