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Brian P. Keane

@briankeanelab.bsky.social

I study human visual perception and how it is altered among those with psychosis @URNeuroscience

39 Posts57 Follower50 Folgt
Colette Delawalla, PhD@cdelawalla.bsky.social · 6d ago

WHEN WE FIGHT, WE WIN. It's time to APPLY HEAVY PRESSURE. Call you Senators NOW: fight2win.standupforscience.net/campaign/omb... I know, everyone hates calling. But this is CRITICAL. Make the calls today! (Use our super easy autodialer tool linked above) www.politico.com/live-updates...

Top senators consider blocking Trump’s grant shakeup in spending stopgap

It’s now “up to leadership” whether to head off the controversial changes, Sen. Susan Collins said.

politico.com

Gavin Buckingham @drgbuckingham.bsky.social · 2w ago

The Cognition Group in the Psychology dept at Exeter are at risk of redundancy because "basic cognitive psychology research does not align with the current priorities of funding bodies" If you think this is overtly wrong and misguided, please sign this open letter docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Open Letter in Support of the Cognition Group, University of Exeter

To Executive members of the University of Exeter, including Vice Chancellor Prof. Lisa Roberts, Senior Vice-President and Provost Prof. Dan Charman, Pro Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean Prof. Sallie...

docs.google.com

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 2w ago

New Request for Information for ideas for NIH-wide challenges and opportunities for the Common Fund. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... Opportunity to think about gaps and opportunities for NIH funding programs. 1/2

NOT-RM-26-004: Request for Information: NIH Common Fund is Soliciting Ideas for NIH-wide Challenges and Opportunities

NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Request for Information: NIH Common Fund is Soliciting Ideas for NIH-wide Challenges and Opportunities NOT-RM-26-004. R...

grants.nih.gov

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New NIH Request for Information regarding capping the number of Research Project Grants allowed per investigator. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... Open for comments until August 3rd, 2026

NOT-OD-26-086: Request for Information: Proposal to Cap the Number of Simultaneous Research Project Grants per Principal Investigator to Support More Researchers and Maximize Scientific Productivity a...

NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Request for Information: Proposal to Cap the Number of Simultaneous Research Project Grants per Principal Investigator ...

grants.nih.gov

Joshua Weitz@joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"The document itself is an odd grab-bag of micromanaging grant processes, assertion of presidential power, and airing of cultural grievances... Its lack of coherence, however, will not prevent it from causing staggering damage to the US scientific system." 👇 arstechnica.com/science/2026...

Proposed new US funding rules: We can cancel any grant at any time

Peer review now optional, political staff would screen grants for forbidden topics.

arstechnica.com

Ryan Heuser@ryanheuser.com · 2mo ago

Surprising: frontier models (Claude, ChatGPT, Deepseek V4) produce the most predictable text of any local AI model or human text I've ever tested. Not surprising: Finnegans Wake is off the charts, by far least predictable—Shannon & Lydia Liu proved right—and Hemingway the most predictable human.

Horizontal boxplot comparing information density (BLT 1B bits/char) across 27 text sources, ordered from most compressed (top) to most information-dense (bottom). Four frontier API models (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Haiku, DeepSeek, Claude Sonnet) cluster tightly at 0.85-0.90 bits/char, below Shannon's English rate of 1.0 bits/char marked by a dashed vertical line. Seven local aligned models (red) span a wide range from DeepSeek-7b aligned (0.94) through OLMo aligned (1.43), with most falling between 1.0 and 1.3. Seven base models (green) occupy 1.04-1.50, overlapping substantially with human text. Eight human text sources (blue) range from Hemingway (1.12) and abstracts (1.20) through dream reports (1.24), waking journals (1.26), and Basic English stories (1.39) up to C20 fiction (1.50) and Joyce (2.30). OLMo aligned is a notable outlier among aligned models, with higher information density than its own base model. DeepSeek-7b base (1.04) is unusually low for a base model, sitting near Shannon's threshold alongside Hemingway.Lydia Liu, The Freudian Robot, p. 37: "...interesting questions that his experimental work raises for us is: how does a stochastic view of writing correlate to the received theories of language, literature, and modernism on the one hand and to psychoanalytical speculations about the unconscious on the other? This question is pertinent to our inquiry because many of the earlier modernist literary and psychoanalytical experiments on language, automatic writing, and thought-reading had anticipated Shannon’s Printed English and his “mind-reading machine” in numerous ways. For instance, Shannon cites James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as one of the texts exemplifying the lower threshold of redundancy and higher entropy rate in his stochastic model of Printed English. What makes entropy and its possible linkage with Freud’s Todestrieb (death drive) such an interesting problem for the study of digital media is the ways in which certain ideas migrated into psychoanalysis first and then got into information theory. Furthermore, Freud’s work and psychoanalysis in general may suggest some interesting clues as to the shared theoretical impulses or implicit exchanges among information theory, cybernetics, and modernist literature. Spanning across these moments of broad intellectual confluences is the techne of the unconscious that continually articulates itself to digital writing, machine, and social engineering. We turn next to the invention of Printed English by Shannon and its implications for a theory of digital writing."
Ryan Heuser@ryanheuser.com · 3mo ago

