For all those here dreaming of socialism, come to Malta where there's only one functional bank. It takes me an hour to deposit a cheque... that's a reality cheque for what you get without competition.

So there is this weird pattern of discrimination (definitely explicit, no IAT needed) in the Maltese rental market. Maltese landlords often reject prospective tenants that are .. (drumroll).... Maltese. Never heard that one before.

New paper alert:

In my latest paper in BRM, I validate a gamified mouse-tracking task that’s been my go-to for the last years. Perfect for online studies without tricky calibration needed for eye-tracking!

rdcu.be/eKsMo

So, I enjoyed a really nice version of the Magic Flute yesterday in Manoel theatre in Valletta. However, hearing the main Mcguffin being called the Zauberflote took some getting used to. (Ok, this one is for opera loving L2 phonologists, small target audience).

There's an advantage to work in a small (really small, bro) country. It's not that difficult to make it into the main national newspaper:
timesofmalta.com/article/why-...

Bike cleaning day. If I bring out the bike stand, let's make that count.

While everyone is on about how good AI is, Google Scholar suggests to me to add a publication to my profile called
"Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics".

I am honored to have (co-)authored the institue, but I will keep away from automatic profile updates for now.

I was using forced alignment short utterances from a speech-production experiment. Using recordings that had been noise-reduced, the results were unusuable, so I tried the original, noisy recordings. Those worked very well.

Can anyone here explain why noise-reduction makes forced-alignment worse?

I want to read you an email that I was asked to keep confidential because I think it explains some of my worries about academia.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFU...

Did I mention that I do triathlon?
psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

That piano break from MiTierra

Most visual-world eye-tracking study need hundreds of images. That's quite a laborious task. Sine openAI can generate images (chatGPT + Dall-E), I managed to batch generate images via an R-script, which I shared via osf (osf.io/apcyb/). I hope this is helpful.

Fancy a trip to Malta during the best time of the year there?
- Submit an abstract to 'r-atics 8, to be held in Valletta 22-23 May.
- Extended deadline: 21st of January
www.um.edu.mt/research/cog...

Question on the ethics of using ChatGPT in science writing.

As an L2 speaker of English, I sometimes find a sentence not sounds well. In that case, I ask ChatGPT to reformulate (providing the original sentence).
Is that cheating or OK?
Do I need to disclose this at submission (Elsevier asks...)?