After taking the rest of the month to relax and settle into my new apartment, I’m excited to share that I’ll be starting a postdoc this September at UChicago in the NIH/NIA T32 Demography and Economics of Aging training program. Looking forward to this next chapter!

Elijah Watson@elijahjwatson.bsky.social · 37m ago

Just submitted my phd dissertation and mph research paper :)

Just submitted my phd dissertation and mph research paper :)

Elijah Wood: It's Done - Lord of the Rings

ALT: Elijah Wood: It's Done - Lord of the Rings

static.klipy.com

I defended my dissertation on Monday (🎉), have packed and cleaned from Tuesday through today, am moving to a new apartment tomorrow, presenting my MPH poster next Wednesday, finalizing my dissertation for submission by next Friday, and then my partner has a major surgery the following Wednesday 😵‍💫

What To Know About Cyclosporiasis https://theonion.com/what-to-know-about-cyclosporiasis/

Finally reading this fully The part about forensic anthros being “coroners”, implying that they are workers not thinkers so they cannot contribute to debates in the field 🤯 (the field sure is happy to put them to work teaching 1st year seminars on CSI & Bones bc those classes get butts in seats)

Stephanie M. Lee@stephaniemlee.bsky.social · 3w ago

New Q&A: Is anthropology hopelessly politicized, more than any other humanistic field? That's the charge that's been flying around this summer, so I wanted to hear from Carolyn Rouse, the president of the American Anthropological Association. She had a lot to say. www.chronicle.com/article/is-a...

Something, something, the ontological turn & anthropology™ creating a world where (1) we endlessly qualify our claims as partial, situated, & positional, AND (2) dropping the cultural subfield prefix & treating humanism as the field’s all-encompassing mode of inquiry is the natural order of things

Stephanie M. Lee@stephaniemlee.bsky.social · 3w ago

New Q&A: Is anthropology hopelessly politicized, more than any other humanistic field? That's the charge that's been flying around this summer, so I wanted to hear from Carolyn Rouse, the president of the American Anthropological Association. She had a lot to say. www.chronicle.com/article/is-a...

Submitted the last of my three dissertation papers to my committee yesterday! And woke up with a cold today. My body really held out until the end 😵‍💫😂

Very happy to work with @nber.org to outline our research program (with @hamidnb.bsky.social), summarizing what we are learning about the impacts of early life circumstances on old age mortality and next steps.

The Long Shadow of Early Life: Life Cycle Exposures and Old-Age Mortality

nber.org

⚙️ New on the COS blog: Principal Research Scientist Noah Haber (@whaleactually.com) shares how the SCORE project developed a collaborative reproducible manuscript workflow, walks through two different approaches, and introduces an open-source R package. www.cos.io/blog/toward-...

Toward Collaborative Reproducible Manuscripts

COS Principal Research Scientist Noah Haber shares how the SCORE project developed a collaborative reproducible manuscript workflow, walks through two different approaches, and introduces an open-sour...

cos.io

This is perhaps the most impressive #medical study I have seen in years: www.nature.com/articles/s41... It will save a lot of lives.

An ECG biomarker for sudden cardiac death discovered with deep learning - Nature

A deep-learning model trained on electrocardiogram (ECG) waveforms identifies an easily visible biomarker that predicts sudden cardiac death more accurately than the current clinical state of the art.

nature.com

A paper based on my master's thesis is out this morning in PDR! It offers a new way of theorising and estimating "demographic memory". In a week of heatwaves and political instability in the UK, these toy examples work as a nice graphical abstract 🌡️ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

While it does not implement TMLE, you could in principle try causatr: github.com/etverse/caus.... It would be a nice “validation” for me 😅

GitHub - etverse/causatr: R package for the estimation of causal effects.

R package for the estimation of causal effects. Contribute to etverse/causatr development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Technically, they’re Remains now.

Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social · last mo.

A fifth of Leave voters have died.

