Gon García-Castro
Clueless postdoc investigating language acquisition and comparative cognition • fNIRS and Bayesian stats • él/he
🌐 gongcastro.github.io
📍Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu, previously at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
- Back from snowy Budapest after presenting one of our ongoing fNIRS studies with neonates at #BCCCD2026. 🧠👶 One of the best conference experiences I've had. Thanks to the organisers and to everyone who stopped by to give nice feedback!
- Soltando pierna y también el hígado y el bazo.
- 🚨 Newsflash: Frederick III of the House of Habsburg named person of the year 1444 by TIMES for the invention of the printing press.
- Reposted by Gon García-Castro[This post could not be retrieved]
- “El laïcisme no és només un principi que limita la interferència religiosa en la política, sinó també una garantia que l’estat garanteix la igualtat per a tots els seus ciutadans i purifica la llei de la discriminació basada en la fe i la moral.“
- Una nova línia de resistència per a la lluita LGBTI+: el laïcisme. Per Defne Öcal. www.realitat.cat/2025/12/una-...
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroUna nova línia de resistència per a la lluita LGBTI+: el laïcisme. Per Defne Öcal. www.realitat.cat/2025/12/una-...
- Tidal también tiene wrapped, y me complace anunciar que, a favor de todo pronóstico, Amaral sigue ahí.
- Reposted by Gon García-Castro¡Estrenamos el primer episodio de Paciencia pa' la Ciencia! youtu.be/h7VF4y0AlxY Ojalá os guste, lleva todo nuestro cariño por esta profesión 🌻
- Brings a motorbike to a marathon and declares having democratised sports after finishing first.
- Claiming that one can become a PhD holder by prompting ChatGPT is the academic equivalent of calling yourself a professional athlete after watching your three year old brother hit five consecutive home runs in Wii Sports.
- 📃New paper out in Brain Topology! A collab w/ Ana Hernández-Sauret and Diego Emilia Redolar-Ripoll: Dissociating the Role of Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex and Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Cognitive Control in Depression: A Combined HD-tDCS and fNIRS Study link.springer.com/article/10.1...
- Reposted by Gon García-Castro[This post could not be retrieved]
- A 30-40% profit margin for a company that mostly relies on unpaid labour from their own "clients" to barely do their job making science (which they did not produce) available is a good case for abolishing the whole industry.
- Investing in science does pay off almost always one way or another, as long as a bunch of rich dudes don't exploit researchers' job insecurity to get richer.
- Por si alguien más está pensando dejar Spotify:
- 4 months since I changed to Tidal, very good alternative. Almost identical experience with two exceptions: no podcasts (I'm using another app for those), and offline mode is not good. Otherwise, I'm very happy with the change! I used a Python script to transfer playlists: github.com/spotify2tida...
- 📒 Here's a new blog post, in which I present pymbrola, a Python module that provides an interface with the MBROLA speech synthesiser: "pymbrola: A Python interface to the MBROLA speech synthesiser" gongcastro.github.io/blog/pymbrol...
- I illustrate some use cases, modifying the duration of individual phonemes or modulating their pitch contours. Here's a simple example.
- If you want to try it out, you can install it from PyPi (python -m pip install mbrola). As a requirement, you will need to install MBROLA first (see my previous blog post): gongcastro.github.io/blog/pymbrol...
- La ciencia es, de forma efectiva e inevitable, una herramienta discursiva. Y el hecho de que mucha gente aún crea que podamos demarcar la ciencia es parte del problema.
- Happy to share a new peer-reviewed study on PubMed. Blessing eggs creates bigger and tastier chickens (p < 0.001). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41035978/
- No hay una sola definición de Ciencia©️ que no deje un resquicio que una persona o institución de cuestionables intereses o incentivos pueda aprovechar. No existe una definición completa y especifica que nos pueda ser útil. Y esto lo sabemos desde hace casi cien años.
- Reposted by Gon García-Castro1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.
