Ray Becker
LightNews LightNews
banner
raybecker.bsky.social
Ray Becker
@raybecker.bsky.social
170 followers 160 following 80 posts
Computational corpus linguist, psychology of language enthusiast. Embodied/Enacted/Extendend/Embedded language > LLMs
Posts Replies Media Videos
raybecker.bsky.social
Sad news to hear my colleague Irene Mittelberg passed last week. She was a very creative and brilliant gesture researcher linguistlist.org/issues/36/31...
LINGUIST List 36.3191 All: Obituary: Irene Mittelberg (1967-2025)
The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.
linguistlist.org
October 22, 2025 at 4:05 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
olivia.science
we're trying something, please consider signing openletter.earth/open-letter-...

also see bsky.app/profile/oliv...
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
September 25, 2025 at 11:47 AM
Reposted by Ray Becker
sfiscience.bsky.social
Final week to apply for the 2026 SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships

If you're an early-career scholar and passionate about collaborative, transdisciplinary research beyond traditional departments, this is the postdoc fellowship for you.

Deadline: Oct 1, 2025

Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship
September 22, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
deniswirtz.bsky.social
These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers.

My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers.

We found 437 of them.

Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...
August 11, 2025 at 11:54 AM
raybecker.bsky.social
I have a new post about gaslighting and what it means raybecker.substack.com/p/thoughts-o...
Thoughts on Gaslighting
Introduction
raybecker.substack.com
August 7, 2025 at 3:07 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
forrt.bsky.social
🎓 Get PAID to co-create open-access teaching materials!

We're launching a funded initiative to make open science education more inclusive and accessible beyond elite institutions and the Global North.

Contribute a set of materials and earn €400. 🧵
May 17, 2025 at 3:23 PM
raybecker.bsky.social
I was inspired by the The Daily Show's segment on Monday to write this post relating some work that I did a few years ago with Sabina Tabacaru on the meaning of the phrase "raising eyebrows". May 12th definitely raised some eyebrows open.substack.com/pub/raybecke...
May 12th definitely raised some eyebrows
The phrase “raised eyebrows” is deceptively simple but semantically ambiguous given its meaning hinges on subtle contextual cues that both humans and AI systems often struggle to resolve.
open.substack.com
May 15, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
dermotlynott.bsky.social
PsyArXiv and OSF preprints have implemented DOI versioning - here's a short blog post about what that means
blog.psyarxiv.com/2025/04/16/n...
#openAccess #openResearch #openScience #preprints
New to PsyArXiv: DOI Versioning – PsyArXiv Blog
A short description of DOI versioning that has been implemented for PsyArXiv preprints
blog.psyarxiv.com
April 16, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
dermotlynott.bsky.social
***Job Announcement***
2 full-time and 2 part-time Assistant Professor posts in Educational Psychology. Posts will contribute to the new Doctorate in Ed Psych.

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DML092/a...

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DML081/a...
#irishResearch #jobsFairy
Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Educational Psychology x2 at Maynooth University, National University of Ireland Maynooth
Searching for an academic job? Explore this Assistant Professor/Lecturer in Educational Psychology x2 opening on jobs.ac.uk! Click to view more details and browse other academic jobs.
www.jobs.ac.uk
April 1, 2025 at 7:42 AM
raybecker.bsky.social
Don't tell me what to do www.mother.ly/health-welln...
Getting Dressed for the Day Can Make you Feel Happier - Motherly
This concept belongs to the theory of embodied cognition, which says that your body's actions (like getting dressed) affect your mind.
www.mother.ly
March 27, 2025 at 7:23 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
forrt.bsky.social
Register for the Replication Research Symposium organized by FORRT and the Münster Center for Open Science (online & on-site)!

Register for free (on-site or virtual*) before March 31st:
🔗 indico.uni-muenster.de/event/3176/r...

📅 3-day symposium on replications & reproductions (14–16 May 2025) 🧵
Replication Research Symposium
indico.uni-muenster.de
March 27, 2025 at 5:13 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
falkhuettig.bsky.social
My book ‘Looking Ahead. The New Science of the Predictive Mind’ is available from today. Cambridge has provided a temporary promo code, if you enter HUETT24 and order via the CUP website you get 20% off any version (hardback, paperback, or ebook) www.cambridge.org/de/universit...
March 6, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
improvingpsych.org
The Tentative Program for in-person SIPS is now available online!

Let's meet in Budapest for exciting hackathons, unconferences, roundtables, and workshops!

