Here's my understanding of the operations of most US universities that hire scientists as faculty (some of this may be applicable to universities in other parts of the world too):
Universities operate like companies where teaching profs are employees, educational degrees are the products being sold, and students are the customers (they pay for tuition and we all know how big of a problem is student debt thanks to these companies, err I mean universities).
Research Faculty are expected to teach and that's the main source of their income. Probably also why usually they aren't given the title of "Scientist" but of "Research Faculty".
Research Faculty pay for their research through grants. If they don't wish to take on teaching duties, they must be able to secure grants to pay for their salaries.
Research Faculty pay for the lab space, shared equipment, benefits, and other admin costs to the university via what are called "overheads" - this is the % cut that the university takes from each grant that a research faculty gets while being affiliated to the university.
This is why the bigger your grants, the happier the university will be to promote you to a "tenured" position. Also why scientists are often forced to follow grant "trends" to get the big bucks.
Universities also rely on endowments, gifts, and donations from wealthy individuals and philanthropic organizations to pay for things like construction/renovation of buildings/libraries, or for paying certain research faculty who take on extra duties like the Chairs/Heads of departments. That's why you see titles like "The XYZ Chair of Neuroscience" where XYZ is usually the name of the entity that made the donation.
Postdocs and lab managers/techs are temporary contractors and are paid from the Research Faculty's grants. I won't be surprised if the benefits that they are offered are also derived from the grant's "overheads".
Universities have done a great job of marketing themselves as an ivory tower distinct from "industry" but when you look at how they operate, are they not just a part of it?
I'm not sure of how much of the public funding that public universities receive is allocated for research 🤔
I'm sure there are more layers to this that I am missing (like how libraries operate and how Clarivate and journal subscription fees are involved there, sigh).
If you know of something that's crucial to understanding university operations or something that's mentioned here that isn't true, please share! It would be nice to collectively understand the systems we are/were/want to be a part of 🙂
@kgoldsholl@Infoseepage@erictopol He (or his team) selected CDC leaders who chose or were pressured to prioritize short term economic capacity over public health.
I hoped his first CDC Director was suffering from inherited staff blocking good intentions. Then she went on TV to talk about it being good news that only the vulnerable were really susceptible - both a lie and dehumanizing the people most in need of her support.
@TransitBiker So, where in the sequence of #SarsCov2 did you or anybody else find #HIV sequences? How is that compared to other #SARS or # MERS #Corona viri? Any proper literature on anything? I call your hypothesis #bullshit.
A red book being the same color as a red toy isn't evidence that they both fell in the same can of red paint.
Evidence would be that they are both covered in the same paint and that someone pulled them out of the same can and left them to dry. Or, for this hypothesis, HIV sequences found in Covid.
@mastobit@kraweel65@TransitBiker
And finally, "sealioning" is a relentless sequence of questions in a context of polite feigned ignorance.
I fail to see how using an analogy to explain why a line of argument doesn't hold up, without posing a single question, expressing ignorance, or requesting to be enlightened could be construed as sealioning.
I stand by my original point - similarity is not proof of causation.
"leading to AIDS"? Disagree. AIDS is a very specific form of immune deficiency triggered by HIV. I suspect the medical community will eventually get around to naming what Covid does, but I doubt they'll call it AIDS. "C-AIDS" maybe.
Do you intend for your posts to come across as condescending? I'm not "Rob", I follow the research, and I'm familiar with "the evidence".
@anniegreens@NilaJones@kitoconnell@tomkindlon@mecfs It seems entirely plausible to me that the sickest female people with LC (PwLC) are indistinguishable from people with ME/CFS, since I would expect the sickest PwLC to have the worst PEM (since PEM makes everything else worse).
But there are a lot of subclinical PwLC with PEM who don't meet the diagnostic threshold for classical ME/CFS, and a lot who don't get PEM.
@CelloMomOnCars This is a Waymo design failure - this road should have been treated as blocked, just like a road blocked by a construction or a fallen tree.
But it's very hard to use local sensor information to tell the difference between "crowd of people who are on the street as their destination" (e.g. celebration, protest) and "river of people temporarily blocking traffic" (e.g. when an event lets out) - and in the latter case the car is there to help reduce the crowd.
You want it there (or at least in the vicinity rather than avoiding the area entirely) because its job is to collect people (ideally from the fringes of the crowd) and take them home, thereby reducing the overall size of the crowd.
@futurebird@stveje They didn't ship the original iPad with a Calculator app, so now the iPad is the only Apple device where you have a choice between free data hungry privacy nightmare Calculator apps, Calculator apps with in-app purchases so you can have an ad-free tier, and paid Calculator apps with pseudoscientific options that lack basic functions like nth root and sine.
We need a way for people to make a living selling things that work so people buy them once.
Do these cooler type things work at all? I have to survive another upcoming heatwave and can’t regulate my body temperature (#dysautonomia) so am risking heatstroke again.
Just humidity machines? (Humidity makes thinks even worse).
Should I just stop posting this stuff? I mean, by now everybody here knows this right? And other people we tell, even repeatedly with every new study and all the latest evidence, are just going to forget.. anyway…🤷♂️ right?
@Brad The part I find most frustrating is the insistence on headlines that imply "Aha! This is IT" instead of recognition that all the evidence we have so far is that every single one of these is "Yes, And".
Brain injury?
Yes, and
Mitochondrial dysfunction?
Yes, and
Clotting?
Yes, and
Autoimmune?
Yes, and
Viral/antigen persistence?
Yes, and
Organ damage?
Yes, and
...
@nrennie@danoehm I'm finding it really hard to gather information from this. Is it supposed to be hard to tell things like whether real or fake groundhogs converged on one answer? Is the randomness the point?