Notices by Kate Nyhan (kdnyhan@social.esmarconf.org), page 2

@mshoberecht
Hoorah, we are saving money and time and "overall" the quality is 74% as good as it used to be!

@mshoberecht
The National Library of Medicine's switch from largely-human to largely-machine subject indexing of biomedical journal articles is a great example of @pluralistic 's take, that it's a lot easier to persuade bosses to buy AI than it is to build AI that actually does the job.

Do I know anyone who uses open resources like Lens or OpenAlex or Internet Archive Scholar for comprehensive, reproducible searching?

Evidence synthesis, bibliometrics, scientometrics, metaresearch -- as long as you care about transparency, I'm interested

Especially if you are using non-subscription resources because you are based in the global south, or you're an independent scholar

I am once again asking

Even Mastodon is better when you block, block, block :)
Brought to you by a combo: the small joy of blocking an account that acted like a jerk to my friend on here, and the way I wished I could block the IRL people conversing in their "need to reach the back row of Carnegie Hall" voices at the next table on the cafe terrace

I wonder why I never notice a super loud person in a public space who is positive, uplifting, and gracious towards the friends they are gossiping about....

@chronodm Target audience is in Malaysia, so removed linguistically as well as geographically. But, @lffontenelle pointed out that Brazilians use the same metaphor, so I think you're right that I may have been overthinking things.

Help! The metaphor of "snowballing" -- starting with one paper and adding more papers to your "read this soon" pile, because they have citation relationships or they use the same dataset or they come from the same theme issue or they are by the same senior author's lab or whatever -- is there a similar metaphor that would work well in a tropical climate, where people have possibly never had the experience of rolling a snowball around until it's gigantic? #English #metaphor

In the age of "you do you" public health, it's not just that the government won't/can't guarantee food safety - this public university won't even let you get it tested. That's how much more value they put on agriculture than consumers' rights/transparency/public health.

Wow. A microbiology lab at Texas A&M accepted purchased raw milk samples from NPR for H5N1 testing, then contacted the milk producers to seek permission. When the producers said, "don't test our milk," the lab not only declined to carry out the tests but also refused to send the samples on to another lab.

I know @pluralistic has talked about right to repair in the context of wheelchairs - I bet you'd be interested in this too

https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/01/wheelchair-repair-delay-numotion-national-seating-mobility/

The headline is "After private equity firms gobbled up wheelchair makers, users pay the price in long repair times"

@feld @paul_ipv6 @tychotithonus
"Those people" are a significant percent of the potential user base, and if they aren't a significant percent of the *actual* user base, gee, I wonder why

"The good news is while there’s no biological solution to such a new and dangerous virus, there absolutely are engineering and social solutions."

Julia Doubleday on living with COVID via IAQ improvements

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/learning-to-live-with-covid-means

@onepict @smallcircles
Maybe I could live with masks being optional at an event if the conference had great IAQ, capped in-person attendance at 50% of capacity, offered outdoor space for eating, provided everyone with rapid tests and insisted on them being used every day, made symptomatic people stay home, offered no-questions-asked refunds so that sick and exposed people aren't incentivized to come....

@onepict @smallcircles
+100

@onepict @smallcircles
If these folks who think that we go on too much about masks and boosters actually wanted to be in community with us, they'd plan COVID-safer events instead of deciding that "rational" people need to accept preventable infectious disease and that "normal" people need to accept exclusion of people with disabilities.

Just looked at https://healthdata.gov/Hospital/COVID-19-Reported-Patient-Impact-and-Hospital-Capa/g62h-syeh for my home state.

While nosocomial COVID isn't reported in such a way that you could count the total cases, I can calculate that between June 1 and June 17 (latest available date), the proportion of hospitalized COVID patients who *must* have been infected SARS-CoV-2 after they were already in the hospital for something else (because they tested positive more than 14 days after they were admitted) rose as high as 9.3%, and never dropped below 4.9%.