- Claro, la subida de los precios se debe al aumento de los salarios de los trabajadores sin un incremento de la productividad. El timón danés que se están haciendo las principales compañías tecnológicas entre ellas—invirtiendo unas en otras miles de millones sin producir nada—no tiene nada que ver.
- Nvidia invests in OpenAI, OpenAI rents compute from Oracle, Oracle buys Nvidia’s hardware, and Nvidia records huge sales. Everyone in the circle reports rising revenue, rising valuations, and surging share prices, but the cash is largely moving in circles. graceblakeley.substack.com/p/the-ai-cir...
- Made some friends in the Marmara sea.
- Outsourcing your thinking process to an autocomplete machine on steroids is definitely a good thing to encourage your students to do, and is definitely how AI is supposed to push societal progress.
- Yo creo que uno no debería hacer divulgación hasta que no tenga su primer Nobel y cuarenta y cinco años cotizados. Antes de eso me parece prematuro hablar de ciencia de manera accesible y rigurosa.
- It only takes me another attempt at coding a multilevel model in Stan to remember what a blessing brms is.
- Barcelona 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸
- Reposted by Gon García-Castro🔴 ÚLTIMA HORA | L'organització de la manifestació en suport a Palestina calcula que la convocatòria ha reunit 300.000 persones. Hi ha tanta gent que algunes persones estan baixant per la Rambla i el carrer de Pau Claris. El Passeig de Gràcia està completament col·lapsat.
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroUN says the genocide in Gaza won't stop as it's profitable. Palestine is a training field to test weapons & surveillance tech that are now sold worldwide. Those making billions? Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Alphabet, Amazon, IBM, Caterpillar, Microsoft, MIT, Blackrock, insurers, real estate firms.
- 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸
- I'm back with a new blog post! 📒 "Installing the MBROLA speech synthesiser" Some months ago, we decided to synthesise some auditory linguistic stimuli in MBROLA for an experiment. Setting up MBROLA was a bit of a nightmare. In this post I share how we did it. gongcastro.github.io/blog/pymbrol...
- The blog post provides a walkthrough, as well as a bash script. It assumes you are using a Linux/Unix-based operative system, or a WSL instance (for Windows users). gist.github.com/gongcastro/0...
- If you can't be bothered using Linux or WSL, I also made a Docker image. 🐳 hub.docker.com/repository/d...
- I wrote this post in preparation for an upcoming one, in which I'll present pymbrola, a Python package that allows calling MBROLA from the Python console. ⏩
- This week I taught an introductory lecture on fNIRS at the Deep Tech Brain Summer School at @ub.edu. We covered some theory, experimental design in dev populations and a live demonstration of data acquisition and preprocessing using @nirx-nirs.bsky.social's NIRSport2. Thanks to the organisers!
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroWouldn't this method show that classic social psychology garbage was highly replicable? Besides, false findings can replicate even without pub bias - hot hand "fallacy" replicated but data analysis was incoherent. After a couple decades of science reform, I'd like to think we've moved beyond this
- Three years into the "formal" onset of AI hype and the only domains where AI has objectively impacted people's lives is that we now get identified, located, made redundant, and killed more easily.
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroBye forever, WeTransfer.
- La actual era de la austeridad y los recortes ha sido rebautizada como "la era de la abundancia". Naturalmente, no nos queda otra que volver a la austeridad y los recortes.
- Se acabó la era de la abundancia. La combinación de pensiones, deuda y defensa aboca a España a décadas de austeridad. La Autoridad Fiscal calcula que España necesitará un ajuste de 30.000 millones por llevar el gasto militar al 3,5% del PIB social.elpais.com/pofp25
- Culpa mía, ayer me compré un aguacate más grande de lo habitual y eso ha debido hacer saltar las alarmas en Bruselas. No más aguacates hasta que superemos este bache en la economía.
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroHello & HAPPY FRIDAY, as promised an open letter by my lovely colleagues and myself. Everybody, feel free to sign this even if you are not NL-based and ‼️ share ‼️ (anonymous signature is poss): Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia openletter.earth/open-letter-...
