Fomite

10 ms·

181.
by Fomite 2y ago
"There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with." Thanks for making me laugh for a bit before I went back to staring at my screen in disbelief.
182.
by Fomite 2y ago
To paraphrase someone else, one of the purposes of those projects was to put the "Necessary" in "The United States is a necessary evil."
183.
by Fomite 2y ago
Trying to keep a computational epidemiology research group going in the teeth of the CDC, NSF and NIH being absolutely gutted.
184.
by Fomite 2y ago
It's a thing that some districts have done for a decade or two now, but it's fairly rare. I wrote a paper on alternatives to full school closure in 2008.
185.
by Fomite 2y ago
"Having 50% of their grant leeched off" is not how indirects work. You know what's a much bigger problem for people doing research? That the budget for a non-modular R01 from the NIH hasn't changed since the Clinton admi
186.
by Fomite 2y ago
This. I had someone try to claim once that having three undergrads in my lab meant a lot of research would be done. I had to explain that they were all net negatives - worthwhile ones, but not productive.
187.
by Fomite 2y ago
And the foundations made up that rate - our institution loses money on every Gates grant, etc.
188.
by Fomite 2y ago
Yeah, this will hit research hospitals, organizations like RTI, etc. And yeah, the rates private foundations pay is enabled by the NIH rates, and also that the NIH makes up the bulk of the funding in the first place. There's an argumen
189.
by Fomite 2y ago
The rules for off campus rates are pretty strict, and not just “I’m not in my office.” They get used for Extension, stuff like that. Ironically, prohibiting “breaks” to Gates, Chan-Zuckerberg, etc. and saying the rate they get is the same a
190.
by Fomite 2y ago
A 50% indirect rate both isn't particularly high. The idea that "You're raising" an extra 50% isn't really fair either - the effort into writing a grant is the same regardless of the indirect rate. There are argumen
191.
by Fomite 2y ago
Since a lot of people on HN don't know how indirect costs work, especially for the NIH: Grant proposals don't cover things that don't directly cover the project. Journal subscriptions, facilities, copy paper, administrative s
192.
by Fomite 2y ago
15% is wildly far from reasonable. More than that, it's an entirely made up number.
193.
by Fomite 2y ago
I wrote my college admissions essay, back in the day, on the virtues of being mediocre at a particular sport, and I'm like, 85% sure that's how I got in.
194.
by Fomite 2y ago
And proposed by two people, Musk and Trump, who are, shall we say, not great at holding up their end of financial bargains.
195.
by Fomite 2y ago
"The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it." This is wildly field specific.
196.
by Fomite 2y ago
You have seen a lot of press releases about what they're doing about it. Muzzling the CDC, gutting infectious disease research, and dismantling USAID (which does some disease work abroad).
197.
by Fomite 2y ago
Bluntly: None.
198.
by Fomite 2y ago
Counterargument: Having a backyard poultry flock in the middle of an avian influenza pandemic (it is a pandemic in birds), is maybe not the best idea.
199.
by Fomite 2y ago
Agreed - I'm rather fond of Extension programs. It's more a note that rural Colorado receives a great deal of benefit from Denver taxpayers, and that somehow never gets a hand wringing article about out of touch ranchers.
200.
by Fomite 2y ago
Denver taxpayers also end up supporting things like the CSU Extension system, which they won't ever see a direct benefit from.
201.
by Fomite 2y ago
In my experience, it's never been an administrative push, but a desire to be more precise, more inclusive, or both, or to reflect the stated preferences of the populations we work with. The only time I've had to fight with a scien
202.
by Fomite 2y ago
Funder publishing requirements are actually one of the few contractual things my university usually refuses to accept.
203.
by Fomite 2y ago
"How do I tell Copilot to go fuck itself?" - My mother during a recent tech support call.
204.
by Fomite 2y ago
I think her arguments are solid, I'm just not certain they're definitive . But I do find her presentation of those arguments to be both detailed and accessible.
205.
by Fomite 2y ago
I got death threats for suggesting that mandatory vaccination for school kids wasn't well justified not from the people who wanted vaccination, but from the people who decided I wasn't sufficiently opposed to it.
206.
by Fomite 2y ago
I've had two grants in a row get killed for political reasons, and a third is on the chopping block. What really kills me is that we get through the unpleasant, unproductive scaling up part, are about to hit our stride, and then...gone
207.
by Fomite 2y ago
This - TB is very well studied compared to most infectious diseases. I think really only HIV and Malaria edge it out.
208.
by Fomite 2y ago
"It's probably time we start looking a bit harder for "natural" or alternate treatments. Some in medical journals, are under scrutiny, but inconclusive." Antibiotics are found in, and derived from, nature.
209.
by Fomite 2y ago
Yep. My prior is that it is a zoonotic spillover event. Not necessarily that one, though there is some good evidence for it.
210.
by Fomite 2y ago
I base it on my evaluation of the arguments of those people as an epidemiologist. And their expertise - as I've said, my expertise focuses on a different aspect of outbreaks, with its own theories and methods, and I know enough to re

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