Fomite

19 ms·

301.
by Fomite 3y ago
Turns out for a lot of people it's easy to be on board with a high minded charter until it might cost something.
302.
by Fomite 3y ago
Given we teach that in our biomedical ethics course as fraud, I think your "most researchers..." statement is not necessarily supportable.
303.
by Fomite 3y ago
One of the first things a professor taught me on a class on the design of experiments is "Never doom yourself to success." The experiment shouldn't inherently be designed to confirm your biases. I've carried that with me
304.
by Fomite 3y ago
"So “single antibiotics don’t work for chronic Lyme but cocktails do and this wasn’t realized for decades” isn’t an unprecedented story. It could turn out that way." ...this leaves me extremely skeptical of the author's argum
305.
by Fomite 3y ago
A useful shorthand for this is a Tomahawk cruise missile is almost exactly the same amount as a NIH R01 grant.
306.
by Fomite 3y ago
As someone who works in a department that was essentially founded via a gift from some very generous donors, it has been enormously impactful in the nature of our positions, how we approach science, etc. All of them for the better.
307.
by Fomite 3y ago
My personal favorite are the occasional cases of airport malaria.
308.
by Fomite 3y ago
Note that California has reported two cases of Dengue in people who haven't travelled outside the United States.
309.
by Fomite 3y ago
We stuck with Intel MBPs for awhile because people needed machines, but the scientific computing infrastructure for Apple silicon took more than a little bit to get going.
310.
by Fomite 3y ago
I work at a state university, and how we spend our allocated funding, and whether we go over budget, both matter quite a bit.
311.
by Fomite 3y ago
There's an extensive negotiation period to arrive at these rates - universities don't get to just pick.
312.
by Fomite 3y ago
My department is actively pivoting away from more expensive researchers towards theorists, implementation scientists, etc. Partially because all that expensive lab equipment means expensive startup packages. And expensive grants get reviewe
313.
by Fomite 3y ago
This is often a clause in our commercialization agreements - that if a company sits on it, the license reverts back to us.
314.
by Fomite 3y ago
They often fund new departments or centers within existing universities, because despite all the complaining about overhead rates, setting up an organization required to house, support, accept funding for, etc. research is non-trivial. My c
315.
by Fomite 3y ago
"And the counter to this is how for many departments getting hold of their company card statements is like pulling teeth. They just try to tell Finance "just pay the bill, thanks". And then audits find faculty paying for flig
316.
by Fomite 3y ago
"Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load)." They better not have. This is actively ille
317.
by Fomite 3y ago
A couple things: 1) You can actively just donate money to a professor's lab. You cannot usual direct what they do with it, because that's a grant (or contract), but if you just think Professor X does amazing work, you can give the
318.
by Fomite 3y ago
We have been increasing funding in some ways . But, for example, the amount for a non-modular NIH R01 hasn't changed since the Clinton administration. A lot of individual grants are just as much work as they have been, more competitiv
319.
by Fomite 3y ago
Sitting on our tenure and promotion committee, I'd be extremely skeptical about someone having 30 graduate students doing a good job supervising them, and we consider having a lab of 3-5 students to be fairly productive for a pre-tenur
320.
by Fomite 3y ago
My kingdom for someone, someday sitting down and figuring out what the average corporation's overhead rate would be if they had to account for it like universities. Because as much as it seems high, there's no real comparison, bec
321.
by Fomite 3y ago
There are professors that choose to go this route. It is very risky, but if it pays off, it pays off big.
322.
by Fomite 3y ago
A bunch of this is just...wrong. "- Graduate students (in this setting) are typically funded, so the cost of their credits (often higher than undergrads) are determined by the university and such costs are a major factor of what is tak
323.
by Fomite 3y ago
It's also expensive, because lab start up costs money. The cost of a faculty recruitment in the sciences can be well into the hundreds of thousands.
324.
by Fomite 3y ago
This - my university is actually a fairly lean organization that's continually pushed more and more administrative burden onto faculty. A lot of people like hand waving and saying "Administrators", but like the idea that most
325.
by Fomite 3y ago
Given very few tenure-track faculty are making $150K, it's more like "A 85K salary has a ticking clock - and considers themselves lucky to have it - wherein if they don't meet some fairly steep performance goals, they are aut
326.
by Fomite 3y ago
What amuses, and irritates, me is that industry frequently projects their own system onto academia. They get incensed at the idea of overhead - but don't recognize that we're not legally allowed to have a profit margin.
327.
by Fomite 3y ago
"you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" This will come as a shock to the three laptops, one desktop, one server and five cluster nodes I have purchased on various grants. Also the "kickback" as you put it (aka in
328.
by Fomite 3y ago
This is not universally true. The last grant I had with a pure research non-profit, my state university had a markedly lower overhead rate, as well as far more flexibility in lowering it (if a sponsor pre-specifies a lower rate, we almost a
329.
by Fomite 3y ago
There's usually a mix of statistical models (some traditional time series methods, some neural network based) and mathematical models (i.e. SIR models). None of them fully capture all the dynamics we need to.
330.
by Fomite 3y ago
And things like "If you accidentally enable xeno-compatibility, good luck and god speed."

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