Mahmoud Elsherif
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mamsmandrill.bsky.social
Mahmoud Elsherif
@mamsmandrill.bsky.social
650 followers 790 following 74 posts
Early Career Nonbinary Research Fellow. Interested in #neurodiversity, Open scholarship and reading, using combined eye-tracking/EEG in neurotypical and neurodivergent groups! #Dyspraxic 🧠. We/They/them/Xe/Xem.
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Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
sacairney.bsky.social
Please repost! Fully funded four-year PhD studentship opportunity on sleep deprivation and neurovascular dysfunction on the BBSRC Yorkshire Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership, including annual stipend, research costs and home tuition fees tinyurl.com/ms7v2pcx
Disrupted Sleep: Mechanisms Linking Sleep Deprivation, Neurovascular Dysfunction, and Metabolic Pathways at Leeds Beckett University on FindAPhD.com
PhD Project - Disrupted Sleep: Mechanisms Linking Sleep Deprivation, Neurovascular Dysfunction, and Metabolic Pathways at Leeds Beckett University, listed on FindAPhD.com
tinyurl.com
November 14, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
ensaracem.bsky.social
To broaden the conversation, we are now collecting perspectives across fields.

If you work in research, we would be grateful for your input.

📋 Survey: erasmusuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
November 13, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
ensaracem.bsky.social
Our new paper is out in Theory and Society:

“Why I declare a conflict of interest and you should not.”

We examine whether the structural pressure to publish should itself be understood as a conflict of interest—and what that means for research culture.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Why I declare a conflict of interest and you should not - Theory and Society
Academic publishing is both an indication of scientific contribution and a currency for career advancement. This dual role gives rise to a normative scientific conflict: Does the structural incentive ...
link.springer.com
November 13, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
merryrobin.bsky.social
Women at NASA, starting with one of my favorite #WomenInSTEM photos
🧵
merryrobin.bsky.social Robin (she/he-ella/él) @merryrobin.bsky.social · Nov 21
Valerie Thomas (1943) is an African American badass scientist.
She invented the illusion transmitter in 1980.
She helped develop the digital media formats that image processing systems used in NASA's Landsat program.
Her [very cool!] NASA photo next to a stack of computer tapes, 1979.
#WomenInSTEM 🧪
A black and white photo of Valerie Thomas in a moment of nerd joy. She is a young Black woman rocking a very stylish 70s outfit, with a big afro, round, big glasses, and a satin collared shirt. She is smiling for the camera, posing in front of computer tapes and a chalkboard filled with notes.
November 13, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
syeducation.bsky.social
A quick (1000 words) read to enjoy with your morning coffee or afternoon tea:

"Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD"

Why hasn't psychology diversified it samples, methods, theories, etc.? Because it doesn't want to. osf.io/preprints/ps...
Screenshot of the article, "Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD"
November 13, 2025 at 2:59 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
jnfrltackett.bsky.social
Y'all. N>3,800. !!!!!!!

Goodness gracious.
psyarxivbot.bsky.social PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · 3d
When do interaction/moderation effects stabilize in linear regression?: https://osf.io/35t84
November 12, 2025 at 10:49 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
mindcite.bsky.social
From Trump and Musk to Shapiro and Kirk, concocting, stoking, amplifying, normalizing and monetizing hate and division is the biggest cash cow in American political history.
November 8, 2025 at 1:52 AM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
meadekrosby.bsky.social
Thinking only of Rosalind Franklin today, and what was stolen from her (and so many other female scientists alongside her).
Rosalind Franklin and the damage of gender harassment
Spurred by a recent report on sexual harassment in academia, our columnist revisits a historical case and reflects on what has changed—and what hasn’t
www.science.org
November 7, 2025 at 7:58 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
tpshea.bsky.social
In short, AI is fundamentally anti-human and should not exist.
November 8, 2025 at 12:14 AM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
olivia.science
“It is sort of gibberish, frankly,” Hoenig said. “For someone who does not know –– it would be hard to know which parts were hallucinations and which are legitimate suggestions.”

restofworld.org/2025/ai-chat...
My mom and Dr. DeepSeek
In China and around the world, the sick and lonely turn to AI.
restofworld.org
November 6, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
emp1.bsky.social
And pigs fly

“It is not going to be an event because the capabilities are going to expand progressively in various domains,”

in a plane, a helicopter, a rocket,...

