Melinda Baldwin is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. We talk about her work studying the history of Nature, scientific journals more broadly, what it means to be a scientist, peer review, the Tyndall project, and much more.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps

0:00:00: Melinda's chemistry-history double major

0:03:42: Why Melinda did a PhD on the history of Nature

0:07:06: The glorious beginning of Nature and the history of scientific journals

0:17:00: How Nature became a journal for scientists (rather than the educated general public)

0:19:59: When did scientists start calling themselves 'scientists'? The mergence of science as a profession

0:26:26: The history of peer review: How to get into Nature in the 19th century, and the rise of peer review during the Cold War

0:40:53: Establishing causality in historical research

0:48:33: The future of peer review

1:06:16: Tyndall, why?

1:19:02: A book or paper more people should read

1:22:24: Something Melinda wishes she'd learnt sooner

1:29:05: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/pod-bsky

Melinda's links

• Website: https://geni.us/baldwin-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/baldwin-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/baldwin-bsky

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/bjks-bsky

References and links

eLife peer review: https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-review

John Tyndall project: https://tyndallproject.com/

Baldwin (2017). In referees we trust? Physics Today.

Baldwin (2018). Scientific autonomy, public accountability, and the rise of “peer review” in the Cold War United States. Isis.

Baldwin (2019). Making" Nature" The History of a Scientific Journal.

Gordin (2012). The pseudoscience wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the birth of the modern fringe.

Poehler (2014). Yes please.

Zuckerman & Merton (1971). Patterns of evaluation in science: Institutionalisation, structure and functions of the referee system. Minerva.

Steve Fleming is a professor in psychology at University College London. I invited Steve to talk about his work on meta-cognition, but we ended up spending the entire episode talking about lab culture, starting a lab, applying for funding, Steve's background in music, and what drew him to do cognitive neuroscience. There's even a tiny discussion about consciousness research at the end.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps

0:00:00: Steve ran his lab in London from Croatia for a few years

0:23:57: Lessons as a PI: students and postdocs are adults and will figure it out

0:28:45: Learning more skills as a postdoc vs. starting a lab

0:41:13: Contacting departments to apply for grants

0:52:19: Steve's background in music

1:07:13: What drew Steve to cognitive science? A brief discussion of the future of consciousness research

1:27:23: A book or paper more people should read

1:33:02: Something Steve wishes he'd learnt sooner

1:38:16: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/pod-bsky

Steve's links

• Website: https://geni.us/sfleming-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/fleming-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/fleming-bsky

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/bjks-bsky

References and links

FIL at UCL: https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/

ERC Starting Grant: https://erc.europa.eu/apply-grant/starting-grant

Wellcome Trust Early-Career Award (without strict time restrictions): https://wellcome.org/research-funding/schemes/wellcome-early-career-awards

Example paper by Josh Mcdermott on music: McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga & Godoy (2016). Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature.

Carter (2002). Consciousness.

Chalmers (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of consciousness studies.

Dehaene, Al Roumi, Lakretz, Planton & Sablé-Meyer (2022). Symbols and mental programs: a hypothesis about human singularity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Isaacson (2021). The code breaker.

Marr (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information.

Pinker (1997). How the mind works.

Tononi (2004). An information integration theory of consciousness. BMC neuroscience.

Damian Blasi is a professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. We talk about his article 'Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science', linguistic diversity, how to study across the world's languages, his career path, and much more.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps

0:00:00: Why Damian studied physics

0:06:31: How to deal with small, sparse, incomplete, imbalanced, noisy, and non-independent observational data

0:09:38: Evolutionary advantages of different languages

0:14:01: How Damian started doing research on linguistics

0:20:09: How to study a language you don't speak

0:28:58: Start discussing Damian's paper 'Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science'

0:48:25: What can experimental scientists do about the vast differences between cultures, especially of difficult to reach peoples? And how different are languages and cultures really?

1:10:15: Why is New Guinea so (linguistically) diverse?

1:17:34: Should I learn a common or a rare language? And where?

1:29:09: A book or paper more people should read

1:32:31: Something Damian wishes he'd learnt sooner

1:33:56: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/pod-bsky

Damian's links

• Website: https://geni.us/blasi-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/blasi-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/blasi-bsky

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• BlueSky: https://geni.us/bjks-bsky

References

World Atlas of Languages: https://en.wal.unesco.org/world-atlas-languages

The Andamanese group that's hostile to strangers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

"the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast

Bakker (2022). The sounds of life.

Blasi ... Neubig (2021). Systematic inequalities in language technology performance across the world's languages. arXiv.

Blasi ... Bickel (2019). Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration. Science.

Blasi ... Majid (2022). Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. Trends in cognitive sciences.

Everett (2023). A myriad of tongues.

Floyd ... Enfield (2018). Universals and cultural diversity in the expression of gratitude. Royal Society Open Science.

Gordon (2004). Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science.

Hossenfelder (2018). Lost in math.

Koyama & Rubin (2022). How the world became rich.

Nettle (1998). Explaining global patterns of language diversity. Journal of anthropological archaeology.

Pica ... Dehaene (2004). Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian indigene group. Science.

Skirgård ... Gray (2023). Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Advances.