Fomite

57 ms·

721.
by Fomite 5y ago
Tenured professor here: - Promotion. Tenure is awesome, yes, but there are two full academic ranks at my institution above associate professor with tenure, and if I want them, I need to continue to do the same things that got me tenure. Gra
722.
by Fomite 5y ago
"it's only ever going to go one way." I have seen it go the other way as well.
723.
by Fomite 5y ago
One very specific example I'd like to see is protection for foreign students on visas in the event that they report academic misconduct - there's lots of ways they can lose their funding after that, even if there's not reta
724.
by Fomite 5y ago
Not really, no. Generally, for retirement, faculty try to "draw down" their labs, and there's very often a "I'm going to see X student through to their defense, and then I'm done" as the end of an academic
725.
by Fomite 5y ago
For the rest of us, it's trying to make people feel like they're not singling themselves out for expressing their preferences. Me putting "He/Him" on my name tag is an extremely low cost/low effort thing.
726.
by Fomite 5y ago
Someone I know didn't get a job written for them because someone with staggeringly high qualifications applied. It's rare but it happens.
727.
by Fomite 5y ago
https://www.rand.org/news/press/2018/04/26.html RAND found that the VA typically also provides higher quality care.
728.
by Fomite 5y ago
Biology has a tremendous number of crackpots. The "I disproved Einstein" equiv. is "Here's my cure for cancer" (yes, all cancer). Then there are the anti-Evolution folks. The AIDS denialists. The anti-vaccine type
729.
by Fomite 5y ago
That's half my "I find this project interesting" consulting rate.
730.
by Fomite 5y ago
"The simple answer is: funding. There is no (public) money to revisit "known" ideas and results to help clarify them, apply them, or place them in better context. And I would not be the one to explain to the public to spend t
731.
by Fomite 5y ago
The best predictive model I've ever made tied rotavirus seasonality to prom dress sales. Science is explanation, which suggests testable predictions.
732.
by Fomite 5y ago
I mean, physicists are notorious for chasing crackpot theories in other fields for the exact same reason - they assume their background is sufficient to understand the current progress of a field, when it's not.
733.
by Fomite 5y ago
Myself, and a large number of folks I know in medicine, microbiology, etc. were pretty worried when it turned out they were doing most of their work without an IRB back in 2013.
734.
by Fomite 5y ago
...Markov Chains (via MCMC) underly most Bayesian inference problems, and pretty much all stochastic dynamical systems models are based on Markov Chains.
735.
by Fomite 5y ago
You don't need to know something is a global optimum - you just need to know there's a slightly better at-least-local optimum with a decrease in fitness between that and where one is now.
736.
by Fomite 5y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that evolution does not produce global optimums - only local ones.
737.
by Fomite 5y ago
Risk adjusted scoring is done in some areas where we have the data for this (healthcare associated infections and antibiotic usage). And this is a place where hospitals and doctors actively do want it to work, because there are financial pe
738.
by Fomite 5y ago
I am. In that I have several CDC funded projects using machine learning in medical analysis and outcome prediction. Even on extremely well curated data sets this is a fairly hard problem.
739.
by Fomite 5y ago
As someone who works on the methodological basis for a number of "Observed/Expected" healthcare metrics in the infection control and antibiotic stewardship space - just, this is pretty hard, even if you are trying to do a rig
740.
by Fomite 5y ago
This is also known as confounding by indication, and is something the pharmacoepidemiology field contents with a lot. And it shows up all the time in things like the Consumer Reports hospital rankings and the like, where hospitals with pa
741.
by Fomite 5y ago
This is even true when we're not talking about patient satisfaction. There's definitely conflicts for things like infection control, where what we should probably should be measuring (process measures) conflict with what patient a
742.
by Fomite 5y ago
Soft Money: A position where a substantial portion (usually 50%+) of one's salary is expected to be brought in by grants. Failing to do so is, at best, going to impact your salary, and at worst, is a good way to no longer have a job. H
743.
by Fomite 5y ago
“Yeah okay that’s great but nobody cares about this math crap. You need doctors.” Well the good news is if you ever want to go be an epidemiologist, you've already heard this bit!
744.
by Fomite 5y ago
We're currently using Unity as part of an epidemic simulator.
745.
by Fomite 5y ago
There are diseases with more and less zoonotic spillover potential, including some extremely predictable targets (hey cornoaviruses...), and projects to figure out the why and how of that zoonotic emergence.
746.
by Fomite 5y ago
Soft money supported versions are fairly common - mine's got a substantial hard money component, which is what makes it rare and honestly a little bit wonderful.
747.
by Fomite 5y ago
These rates are negotiated with the government, and aren't exceeding the actual costs. Indeed, someone I know crunched the numbers for my institution, and the "margin" is exceedingly tight, and for some projects, negative. I
748.
by Fomite 5y ago
Or Biology.
749.
by Fomite 5y ago
One of the great problems with this is that "Too many administrators", like "Too many regulations", is easy to say, but hard to implement. There's a reason each of those positions was created - often a fairly good
750.
by Fomite 5y ago
This. In 2008, state funding dried up, and has not returned, even in places with booming economies. Federal funding via research grants has been, at best, flat over the same time period. That leaves only one dial left to universities.

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