Check out the program here 👇
Program – SIPS 2025
Last update: 02/25/2025
buff.ly
February 27, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
mioana.bsky.social
Also by Eko: "Meta and X gave the green light to AI-generated ads that called for the gassing of immigrants in concentration camps and the burning of synagogues ahead of Germany’s federal elections on Feb. 23" www.adweek.com/media/meta-a... X approved 10/10 ads. Facebook rejected 5 as "political"
Meta and X Approve AI Ads Referencing Nazi War Crimes Ahead of German Elections, Research Finds
The ads promoted extremist hate speech.
www.adweek.com
February 25, 2025 at 5:46 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
erictopol.bsky.social
New: The largest medical A.I. randomized controlled trial yet performed, enrolling >100,000 women undergoing mammography screening
The use of AI led to 29% higher detection of cancer, no increase of false positives, and reduced workload compared with radiologists w/o AI thelancet.com/journals/lan...
Screening performance and characteristics of breast cancer detected in the Mammography Screening with Artificial Intelligence trial (MASAI): a randomised, controlled, parallel-group, non-inferiority, ...
The findings suggest that AI contributes to the early detection of clinically relevant breast cancer and reduces screen-reading workload without increasing false positives.
thelancet.com
February 4, 2025 at 3:00 AM
Reposted by Ray Becker
apoorvalal.com
chain of thought is hilarious

(distilled deepseek 14b running via ollama)
January 29, 2025 at 8:48 PM
raybecker.bsky.social
meirl
January 29, 2025 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
mitpress.bsky.social
"An original, thrilling, poetic, and utterly humane exploration of the linguistic bookends of our human lives."—Ellen Jovin, @grammartable.bsky.social

Michael Erard's intimate study of our first and last words arrives in just two weeks: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204942...
michaelerard.bsky.social Michael Erard @michaelerard.bsky.social · Jan 29
It’s here! An object I can hold!

As a thing, it’s surprisingly heavy. Said the 8 yo: “it’s so heavy because it’s full of love.”
The cover of my book with flowers peeking over the top
January 29, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
chrisfields38.bsky.social
And still a benchmark for chatbots: arxiv.org/abs/2310.20216
Does GPT-4 pass the Turing test?
We evaluated GPT-4 in a public online Turing test. The best-performing GPT-4 prompt passed in 49.7% of games, outperforming ELIZA (22%) and GPT-3.5 (20%), but falling short of the baseline set by huma...
arxiv.org
January 28, 2025 at 3:13 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
ducuuo.bsky.social
Vote vote vote!

Our ballot to save jobs at the University of Dundee will close in 10 days.

Post your ballots in the next couple of days to ensure that they arrive in time.

#SaveDundeeUniversity
A photograph of a person’s hand posting an addressed envelope in a red post box in Dundee.
January 20, 2025 at 10:54 AM
Reposted by Ray Becker
elliotthoey.bsky.social
Fully funded 4-year PhD with me at VU Amsterdam #emca workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/ph...
Vacancy — PhD position: Recording in social interaction
Are you looking for a PhD position in the field of communication? Do you have a background in conversation analysis, interactional-, or sociolinguistics? Are you fascinated by the impact of smartphone...
workingat.vu.nl
January 28, 2025 at 6:22 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
garymarcus.bsky.social
👉 DeepSeek may well have broken OpenAI’s Terms of Service and distilled their intellectually property without permission
👉 OpenAI may well have done analogous things to YouTube, New York Times, and countless artists and writers.
👉 Karma is a bitch.
January 29, 2025 at 12:39 PM
Reposted by Ray Becker
joachim.cidlab.com
Did a thing

bit.ly/SPDsf
Cover image of PNAS Special Feature: Dialogues about the practice of science
January 29, 2025 at 1:15 PM
raybecker.bsky.social
"The Risks and Rewards of Embodying Artificial Intelligence with Cloud‐Based Laboratories" by Nicolas Rouleau and Nirosha Murugan www.researchgate.net/publication/...
(PDF) The Risks and Rewards of Embodying Artificial Intelligence with Cloud‐Based Laboratories
PDF | Autonomous, cloud‐based laboratories (CBLs) are transforming scientific research by democratizing access to advanced instruments that accelerate... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...
www.researchgate.net
December 16, 2024 at 7:31 PM
raybecker.bsky.social
"Imagining abstractness: The role of embodied simulations and language in memory for abstract concepts" by Quentin Marre, Nathalie Huet, and Elodie Labeye www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Imagining abstractness: The role of embodied simulations and language in memory for abstract concepts
Can you visualize a dog? How about grief? The latter may be more difficult, as grief has no easily identifiable physical referent in the external world. Such an abstract concept is often seen as “d...
www.tandfonline.com
December 9, 2024 at 9:25 PM