#causalsky #biostatsky bat signal: Can anyone point me to TMLE code for a controlled direct effect adjusting for post-exposure confounders? (I've used medoutcon in other work for the IDE, but here I need a CDE 🙏) @nimahejazi.org @idiaz.bsky.social @kararudolph.bsky.social @aschuler.bsky.social

Exclusive: The National Science Foundation is trimming this year’s budgets for hundreds of its traditional basic science programs by roughly 20% to 30%, even though its overall budget is down just 3%. https://scim.ag/4xY2KCm

Exclusive: NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say

Unexpected shift in funds has meant sharp drop in grants this fiscal year

science.org

Had a great first time participating in the Evolutionary Demography Society conference last week in Fort Collins, followed by a much needed weekend hiking trip to the Snowy Range Mountains in Wyoming 🏔️🐾

After the tarp went up to try and stop the “Berlin Wall” moment, Cliff Owen of the AP got the iconic 📸 shot. 🇺🇸

If anyone is interested in this but missed the talk, I'm afraid it wasn't recorded on this occasion, but the slides are now available on our webpage: ciig-seminar.github.io And Vanessa is more than happy to answer questions by email!

Now that's what I call a spicy opeing: Understanding mechanisms is not a research question.

Georgia Tomova@georgiatomova.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Why we should rethink causal mediation, and what to do instead? Come to hear the answer from Vanessa Didelez at the next CIIG seminar! The seminar will be hybrid. If you are in London, come join us in person at UCL! Otherwise, you can join on Zoom as usual. Registration links in comment below.

Was really excited that my recent paper got its first (non letter-to-editor) citation! But, then I realized it's apparently an AI hallucination :/

Very grateful to have secured a postdoc offer in this market. Excited to share more soon and to start chipping away at submitting a backlog of papers that have overstayed their welcome in my Dropbox drafts folder and, more pragmatically, there's nothing like a hard deadline to whip me into shape :)

Meanwhile, more on the shitweaselry within the NSF. For unexplained reasons they've put all grants to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Duke on hold.

Exclusive: NSF puts new research grants to top universities on hold

US science funder once again restricts awards to Harvard University and other research institutions.

nature.com

I wrote for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social about Kathryn Paige Harden's new book, an attempt to popularize the eugenics of criminality. I read it as a gambit to build liberal support for the project animating far right politics today, inspired by Replacement theory.

Los Angeles Review of Books@lareviewofbooks.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"The book reads like an 'Eat Pray Love' of biotech grifting, designed to make her into a public figure based on her personal journey." Jonathan Basile reviews Kathryn Paige Harden’s “Original Sin.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/original-sin-eugenics-scientific-calvinism-kathryn-paige-harden/

Just saw the news after writing a self-promotional post about my research on fetal exposure to political violence. (tired of being reminded how ubiquitous it is 😵‍💫) Long story short: political violence in the womb can leave long term marks on cardiovascular health and molecular aging

Elijah Watson@elijahjwatson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Really excited to be speaking on my dissertation research on selection vs. scarring in utero, leveraging the enrollment timing of the Cebu, Philippines longitudinal birth cohort study relative to the 1982–83 El Niño drought and the August 1983 assassination of opposition leader Ninoy Aquino. (1/2)

Really excited to be speaking on my dissertation research on selection vs. scarring in utero, leveraging the enrollment timing of the Cebu, Philippines longitudinal birth cohort study relative to the 1982–83 El Niño drought and the August 1983 assassination of opposition leader Ninoy Aquino. (1/2)

My T32 postdoc applications are in limbo due to funding delays. I don’t know if I’m defending in 3-4 months (to start a postdoc) or staying in grad school another year. I have to sign a lease soon. It's a mess, but I'm grateful to have one more year of funding in such a turbulent time.

Scott Delaney@scott-delaney.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Next up: T grants These support grad student and post doc training programs at certain institutions. # of new grants issued through April 15 in FY2024 (the last “normal” year): 70 FY2025: 23 FY2026: 2

If only a dozen Republicans in Congress found the will, they could impeach and remove him today.

I've spent the past two hours digging around in online newspaper and governmental archives to try to clear something up for my dissertation and it has paid off beautifully. A very big small win 🥲

I’ve been dreading opening analysis files for part of my thesis that does geocoding in Docker and fits a model in Stan. I hand-coded (funny to have to say that now) it years ago, but before I was trained in reproducible coding. Claude helped me get it tight and reproducible in a few hours 🥲

I saw five 22 Clark buses in a convoy last night. My friend had a theory this route is cursed. She said it always comes in twos. I don’t know what five means but it cannot be a good sign.