Bimoo

TO MY MYSTERIOUS BENEFACTORS

I got a full ride to Stanford University thanks to the Elsie B. Ballantyne fund. The Elsie B. Ballantyne foundation was formed in 1968 and it dissolved in 1972. That is all I could find out about them online. Yet a gift they made to Stanford paid my way through college. When I started my studies, I was informed that Mr. Robert Ballantyne was elderly and had trouble seeing, so I regularly wrote him thank-you notes in large letters informing him of my progress. When he passed way, I decided to write to his wife to send my condolences. Below is a verbatim copy of that letter. I never heard back from my mysterious benefactors, but they showed me the value and the joy of giving. Our foundation KANTAROT / КАНТАРОТ is a way of paying their gift forward.

https://qantarot.substack.com/p/to-my-mysterious-benefactors

WE NEED MORE AMATEURS IN SCIENCE!

Had a lot of fun with this NeuroLibre preprint, big thank you to Evelyn McLean, Jane Abdo, and Nadia Blostein for putting it together!

Also thanks to Aella, The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, Slime Mold Time Mold, Roger's Bacon and Seeds of Science for their science and for the interviews

https://preprint.neurolibre.org/10.55458/neurolibre.00031/

TO PDF OR NOT TO PDF?

In September we organized NeuroLibre Day, and the most provocative lecture came from Dmitry Novikov, a professor at NYU

I am a well-known PDF hater, but Dmitry made me question my assumptions and rethink the publishing incentive structure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UASTR-BGLo

"Some truths keep swimming around in my memory, refusing to be forgotten and resurfacing in most unexpected times and places."

I wrote this essay 10 years ago when I was applying for faculty positions. It got me the job. It still keeps me going.

https://qantarot.substack.com/p/my-teaching-statement

Instructions how to donate your voice to Buki 2.0 via the Mozilla Common Voice platform.

Macedonian speakers, help us train our open-source transcription tool

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/mk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEfg4imGTfI

Now my wife, Dragana Stikova, knows what I do on ChatGPT all day

It’s been a busy month for our Foundation KANTAROT, and we have lots to show for it

https://qantarot.substack.com/p/libra-net-19-augmenting-our-reality

I can never remember how many Gauss are in 1 Tesla (10,000) and how many satoshis are in 1 bitcoin (100,000,000).

Today I realized that bitcoin/satoshi = (Tesla/Gauss)^2 and my mnemonic needs are satisfied for the day

There's a popular theory by Erik Hoel that we stopped producing Einsteins because we perverted the concept of tutoring and mentorship. In the past tutors were world-class scientists who expanded the horizons of their gifted students. Today tutors are pragmatic professionals who help our children score high on standardized tests.

Our Foundation is providing mentorship of the old-school kind. My wife’s essay on this topic is personable, eloquent, and inspiring

https://umno.mk/naukata-e-prijatelka/

My interview for Macedonian TV Telma

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK3dnGeDYE8

Our vendor-neutral MRI work got an oral in the News on relaxometry session at ESMRMB 2024 (3:30pm on Thursday)

Agah Karakuzu could not get the visa to come to Barcelona, so it is up to me to live up to the title of our abstract

Four events and a preview

Our foundation KANTAROT is gearing up for a fun month ahead, including NeuroLibre day, European research night at Europe House Skopje, the Parlez-vous fran-sci collaboration with the Skopje French Institute, and the third Science for kids conference.

That, plus a sneak preview of a special project, at the link below

https://qantarot.substack.com/p/libra-net-18-four-events-and-a-preview

Over the last five years I have told countless students not to do a PhD. The reasons are many, including low salaries, stressful work conditions and poor prospects of becoming a professor.

I reviewed a book that made me rethink my strategy

https://qantarot.substack.com/p/it-goes-without-saying-a-review

Sometimes three minutes is all you get. I designed an entire graduate course around this idea.

https://qantarot.substack.com/p/grading-is-subjective-period

My love affair with the Stanford MRSRL scanner reaches a bittersweet conclusion today, when the scanner will be celebrated before being decommissioned later this year.

I cannot be there for the celebration, so I decided to write a love letter:

https://qantarot.substack.com/p/a-love-letter-to-the-mrsrl

Join us for NeuroLibre Day in Montreal on September 27!

We have a stellar list of speakers who will talk about reproducibility in publishing and registration is free

https://events.neurolibre.org/day/

To fix this issue we need a journal that will put article processing fees to good use:

1. Maintain an infrastructure that integrates the article, the code and the data

2. Pay the reviewer to make sure the article is reproducible

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/peer-review-is-essential-for-science-unfortunately-its-broken/

For those who like going down rabbit holes, the Tracing Woodgrains backstory ends with 52 pages of notes that document the arcane subculture drama surrounding David Gerard

Well worth a substack subscription!

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/a-young-mormon-discovers-online-rationality

“Finally, Gerard had found the most Reliable Source of all: himself.”

A fascinating read about citation mills, Wikipedia and the internet

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin

It was a pleasure to discuss #ismrm24 on Peter Bandettini's NeuroSalience podcast

My highlight was Andrew Webb's stellar Lauterbur lecture that made a clear distinction between hype and reality in low-field MRI, whereas Sean Deoni's tried to blur that line with his meandering (and pandering) Ernst lecture

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ohbm/episodes/Neurosalience-S4E20-with-Polimeni-J---Huber-L---Stikov-N---Vizioli-L---Yacoub-E----OHBM-vs-ISMRM-e2kqdbq

Last day of my 2024 sabbatical and I discover that my Erdős number has dropped to 3

Off to Montreal to buy Alan Evans a beer!

Our Foundation KANTAROT announced an award for best science reporting by an elementary school student in Macedonia.

The award honors my father's legacy and hopes to promote science journalism in Macedonian

https://naukazadeca.mk/kolegastikov

What a pleasant surprise!

Our 2015 paper on the accuracy of T1 mapping won the Michael S. Patterson Publication Impact Prize by the Canadian Organization of Medical Physicists

Congrats to co-authors Mathieu Boudreau, Ives Levesque, Christine Lucas Tardif, Joëlle Barral, and Bruce Pike

https://www.piratewires.com/p/bug-man-vs-the-robots