Chris Miller

The Bluesky Dictionary Can Bluesky say every word in the English language? Well this is your chance to find out.

Only 35% of the dictionary? Yes, it might require some tortile posts from us nonathletes to get it done, but we're no tambourinists, we can do this!

www.avibagla.com/blueskydicti...

"It gives one that too-familiar mixture of rage, despair, and embarrassment that is peculiar to the Trump era, and for which the English language does not have an appropriate word."

As stressful as it is to run a laboratory in the US right now, my thoughts are often with the NIH staff living in the awful chaos trying to preserve the whole enterprise. I’m grateful for every moment they choose not to give up. These people are the only thing keeping it from entirely collapsing.

Photo of president Harry S. Truman laying the cornerstone of the NIH clinical center.

President Harry S. Truman laid the cornerstone in 1951, saying of the Clinical Center's future work: "Medical care is for the people and not just for the doctors and the rich." He mentioned that 75 million Americans then without health insurance would soon become a "medically indigent class" and he challenged the scientific community to "translate the new knowledge gained by research into better care for more people." "Research to prevent disease" was a better investment for federal dollars than "providing unlimited hospitalization to treat it."

In 1951, Harry S. Truman laid the cornerstone of the NIH clinical center, stating, "Research to prevent disease" was a better investment for federal dollars than "providing unlimited hospitalization to treat it."

Shout out to the WSJ journalists who reported on Vought’s impoundment by footnote, causing the White House to walk it back. Impact journalism!!

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding The National Institutes of Health can’t award grants to outside researchers under a new White House restriction.

NEW
The White House is blocking the NIH from awarding new research grants for the rest of the fiscal year

Chokes off billions in research funding

Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol... with @nidhisubs.bsky.social

Similar story over here.

Yes, getting funding has always been hard, but this means 96% of NCI grant applications are getting nothing. So much wasted time. It's going to destroy so many labs, and so much promising research.

Just absolutely brutal.

However hard to read it might be, it'd probably be a more accurate way to represent science.

"Try this experiment on page 9 - antibody failed, dead end"
"Try this experiment on page 24 - data inconclusive, dead end"

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field?

That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience

A 🧵 1/n

No you cannot determine which drugs are safe and effective with machine learning. You cannot. It will not work. People will die.

People outside tech starting to realize how quality software and typing/generating code fast are not correlated

I frequently take comfort in the fact that the Universe is vast and beautiful and entirely unaffected by petty human foolishness

If you see this, I want your answer to this question from @alz_zyd_ on twitter:

"What is the largest scope/time project, of any kind, you've accomplished in your life so far?"

Raising my kids is an obvious answer

Professionally: playing a small part in making DNA sequencing a routine part of clinical cancer care (work still ongoing)

Teaching bioinformatics to hundreds of folks over the years has some large ripple effects, as they apply those skills to their own research

A major danger of LLMs is that humans are SO predisposed to attribute knowledge to any entity that uses natural language fluently. We cannot imagine that a machine that outputs natural-seeming speech/text doesn't have cognition. Brilliantly articulated by @emilymbender.bsky.social et al. (2021).

Congress shows first signs of resisting Trump’s plans to slash science budgets House panel rejects cuts to agricultural research, and Senators express doubts about cuts to NIH and forest research

🧪Good News!
A key committee in the House of Representatives rejected the administration’s plan to make deep cuts to research programs at the USDA; the leader of the Senate’s appropriations panel called the 40% cut to the NIH’$47 billion budget “disturbing.”
www.science.org/content/arti...

Atul Butte died yesterday.
The world lost a giant.
A big bear of a man.
With a huge smile.
With love for everyone.
With energy that could power a room.
I loved everything about Atul.
I loved how he was always happy.
I loved how excited he was about science and helping people.

Worth considering that one reason Bluesky doesn't always feel super fun is that current events are relentlessly horrifying and bad

12/
Bioinformatics isn’t about blindly analyzing big matrices.
It’s about asking:
“What’s the signal?
What’s the noise?
And what can I ignore to see the truth?”
That’s the real art of dimension reduction.

Two charts present survival rates for childhood leukemia over time, specifically focusing on Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) and Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). In the top panel, for ALL, a series of curved lines represent overall survival rates plotted against years since diagnosis. The lines show a marked increase in survival rates from the late 1960s, when only 14% of children survived more than five years post-diagnosis, to around 94% in the 2010s. Key intervals are labeled, with different colors indicating different periods of diagnosis, ranging from 1972-1975 to 2010-2015. The bottom panel illustrates survival rates for AML, which are consistently lower overall compared to ALL. Like the top graph, it features several colored lines indicating specific periods. The highest point noted indicates a survival rate of 65%. The graph captures trends in survival as well, showing gradual improvement over time, from 1975-1977 up to 2011-2017. Data sources for these visualizations are cited at the bottom: Mignon Loh et al. (2023) for ALL and Todd M Cooper et al. (2023) for AML, both from the Children's Oncology Group. The chart is published by Our World in Data, and licensed under Creative Commons by the author, Saloni Dattani.

I wrote a new piece on how much progress has been made in treating childhood leukemia.

The answer is: quite a lot!

Before the 1970s, fewer than 10% of children diagnosed survived 5 years after diagnosis.

Now most are cured and around 85% survive that long.
ourworldindata.org/childhood-le...

if [[ $fee == $feefi ]];then
$fee=$((fee + fi))
fi

for four in 4 44;do . . .

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

This is heartbreaking. Americans don't support this.

We thank Reviewer 2 for their helpful feedback which has greatly improved the paper

One problem we face today is how few people understand the science that helps us all. Some scientists are able to explain the importance of their work. @baym.lol of Harvard University is one of them. Science is for everyone, and benefits us all more than most people know.

a man with glasses and a mustache has the words " that 's science baby " above him ALT: a man with glasses and a mustache has the words " that 's science baby " above him

Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment
archive.ph/VNYzA

An article titled "How the Web Became Unreadable", posted on Medium. There is a soft paywall asking you to sign in, covering most of the article. Screenshot found on Mastodon https://beige.party/@mayintoronto/114497234942335666

A Venn diagram with three circles: one for LLMs, one for Regexps, and one for teenagers. The intersection for LLMs and teenagers contains the label “confidently wrong.” The intersection for LLMs and Regexps contains the label “seems to work”. The intersection for Regexps and teenagers contains the label “inscrutable language.” The intersection for all three contains the label “trouble with braces”.

too cynical?

Trump’s NIH Axed Research Grants Even After a Judge Blocked the Cuts, Internal Records Show A lawsuit led by the Washington state attorney general offers an unprecedented view of the termination of more than 600 NIH grants, including transgender research grants threatened by Trump’s executiv...

NEW: Whistleblower records show that the NIH axed research grants – even after a federal judge blocked the cuts with an injunction.

www.propublica.org/article/trum...

🧵

Same, except I sometimes also use emacs (something else that students don't understand)