@greyson
Academic & writer. 🇨🇦Applied Public Health Chair. I study health information practices & interventions, often pertaining to vaccination and/or gender. I also bicycle & drink coffee a lot, and write fiction a little. Recovering classical bassist.
I love the term used in this interview, “technologies of isolation”. It feeds into something I’ve been thinking about over recent weeks, which is our damaging obsession with independence. It’s damaging for mental health, it’s detrimental to families coping and children thriving and much more, and…
"more than 1,100 children have been reported injured or killed in the violence. This includes 200 children reportedly killed in Iran, 91 in Lebanon, four in Israel and one in Kuwait"
Folks, the use of AI to write reviews is a clear violation of peer review ethics + it endangers the authors' intellectual property rights. Don't do it.
Thank Julia for filing this suit and getting the tool shut down almost immediately 👏🏽👏🏽
there was also a Stanford study that found that a surge in AI slop by lazy people actually created significantly more work for others who had to decipher and correct it
this "I'm being efficient" (but not really) vibes well with the American obsession with artifice and appearing productive
One thing I know is Margaret Atwood never had model collapse.
"Call for International Doctoral Students: Short-Term Research Visit at the Social Media Lab" socialmedialab.ca/2026/02/24/c...
1-2y postdoc with lovely supervisors @socialmedialab.ca in Toronto, Canada! #LIS #Communication (Plus, no ref letters at initial appln stage; yay!)
Ooh, I don’t know but would ask Alice Virani & co.
(Recognizing I don’t typically respond to the rallying cry “Ladies” but am so excited to share that a government can in fact just *do that*. Also, upon reflection, I’d probably join Josie’s team of avenging ladies if summoned.)
It’s the last time* where I live! 🎉🙌🎆
*w the slight unacknowledged possibility of one more someday if the rest of Canada or the PNW decides on permanent standard time or halfsies.
Thanks! I’ll go bug some epidemiologists about this.
Right. Just wondering about relative validity of wastewater surveillance (obv only where there is municipal sewer) vs interview-based estimates vs other approaches I’m unaware of to try to establish this range.
Assuming that some % of milder measles cases are going unreported in recent outbreaks, what would be a valid way to estimate total cases in a region experiencing an outbreak?
I missed that Statistique Canada had released 2024 life expectancy.
Life expectancy in Canada and US in 2024 has virtually returned to 2019 pre-pandemic levels (US 0.2y higher, CA 0.06y lower).
www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quo...
Oh, no, I am just uneducated, and it's Arabic-Indic. IDK how you change it back, but that's what it is.
Watch it be some made up language from a fantasy novel or popular YA scifi series mystifying us, haha.
I literally assumed this was AI by the nonsensical watch face numbers before I realized who had posted it. #NotAStroke
It is not but I guess she wanted to quote it anyway.
This paper argues that misinformation research needs to move beyond studies of a few wealthy countries and online samples to include diverse, real-world information environments worldwide in order to produce more accurate and effective insights. I agree!
misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/towa...
Part of being a community-engaged researcher is treating communities w respect. This includes being forthright abt the limitations of academic research, e.g., it takes a LONG TIME to get to publication, to get rsch funding we have to do something *new* in scholarly terms, not just good for people.
My off-the-top-of-head ideas:
1. Refine the RQ to add novelty & still address their underlying issue (maybe add a 2nd more novel Q);
2. Use this topic as case to test/further theory;
3. Add novel methods to make methodological contribution;
4. Possibly a comparative study if that would add novelty.
^By "not much scholarly novelty" I mean the topic, research question, and method they suggest to you have all been done before with other, likely-similar communities (perhaps in slightly different geographies) in the past.
(I have my own ideas, but am curious what I may not have thought of!)
An interesting question arose in conversation last week and I'm curious about thoughts from other academics/social scientists:
What do you do when a community partner (esp a marginalized community you have built a relationship with) wants to do a study that doesn't have much scholarly novelty?
😱
Graphic featuring details of project. Pictured is Dr. Ogilvie wearing a black turtleneck, Dr. Marquez wearing a black button-down shirt with red dots, and Dr. Sekirov wearing a pink sweater.
Although Canada has made significant progress through screening and early treatment, recurrence after standard care continues to affect roughly 10 per cent of patients. The complex interplay between HPV, the immune system and the microbiome of the genital tract is still not fully understood. The Terry Fox Research Institute is investing $2 million to help change that. With this grant, a multidisciplinary team led by Drs. Gina Ogilvie, Inna Sekirov and Citlali Marquez will work to uncover how the body interacts with HPV and pinpoint those most at risk of cervical cancer, paving the way for personalized and preventative follow-up care.
"The knowledge gained from this research will help improve how we identify and monitor patients at higher risk, leading to more precise and effective follow-up care." - Dr. Gina Ogilvie, University of British Columbia.
March 4 is Intl. HPV Awareness Day: Ending cervical cancer is within reach, but only if we close the remaining gaps.
That's why TFRI is investing $2 million in a BC-based research team working to decode how the body and HPV interact to stop cervical cancer.
Learn more: tinyurl.com/mukh5fan
In 2025 things changed @ NIH. It's possible my colleagues and I over-represent areas of research heavily targeted (e.g., vaccination, gender & women's health, health equity) for elimination by US regime, but overall US rsch $ was way down last year & foreign subgrants halted at least temporarily.
15% even seems optimistic based on recent competitions (not all proj grant, some team/op/catalyst). Have we seen any documentation yet regarding any changes in appln volume since US largely got out of the funding biz (at least in certain area).
Not all tools are right for all jobs. A LLM trained to spit out standard outlines, format writing, or audit it for hallmarks of clarity, might be helpful In scientific or business writing. An LLM generating novels, though, will inherently be derivative, missing the creativity human minds can bring.
A decent starting point to assessing potential of an “AI” technology is to ask its purpose: is it aiming to improve consistency of a task & rapidity of algorithmic change? Might work—these are things mechanization can be good for. OTOH, if it just aiming to save $ by eliminating humans, question it.