Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
paulallen.ca
Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
@paulallen.ca
Clinical director of intensive mental health services for children and youth in Canada (ret.). Believer in Truth and Reconciliation. Denier of Denialism. Student of semantics and statistics. "AI" too.
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
New peer reviewed research confirms that gender affirmative care reduces the rate of suicide in gender diverse youth over time.

These findings published in the Journal of Pediatrics are consistent with other studies.

Access to timely care is critical.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Changes in Suicidality among Transgender Adolescents Following Hormone Therapy: An Extended Study
To examine changes in suicidality following hormone therapy (HT) among transgender and gender-diverse adolescents and young adults.A retrospective cha…
www.sciencedirect.com
November 25, 2025 at 5:48 AM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
Premium: This is The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA: A 14k word guide to how NVIDIA makes its money, how millions of Blackwell GPUs have been sold with nowhere for them to be installed, and how NVIDIA's future relies on companies raising hundreds of billions in debt.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...
The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA
This piece has a generous 3000+ word introduction, because I want as many people to understand NVIDIA as possible. The (thousands of) words after the premium break get into arduous detail, but I’ve wr...
www.wheresyoured.at
November 24, 2025 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
The latest evaluation of bike lane projects in Boston continues to show that if you build bike infrastructure, people will use it.

Full report: www.boston.gov/sites/defaul...
November 24, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Norm Macdonald prefers the Mangrate's grilling grates to CharGPT.

youtu.be/iqDb8bpUKHU?...
November 24, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?
November 23, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
According to "Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being Vaishnavi Jayakumar,... the company had a “17x” strike policy for accounts that reportedly engaged in the “trafficking of humans for sex.” time.com/7336204/meta...
7 Allegations Against Meta in Newly Unsealed Filings
Court filings allege Meta tolerated sex trafficking, hid harms to teens, and prioritized growth over user safety for years.
time.com
November 23, 2025 at 1:48 AM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
Holy crap, you REALLY CAN attack complexity theory via measure theory...if you go deep enough into the weeds of descriptive set theory.

Welp, I guess I know what I need to start digging into as soon as finals are done.
Separating complexity classes of LCL problems on grids
We study the complexity of locally checkable labeling (LCL) problems on $\mathbb{Z}^n$ from the point of view of descriptive set theory, computability theory, and factors of i.i.d. Our results separat...
arxiv.org
November 23, 2025 at 1:14 AM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
‼️ Friends, this is very important. Please share to whoever this may concern, especially if you are in the United States.

Ukraine wants peace. Lasting, just, sustainable peace, and not a pause before the next bloodbath. I cannot stress this enough.
November 22, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
But unfortunately deepfake detection models can fail in real-world settings... so in most places this presents a real challenge for users and the platforms to deal with - the technology deployed to detect this content isn't a foolproof response. arxiv.org/abs/2510.16556
Fit for Purpose? Deepfake Detection in the Real World
The rapid proliferation of AI-generated content, driven by advances in generative adversarial networks, diffusion models, and multimodal large language models, has made the creation and dissemination ...
arxiv.org
November 22, 2025 at 8:00 AM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...
Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world
A year-long investigation reveals how mothers lost children after being radicalised by uplifting podcast tales of births without midwives or doctors
www.theguardian.com
November 22, 2025 at 7:57 AM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
Training LLMs end to end is hard. But way more people should, and will, be doing it in the future.

The @hf.co Research team is excited to share their new e-book that covers the full pipeline:
· pre-training,
· post-training,
· infra.

200+ pages of what worked and what didn’t. ⤵️
November 2, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
Really excited about this 5-year project starting, funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social, where we will combine ✨computational modelling✨ with causal intervention techniques such as ✨tFUS✨ to study the neurocognitive mechanisms of repetitive negative thoughts 🚀 led by @mikebrowning.bsky.social
Repetitive negative thoughts will be investigated using a range of cutting-edge brain science techniques as part of a new study led by the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford and funded by Wellcome @wellcometrust.bsky.social 👇
tinyurl.com/364es88k
November 21, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
People learn through practice and challenge; not by receiving answers.

But a deeper problem is that an essential aspect of teaching is helping someone organize their thinking in new ways. LLMs — systems which cannot think or appreciate thinking — are incapable of doing this in a meaningful way.
Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
November 21, 2025 at 1:29 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
New study on LLMs shows that while LLMs & humans converge on similar judgments of reliability of news media, they rely on very different underlying processes.

In delegating, are we confusing linguistic plausibility with epistemic reliability?

The age of "epistemia"

www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....
November 21, 2025 at 10:36 AM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
Building datasets to train smaller, task-focused models used to be incredibly time-consuming.

Very excited to see SAM3 massively lower that barrier. Describe the class you want to detect and get annotated datasets automatically!

Try it yourself: huggingface.co/datasets/uv-...!
November 21, 2025 at 1:30 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
This new model opens a whole new world of analysing multi region interaction across trials and tasks! More analysis and findings can be found in our paper linked below. Work lead by Jack Cook, and with great help from @danakarca.bsky.social and @somnirons.bsky.social !

arxiv.org/abs/2506.02813
Brain-Like Processing Pathways Form in Models With Heterogeneous Experts
Examples of such pathways can be found in the interactions between cortical and subcortical networks during learning, or in sub-networks specializing for task characteristics such as difficulty or mod...
arxiv.org
November 21, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
I was thinking about the efficiency of nonparametric tests and remembered this SO post about the Wilcox being 96% as efficient as T test, even in small samples. For those who have a copy, Lehman & Romano did an thorough job in <5 pages detailing situation. #statssky #statistics #rstats #AcademicSky
November 21, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
“Canada is facing near-term threats to its economic competitiveness and grappling with declining productivity and prosperity, so waiting years for AI investments to create value isn’t realistic in this environment – in fact, it’s downright risky.”
Yet Another Study Shows That Most Companies Aren't Making Any Money Off AI
Further proof has arrived that the ROI on AI is essentially non-existent.
gizmodo.com
November 21, 2025 at 1:51 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
“To add insult to injury, many metaphorical … phrases (especially used to describe ANNs; see Table 1) — like train, learn, hallucinate, reason — are applied to machines and result in distorting how we perceive these machines: humanising them while dehumanising us”

zenodo.org/records/1706...

14/🧵
September 19, 2025 at 11:06 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
“LLMs do not improve one’s writing ability much like taking a taxi does not improve one’s driving ability. Students should hone their writing, thinking, and other academic skills at every opportunity.”

zenodo.org/records/1706...

23/🧵
Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia
Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these col...
zenodo.org
September 19, 2025 at 11:20 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
Multimodal AI Decodes Extreme Environment Functional Dark Matter Beyond Homology www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
November 20, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
Three meta-principles of statistics: the information principle, the methodological attribution problem, and different applications demand different philosophies
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/11/20/t...
Three meta-principles of statistics: the information principle, the methodological attribution problem, and different applications demand different philosophies | Statistical Modeling, Causal Infere...
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
November 20, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by Paul Allen 🌐🇨🇦
Please join us for the next online ISHTIP seminar:

Gerardo Con Diaz (STS, UC Davis) will be speaking

'On Judgment: A Critical Grammar for Computing and Law'.

Monday, 8 December 6am LA (PST)

More info and registration link:

ishtip.org/on-judgement...

Everyone welcome.
On Judgment: A Critical Grammar for Computing and Law – ISHTIP
ishtip.org
November 20, 2025 at 1:28 PM