Shannon measured the information rate of English at ~1 bit per character. According to a byte-level LLM measuring next-character predictability in LLM & human text (diaries, abstracts, dreams, fiction), aligned models produce sub-English information rates & LLM text is more predictable than humans'.

Bar chart comparing information density (BLT bits/char) of AI-generated prose versus human text. Shannon's English rate (1.0 bits/char) shown as dashed red line. Aligned OLMo models (SFT, DPO, RLVR) fall below the line at 0.89–0.99 bits/char. The base model sits just above at 1.14. All human text types are higher: waking reports (1.24), abstracts (1.28), dreams (1.32), and fiction (1.49). Alignment compresses model output below the information density of all measured human writing.
Zamin Iqbal@zaminiqbal.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

Researchers say the Trump administration is finding new ways to punish science

Even with federal grants largely restored, scientists say the Trump administration is still preventing those funds from reaching them. The consequences, they say, are already becoming clear.

npr.org

Max Kozlov@maxkozlov.bsky.social · 3mo ago

NEW: A serious staffing shortage — of the Trump admin's own making — is delaying the agency's ability to send billions to universities around the country, leaving labs reeling in the meantime. “I thought we were at rock bottom”, a senior NIH official said. “We are below rock bottom now.”

NIH staffing shortage could slash number of new grants issued this year

Some units at the US funding giant are so understaffed, they are focusing on mandated grant renewals rather than new awards.

nature.com

Aaron Clauset@aaronclauset.bsky.social · 4mo ago

tl;dr: NIH is running at about 60% of pre-Trump levels and NSF is running at about 20% of pre-Trump levels of funding-outlays (some directorates far below even that). Utterly catastrophic. An unforced disaster for U.S. society, and the world

Noam Ross@noamross.net · 4mo ago

For #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals. The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

Max Kozlov@maxkozlov.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I got excited when I saw that NIH might have received its first apportionment from OMB today. Alas, it's for ARPA-H. OMB still has not given NIH a dime for non-salary, non-emergency expenses from the spending bill that was signed into law on Feb 3.

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Max Kozlov@maxkozlov.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

Brian P. Keane@briankeanelab.bsky.social · 5mo ago

This is an important policy decision that will impact our ability to publicly share neuroimaging data. The time is now to weigh in.

Lauren Atlas@laurenatlas.bsky.social · 5mo ago

NIH is requesting comments on a new draft policy that may require human brain imaging data (and other data) from nih-funded research to only be shared via controlled access, & only with certain countries. I suggest neuroimagers read closely & submit comments by 3/18. osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form...

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Thanks to the Nature team for digging into this. Apportionment is one of those inside-baseball issues that I hoped never to need to learn about... But here was are.

Max Kozlov@maxkozlov.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

Brian P. Keane@briankeanelab.bsky.social · 5mo ago

NIH is funding only 30% the number of new grants as compared to previous years…if you care about preserving the science that makes our country great, now may be a good time to reach out to your representative.

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New and Competitive Renewals Only 803 grants have been made compared to ~2650 in fiscal years 2023 and 2024 through February 20. All institutes and centers (include OD now) have made awards except NIAAA, NLM, NCCIH, and FIC. 3/4

Line graph of the number new and competitive renewal grants funded by NIH in fiscal year 2026 through February 20, compared to fiscal years 2020-2025. The fiscal year 2026 is well below the other curves.
Max Kozlov@maxkozlov.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year. That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027. A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications. A short 🧵

Exclusive: key NIH review panels due to lose all members by the end of 2026

Thirteen of the agency’s advisory councils, which must review grant applications before funding is awarded, are on track to have no voting members.

nature.com