David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
LightNews LightNews
banner
gringene.org
David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
@gringene.org
1.5K followers 1.3K following 3.7K posts
Neurodivergent freelance bioinformatician, cuddler of data, and theoretical geneticist, with a love for Free Software and the hacking thereof. Rangitāne o Wairau. He/they.

https://ko-fi.com/gringer

Website: https://www.gringene.org
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
gringene.org
David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️ @gringene.org · Nov 7
If you're considering following me, bear in mind that I'm a social butterfly, both in research (as a bioinformatician), and on social media. If there's news I want to spread, I'll repost a woman's report of it (if possible). "Like" means I like something, and have read it.
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
francesryan.bsky.social
Turned 40 and asked for some of my front pages to be framed as a self-esteem boost.
Two framed front pages are propped against a green wall. One is the New York Times and the other is The Guardian.
November 25, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
njbbari3.bsky.social
No… seriously… a lot more people are willing to talk about things and improve things one on one.

The silence about the elephant in the room can be broken with a whisper.
November 25, 2025 at 11:30 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
rvawonk.bsky.social
X rolled out a new feature that accidentally exposed a massive covert foreign influence operation — more than one, actually — that is currently live on the platform. It’s a huge story and I wrote about it — and what it means for America — here:

open.substack.com/pub/weaponiz...
X Just Accidentally Exposed A Vast Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans
How a new X feature led to the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since 2016.
open.substack.com
November 24, 2025 at 3:17 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
obialik.bsky.social
I think at this point we have fairly well established that reefs (like all of us) will do a little bit better if they need to deal with a few less stress factors hitting them at once. This time, if we let them breath (prevent/remove oxygen stress). 🧪🌊

Link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Behavioral and physiological responses of reef organisms to hypoxia. Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00338-019-01765-0
November 25, 2025 at 4:40 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
jrmorber.bsky.social
Went looking for COVID19 death statistics recently:

18.2 million people worldwide, 1.13 million in the US
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

We still have no day of remembrance or mourning.
Estimating excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic analysis of COVID-19-related mortality, 2020–21
The full impact of the pandemic has been much greater than what is indicated by reported deaths due to COVID-19 alone. Strengthening death registration systems around the world, long understood to be ...
www.thelancet.com
November 25, 2025 at 6:13 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
writagal.bsky.social
“In addition to environmental protection and public transport, regional councils sometimes also own ports.”

“If these reforms go ahead, councils may lose their authority at the exact moment ministers acquire unprecedented fast-track powers.”

Quiet part out loud etc
Concern as end of regional councils tipped in local government reforms
Sources are worried about what would become of the environmental protection aspect of regional councils, with an announcement about their future expected today.
www.thepost.co.nz
November 25, 2025 at 6:16 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
daytheelf.bsky.social
You know what Wellington really needs to help kickstart its economic recovery? More unemployed people! That always makes things better for everyone! #nzpol
November 25, 2025 at 6:11 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
sarah4ilam.bsky.social
Awesome work as ever by @duncanwebbmp.bsky.social
Any chance you’d reconsider the retirement plan?
#nzpol
November 25, 2025 at 4:00 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
duncanwebbmp.bsky.social
Labour lodges member's bill to repeal Regulatory Standards Act, asks NZ First for support www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...
Labour lodges member's bill to repeal Regulatory Standards Act, asks NZ First for support
"We can do it right now, if Winston Peters is willing to walk the walk."
www.rnz.co.nz
November 24, 2025 at 11:48 PM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
serenity22.bsky.social
Interestingly the subs have gone to town with this headline - the story itself isn't as inflammatory. Basically Winston was asked with a short turnaround to support Duncan Webb's members bill and he declined. Duncan was no doubt anticipating this and it was a bit of a stunt.
November 25, 2025 at 3:01 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
paullecomtephoto.nz
Give it up old man, you will never be Prime Minister
November 25, 2025 at 3:06 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
writagal.bsky.social
Reflecting that the sheer pace/scale of this erosion & damage has never happened in our history - & has been absolutely deliberate to ensure, even they don’t get another term, that a centrist government will do little to reverse the damage. The thought of a second round of this decimation is dire.🫠
November 25, 2025 at 6:36 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
jennifilm.nz
T-22 days until this govt enacts legislation that directly and explicitly breaches the Bill of Rights Act to discriminate against trans people, and Labour are still yet to publicly commit to fixing it.
November 25, 2025 at 6:33 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
mathsteacher09.bsky.social
In #mathstoday I enjoyed solving this problem posed by a colleague.
November 24, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social
Okay so i'm trying to fall asleep but while I'm actually feeling fine physically, my brain keeps replaying the sound and feeling of when the dentist had to break the tooth to get it out and somehow that is worse than if it just hurt?
November 25, 2025 at 6:48 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
michaelbclark.bsky.social
@jovmaksimovic.bsky.social – On how to “easily“ detect fusions in single-cells. 1. Identify fusions with bulk RNA seq. 2. Use Flexify to design fusion detection probes for 10x Flex. 3. Detect fusions and their expression in each cell with scRNA-seq. #abacbs2025
November 25, 2025 at 6:34 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
dimsie.bsky.social
"handheld meat pies" is truly the most cursed phrase anyone has ever used to describe this part of our national cuisine
douglasmack.bsky.social Doug Mack @douglasmack.bsky.social · 11h
* New Zealand takes pies (namely, handheld meat pies) so seriously that there are National Pie Awards that get major media coverage. The New Zealand National Library has a whole dedicated category for “Pies — Competitions.”