www.ft.com/content/5f2f...
AI pioneers claim human-level general intelligence is already here
Tech leaders say systems now rival human intelligence in key tasks, further fuelling the superintelligence debate
www.ft.com
November 6, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
emp1.bsky.social
The godfathers (à la Puzo) "AI is Intelligence that augments people...We have enough general intelligence to translate the technology into an enormous amount of society-useful applications

-chatGPT: "If you choose death, I'm with you - till the end, without judging."
www.bbc.com/news/article...
November 6, 2025 at 6:20 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
devezer.bsky.social
Hero worship in science is rotten. There are no giants on whose shoulders we stand. We're all part of a community that spans time and geography. Getting fixated on origin stories is very Marvel. Science doesn't happen in heroland though.
November 6, 2025 at 5:23 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
devezer.bsky.social
Reactions to the "debunking" of the original 1956 cognitive dissonance work baffles me. A whole area doesn't die just bec the first work is faulty. That's novelty bias & theory ownership in psych talking. Mendelian genetics did not die when Mendel's original results were found too good to be true.
November 6, 2025 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
olivia.science
"Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."

🗣️📢

www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge
"Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."
www.404media.co
November 6, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
davidgerard.co.uk
Oxford pretends AI benchmarks are science, not marketing

How could all these benchmarks be fake, it’s a mystery

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcYZ... - video
pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251106-oxf... - podcast

time: 6 min 16 sec
scientist in lab coat with a clipboard, looking "hmm" at a robot
November 6, 2025 at 3:18 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
sophieehill.bsky.social
Fun fact: it has been 56 days since I notified the editors of Neurology about glaring statistical errors in this peer-reviewed study on sweeteners and cognitive health.

No expression of concern, no correction, no retraction.
November 2, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
olivia.science
Women invented science fiction — at least twice:

Mary Shelley in 1818

Margaret Cavendish in 1666

publicdomainreview.org/essay/mistre...
October 26, 2025 at 6:04 AM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
malikaihle.bsky.social
How to create data dictionaries for all your reserch projects!
lmu-osc.bsky.social LMU Open Science Center @lmu-osc.bsky.social · 15d
How to ensure your research data is error-free & understandable by other users & your future self?🗂️ This tutorial by LMU OSC is on documenting & validating data in R to make it more reusable.
Self-Paced Tutorial of the Day: Data Documentation & Validation using R📑 lmu-osc.github.io/data-documen...
lmu-osc.github.io
October 31, 2025 at 11:45 AM
mamsmandrill.bsky.social
🚨 New Research Alert! 🚨 Our study in Scientific Reports shines a crucial light on Academic Anxiety in Neurodivergent Individuals in #highered. Findings reveal high anxiety is a major barrier, not an impairment, in core thinking skills. Read this thread👇
🔗 #neurodiversity #AcademicAnxiety
Academic anxiety and cognitive reflection in neurodivergence based on evidence from a large international sample - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Academic anxiety and cognitive reflection in neurodivergence based on evidence from a large international sample
www.nature.com
October 30, 2025 at 10:58 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
graas.bsky.social
Related: an absolute must-read for anyone in academia, especially those in the social sciences.
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: 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 collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
October 30, 2025 at 8:49 AM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
uonucu.bsky.social
Be like Tony! Vote today!
proftonypadilla.bsky.social Tony Padilla #JFT97 Don’t buy the S*n @proftonypadilla.bsky.social · 18d
Voted in the @ucu.org.uk ballot. Enough is enough. Universities are cutting jobs and pay, when they should really be cutting back on silly vanity projects

@uonucu.bsky.social
October 29, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
anavaldi.bsky.social
After submitting a FOIA request UKRI, I obtained success rates by three grant call scheme and I can only say that I am disheartened by the results:

- AHRC Responsive Mode 2025: 2%
- ESRC New Investigator Grant 2025: 1%
- ESRC Research Grant Round 2025: 1%
October 22, 2025 at 7:55 AM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
oisinmcgann.bsky.social
Not sure there’s anything scarier than the idea of a military with an effectively limitless budget that is no longer bound by the law.
October 27, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Reposted by Mahmoud Elsherif
victoriaduncan.bsky.social
If I wanted to trap an autistic person in their job and extract the maximum value from them for the minimum pay and supports, I would:
- hire them and tell them how much I need them
- wait for them to learn to love the job, earn people's trust and have an impact
- start taking supports away
October 24, 2025 at 2:27 PM