- Solo me quedan dos episodios de #Andor. Es muy una pasada que la saga con la que crecí desde los cinco años haya albergado algo una serie tan interesante, potente y políticamente comprometida.
- There's some audacity in this statement after a decade of promoting the mantra that there is a "replicability *crisis*" that should make everyone doubt the credibility of science, as a whole. Now it turns out it's been fueling anti-science discourses without improving the credibility of science?
- It remains frustrating that prominent voices in #metascience are seeing weaponization of science reform as more of an opportunity to push their preferred policies than the threat it is. cen.acs.org/research-int...
- Reposted by Gon García-Castro"Nosek also wants academia to create clear career paths for people doing replication studies—it should be something that university bosses admire and want to promote." Also NO. This is someone's pet theory for how science works, not actually how science works.
- This. I could compromise that replicability is at best, "desirable", as in: Provided solid theoretical background, causal inference, and statistical properties, then being able to observe an effect across equivalent observational/experimental settings *can* provide further credibility to it.
- Voy a poner la fotocopiadora de la biblioteca a echar más humo que la locomotora Orient Express.
- Reposted by Gon García-Castro"Israeli soldiers in Gaza told Haaretz that the army has deliberately fired at Palestinians near aid distribution sites..." www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...
- Back with a late update from #WILD2025 in Donosti! Flora Chartier (our new PhD star ✨) and I presented exciting, preliminary results from our studies. Thanks everyone for the feedback! Here's a glance of our poster on the ongoing fNIRS study in newborns at the @sjdhospitalbarcelona.org.
- Ens veiem el dissabte a Barcelona. 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇱🇧🇱🇧
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroSOS! the volunteers on 'Madleen' have been kidnapped by Israeli forces. Sergio Toribio is a Spanish citizen. Pressure the Spanish foreign ministries and help us keep Sergio safe! E: consular@maec.es ...2/
- Tenéis una obligación con Sergio Toribio y el resto del Madleen @freedomflotilla.bsky.social de exigir su liberación inmediata: @jmalbares.bsky.social @exterioresgob.bsky.social Un intento de evadir vuestra responsabilidad es un apoyo al genocidio del pueblo palestino. Actuad YA. #AllEyesOnMadleen
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroIf you don't do your due diligence on who you speak to, you are totally culpable. This isn't free discussion of ideas. This is lending credibility to a publication run by overtly right-wing 'academics'
- Reposted by Gon García-Castro🚨🇵🇸| El @nytimes.com ha publicado un vídeo encontrado en el teléfono de uno de los enfermeros ejecutados por el ejercito israelí en Gaza. 👉 Los vehículos son claramente identificados y con las luces encendidas: eso desmonta - una vez más - la versión israelí.
- Casi se me había olvidado lo poco que me gusta volar pero siempre puedo confirmar en la señora sentada a mi lado y su café desparramado por toda la fila tras unas turbulencias para recordármelo.
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroThe leading cause of death among pregnant and postpartum women in the U.S. is homicide by an abusive partner. Perinatal women are more than twice as likely to be murdered than to die from sepsis, hypertensive disorders or hemorrhage.
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroThe role of cognateness in native spoken word recognition: osf.io/7k3ga
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroNew preprint w/Serene Siow, Kim Plunkett, and Nuria Sebastian-Galles. We investigated how listeners exploit phonological similarity to correctly translate words from a completely unfamiliar language!🧵 🔗 osf.io/7k3ga_v1 @upf.edu @ox.ac.uk
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroBased on recent incidents like this one, I can't in good conscience, recommend that any (non-U.S.) prospective PhD student or Postdoc seek a position in the U.S. at this time. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/u...
- Reposted by Gon García-CastroDisappeared Tufts Human Dev. PhD student Rumesya Ozturk is also a graduate of Teachers College - she’s a dev. psychologist studying children’s media & prosocial development. She also bakes without recipes and binge-watches cartoons. She is our colleague & she was abducted on the street w/ our tax $.
- Being caught between supporting a fascist dictator and not supporting a fascist dictator is now called "it's complicated".
- "its values" give me a break.