Pie.
November 25, 2025 at 6:44 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
aliciao.bsky.social
Awesome talk by @jovmaksimovic.bsky.social one detecting fusions in single cells with probes designed for 10X Flex. If I do say so myself 😜 #ABACBS2025
November 25, 2025 at 6:52 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
gunjand.bsky.social
Wonderful talk by @jovmaksimovic.bsky.social on detecting gene fusions at single-cell resolution using custom probes #Flexify #ABACBS2025
November 25, 2025 at 6:42 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
rebeccamatthews.bsky.social
Really excited to see a new local community group forming in Karori to support the transition to a climate-friendly future. They will be looking at energy, transport, waste etc. I have an email contact if you are keen to connect or check the post on I Love Karori (!!) Facebook 💚
November 25, 2025 at 6:56 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
olivia.science
We end on an appeal to our fellow psychologists:

"To sit idly by while deskilling and displacing of [our]selves is normalised [...] serves [solely] the technology sector, which avoids criticism and self-reflection and prefers pseudoscience and misinformation."

10/
8 Do not Embrace AI In this paper, we unpacked why we think psychologists need to be on high alert — not just to avoid another replication crisis, but to avoid the total collapse of our science. What we signpost in Table 1 may have been novel to readers until this point, but the deeper problems are absolutely known. Also, as Crystal Steltenpohl et al. (2023, pp. 9–10) state: “Intentions alone are not enough to move science forward. Creating responsible, considered processes for rigorously transparent open science requires involving interested parties from a wide range of backgrounds, perspectives, research areas, and training paradigms.” Indeed, because many such warnings go unheeded — such as the need for a cultivation of shared values and especially the principles of impartiality of researchers and academic freedom from corporate influence — we find ourselves in polycrises that affect our universities, political systems, planet, and ultimately all humanity. “When historians of science look back on the 2010s in social and personality psychology, the decade will likely stand out as a period of exceptional doubt and self-scrutiny in the field.” (Schiavone & Vazire, 2023, p. 710) Why did we ever stop? Should we ever stop? Importantly, Hazel Rose Markus (2005, p. 180, emphasis added) explains that: “Social psychology is often defined as the study of how people respond to and are influenced by other people” Algorithms, chatbots, LLMs, machines, models, inanimate objects are not people — they are the products of people (Guest, 2024, 2025). And to paraphrase Rae Carlson (1984): What’s social about chatbots? Where’s the person in an LLM? We must sure up our subfields from the slow but certain corrosive power wielded by the harmful nonsense that is modern displacement AI. To sit idly by while deskilling and displacing of our students, participants, and selves is normalised — or worse still to profit from it — serves not science but the technology sector, which avoids criticism and self-reflection and prefers pseudoscience and misinformation.
October 4, 2025 at 6:42 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
bewarethefish.bsky.social
I'm only on page six of the "simplifying local government" consultation document and it's already clear that their proposals will make things vastly more complicated.

