For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis of their content, rather than counting the applicants’ previous […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science
160 results.
It has been almost 10 years now that we have come to the realization that a particular type of our operant experiments can be classified as motor learning. In such “operant self-learning” experiments, the animal learns about the consequences of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on October 1, 2024
at 17:28
Comments Off on Motor learning at #SfN24
In a discussion about what decisions are, John Krakauer emphatically pronounced that “decisions happen for reasons”, in answering ‘no’ to my question if it wasn’t a decision with which foot to start walking from a stand-still. A recent article from […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on September 6, 2024
at 13:47
Comments Off on What is a decision?
I was very excited when our latest research paper came out, after all, I was confident our 30-year-long search for the sites of plasticity in the form of motor learning we study was coming to an end. In this work, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on July 26, 2024
at 12:27
Comments Off on Whodathunk? Motor learning in motor neurons, huh?
A few years ago, I came across a cartoon that seemed to capture a particular aspect of scholarly journal publishing quite well: The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat. There are […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It was my freshman year, 1991. I was enthusiastic to finally be learning about biology, after being forced to waste a year in the German army’s compulsory service at the time. Little did I know that it was the same […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on January 11, 2024
at 15:55
Comments Off on The speed (or lack thereof) of science
You may have seen a neutered version of this post over at the LSE blog. This post below, however, puts the tiger in the tank, as it was enhanced by CatGPT: Maybe scholarly societies have taken “the instruction”follow the money!” […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on December 1, 2023
at 11:50
Comments Off on Scholarly societies: like a cat chasing the laser dot
The DFG is a very progressive and modern funding agency. More than two years ago, the main German science funding agency signed the “Declaration on Research Assessment” DORA. The first point of this declaration reads “Do not use journal-based metrics […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on November 29, 2023
at 13:32
Comments Off on German funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?
It’s the time of the year again where 30,000 neuroscientists head to the US to talk neuroscience. This year the big annual conference is in Washington, DC, one of the three cities able to host this large event. Our first […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on November 7, 2023
at 10:29
Comments Off on Heading for #SfN23 with two posters
No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the wrong time for making publicly funded […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