There also doesn't appear to be any detail on how the work to implement this will be funded so presumably councils will have to pay.
November 25, 2025 at 4:26 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
olivia.science
Second, if we uncritically adopt AI in psychology, we outsource programming of our experiments to companies. This undoes a lot of open source: experiments are under industry capture, written without formal specifications. It deskills us: psychologists spent the last decade learning to code.

6/
4 Outsourcing Programming to Companies [Sanford’s mechanical vernier chronoscope] had two pendulums, one set longer than the other but both set at known lengths. When the stimulus appeared, the longer pendulum was released mechanically. When the participant pressed the key in response, the shorter pendulum was similarly released. By counting the number of swings it took the shorter pendulum to catch up with the longer, experimenters could use a mathematical formula to calculate the difference in time between the two events. (Evans, 2000, p. 322–323) A century later, all this is now done by programming computers to display stimuli, and collect and analyse data. The largely harmless and perhaps even beneficial (cf. Guest, 2025) transition to computational experimentation, where all instruments (e.g. EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking) are hooked up to the codebase for running experiments and the database for storing participant data, has been completed through: the adoption of programmes such as SPSS for statistics (Landau & Everitt, 2003) and E-Prime for presenting stimuli (Spapé et al., 2019); and training psychologists to use programming languages (e.g. R, Python; British Psychological Society, 2017; Peirce et al., 2022). The last part, from the mid 2010s onwards, where psychologists spent time and effort learning how to program is a massively laudable case of reskilling (N. D. Anderson, 2016; Guest & Forbes, 2024; Scherer et al., 2019) From the 2020s, however with the rise of the kinds of AI products we critique herein, this is under threat. If scientists accept the AI “snakeoil” and “con” (Bender & Hanna, 2025; Bjarnason, 2023; Narayanan & Kapoor, 2024) and use it to deskill themselves from learning proper programming, then code reproducibility and verifiability are lost causes; not just short-lived, dead on arrival (Becker et al., 2025a). If the code is for running experiments, strange side-effects will be present from so-called ‘vibe coding’ (Harkar, 2025), which is ‘programming’ using a chatbot such that nothing is checked or verified against software engineering principles and only the output being seen as acceptable under a small sample of conditions is evaluated. This means that because standards are ignored and best practises are violated the stimuli may be presented in the wrong order, participant data may not be properly or securely saved, and the code may be unmaintainable (Burgess, 2023, 2025; El-Mhamdi et al., 2022; Greshake et al., 2023; Ming, 2025; Tangermann, 2025). And the same is true for this non-engineered code in the case of analysing data, which will not only not be analysed, but open to all sorts of bugs. To add insult to injury, because the scientist is not practising programming or never learned how to code, all this will be outside their skill level and they will be unable to detect and fix these issues (Becker As Danielle Navarro (2015) says about shortcuts through using inappropriate technology, which chatbots are, we end up digging ourselves into “a very deep hole.” She goes on to explain: The business model here is to suck you in during your student days, and then leave you dependent on their tools when you go out into the real world. [...] And you can avoid it: if you make use of packages like R that are open source and free, you never get trapped having to pay exorbitant licensing fees. (pp. 37–38) These were and are the reasons to switch from e.g. SPSS, which is owned by IBM, to R or Python (Wills, 2019). The same and more hold for being locked in and addicted to AI products, which have closed or industry-controlled source code (Hao, 2025; Liesenfeld & Dingemanse, 2024; Liesenfeld et al., 2023; Maffulli, 2023; Maris, 2025; Mirowski, 2023; Solaiman, 2023) , and mislead us into overestimating our programming abilities (Lehmann et al., 2025)
October 4, 2025 at 6:07 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
olivia.science
Now, we tackle in turn the issues we outlined in the abstract:

First, the displacement of human participants, tracing the history of technologies to recruit real people, we end up forgetting the whole point: gathering — not fabricating! — human data. More at section 3: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

5/
3 Displacement of Participants Many technological solutions to recruiting and managing participants have been proposed: from original pen and paper sign up sheets and physical bulletin boards to computer systems like SONA, which digitised and automated some of these processes, and then furthermore to platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), which allows participants to be outsourced to sweatshops (e.g. C. A. Anderson et al., 2019; Douglas et al., 2023; Gamblin et al., 2017; Gray & Suri, 2019; Hauser & Schwarz, 2016; Wagner et al., 2022). It may be the case that systems like MTurk, which is named after the infamous pseudo-automaton which beat Napoleon at chess (Manninger, 2024), indeed have clear pros and cons, and are perhaps not inherently abusive. However, they are clearly open to abuse (C. A. Anderson et al., 2019; Guest, 2024; Newman, 2019; Pettit, 2024c; Stephens, 2023). MTurk’s namesake, the original Mechanical Turk, was a device that comprised a cupboard with a chess board on top and which across the player sat an orientalist puppet. However much it may have seemed the puppet played chess, it was instead a hidden human who moved the pieces. In the present, sweatshops based on Amazon’s MTurk technology undergird all modern AI products (Alba, 2023; Bansal, 2025; Equidem, 2025; Gershgorn, 2017; Gray & Suri, 2019; Manninger, 2024; Perrigo, 2023; Stephens, 2023; Streitfeld, 2025; Suri, 2019; Yang et al., 2020). This human-in-the-loop technique has had applications in the 2010s with deep artificial neural networks that performed what is claimed to be human-like vision, and in the 2020s with reinforcement learning from human feedback (e.g. Birhane et al., 2023; Guest & Martin, 2025b; Kirk et al., 2023; Manninger, 2024; Prabhu & Birhane, 2020; Suri, 2019). The next iteration of this is to completely obfuscate the human-in-the-loop (Guest, 2025; Guest & Martin, 2025a; Shiffrin & Mitchell, 2023) and present AI products, such as those powered by large language models (LLMs), as able to stand in for, displace, human participants or their data (cf. Crockett & Messeri, 2023; Dillion et al., 2023; Jamieson et al., 2023; Rilla et al., 2025; Rossi et al., 2024; Schröder et al., 2025). This is problematic for many reasons (viz. Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van Rooij & Guest, 2025), but some lesser discussed angles are that the AI products cannot replace human participants but are merely a) returning unethically sourced (pre-existing) human data (Alba, 2023; Bansal, 2025; Equidem, 2025; Guest, 2025; Perrigo, 2023). And as such, b) these data have statistically unfavourable properties according to what are stated norms of the field, such as comprising double dipping (Y. Liu et al., 2024; Villalobos et al., 2024; What is most disparaging if we continue down this route, is not only that it leads to data fabrication on steroids but that also we will depend on a machine that, for lack of a less anthropomorphic term, lies, and lies about lying by design (Bender & Hanna, 2025; Bender et al., 2021; DeVrio et al., 2025; Edwards, 2023b; Hicks et al., 2024; Metz, 2023; Xu et al., 2025; Zhao et al., 2025). It deceives through the Eliza effect, the cognitive bias towards assigning human-like traits to chatbots (Borau, 2025; Dillon, 2020; Koike & Loughnan, 2021; Weizenbaum, 1966), and the BarnumForer effect, the phenomenon where one thinks generic person
October 4, 2025 at 5:58 AM
Reposted by David Eccles 🌻🇵🇸7x🩹🛡️
spiderandme.bsky.social
lol this is totally about a power grab.
Do these guys have the foggiest idea what RCs do and how much this will cost??
otoh if you want to ditch envmntl controls & monitoring, pest control, arts and recreation this is probably the best way to do it.

#nzpol
No more regional councils - major shake-up of local government announced
The government says it is not a power grab, but about "making local government fit for purpose".
www.rnz.co.nz
November 25, 2025 at 4:29 AM