Excited for our #ASHEcon panel TUESDAY 10:15am on natural experiments in acute care. Papers on decisionmaking in surgeon-anesthesiologist dyads, emergency attending peer dyads, and clustering of patient acuities. ashecon.confex.com/ashecon/2026...

Reminder, if you’re going to @ashecon.bsky.social 2026, come to our Wednesday session of creative uses of recession discontinuity with some of the best in the business, including @aschwartz.bsky.social, @vinisingh.bsky.social, @dzeltzer.bsky.social, and @mlbarnett.bsky.social!

It makes me really sad. Used to be, if someone wrote about a super-niche topic, it would because they cared—a lot. Their personal viewpoint would be interesting even if not entirely accurate. Now so much of it is meaningless digital effluent. Doing to fountain pens is just a twist of the knife.

(The abstract is from @paulgp.com's paper here: bsky.app/profile/paul...)

This week we released the #maps module in #ggplot2 uncharted — and we cover a loooooot of maps in the 4 lessons and 19 exercises! ... and this collection doesn't even feature each 👀 As usual, the first lesson is available for everyone 🤙 www.ggplot2-uncharted.com/module5/spat... #rstats #tidyverse

The Sloan Foundation is searching for a new Director of its Economics Program. At a critical time when federal research funding is limited, this is a critical position. Please circulate this opportunity to shape and support economics and economists widely! sloan.org/about/careers

The future of the nursing profession, as well the training for other healthcare providers is under attack by the Department of Education. I was in the hospital last week: nurses are care. We need more, not less of them. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

And lastly… 🎉Congrats to Lily Berrin, MD and James Galske for receiving the AGEM Trainee Grant this year🎉 @saemonline.bsky.social #emergencymedicine #saem #agem #geriatricmedicine #emergencydepartment

Learn the ecological fallacy — average wages are higher in areas where more people have learned about the ecological fallacy.

Janke, Delgado, and I in our new @annalsofem.bsky.social commentary conceptualize boarding as a ‘dose of delay:’ “Admission is ordered by the emergency care team and is not delivered in a timely fashion, and harm results.” kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

New @annalsofem.bsky.social paper introduces early clinical deterioration as a metric for ED boarding harms click.notification.elsevier.com/CL0/https:%2... .

I have never yet met a student who wasn't shocked by how much work it takes to publish an academic paper, no matter how much I preview the process in advance. Every fact, every number, every citation.

Through research, Penn OB/GYN's Courtney Schreiber transformed care for early pregnancy loss, improving miscarriage treatment, reshaping global guidelines & launching PEACE to expand compassionate, accessible care ft. Eline Luning Prack (@pennpathlabmed.bsky.social) tinyurl.com/3nmrmymk

Nationally, 40% of >65yo patients presenting to EDs with a chief complaint of abdominal pain don't get cross-sectional imaging (agsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/..., our earlier paper in @agsjournal.bsky.social). 16% get xrays but no CT/US.

this may be my favorite nugget in the study: despite ordering more CTs for older patients, ER docs didn’t report much higher index of suspicion what we think ≠ what we think we think

bottom line: older people in the ER with abdominal pain have worse outcomes & a wider range of bad things, plus less reliable signs & symptoms may be worth thinking of “geriatric abdominal pain” as somewhat distinct from abdominal pain thanks again @abfriedman.com ! @aem-journal.bsky.social

fyi this study is open access — free full text for all thank you @abfriedman.com @aem-journal.bsky.social ! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

“RFK Jr.’s HHS Orders Lab Studying Deadly Infectious Diseases to Stop Research NIAID’s Integrated Research Facility is one of the few federal facilities charged with studying Ebola. Tuesday afternoon, all of its work was put on indefinite pause by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s department.”

So grateful to an amazing team that worked to bring this paper to AEM: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... We use abdominal pain as a model system to study classic #geriatric hypotheses: older adults present with less specific symptoms, more diagnostic complexity, and worse outcomes.

we did a #science @abfriedman.com ! @aem-journal.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Bad faith actors will always use the legitimate critiques of good faith actors to further enable the bad outcomes bad folks want. The solution isn’t to stop providing critiques, it’s to point out the bad faith and build durable coalitions for participatory democracy.

horrible. this country’s turn away from science based medicine in the name of “wellness” is killing children and will kill a lot more. www.propublica.org/article/more...

Austin Kilaru online now giving an important CORE Talk (www.coretalks.org) on using the moment of an emergency department visit as a way to improve the value delivered by the health system.

#ThePitt depicts overcrowded ERs, which often results from backups from bed shortages, weak outpatient care, & incentives that reward full capacity. LDI's Austin Kilaru says the fix isn’t just more beds—it’s better incentives, accountability, & stronger care outside hospitals. https://bit.ly/4vt1WnM

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Join us Monday for a CORE Talk seminar and discussion featuring Michael Barnett's work on the link between length of hospital stay and insurance policies. Register here: www.coretalks.org

LAST CALL for Submissions for the PARC Aging Retreat! Penn AGING researchers are encouraged to submit a brief abstract to the 2026 PARC Aging Retreat "USA at 250 Years: Aging Healthily" on May 1, 2026! Details: aging.upenn.edu/events/retreat

"The skills they don’t replicate—at least not yet—are the ones that were always the hardest [...]: knowing which questions matter, developing taste for what makes a research design credible, understanding an institutional setting deeply enough to know where the data is lying to you...."

Breast cancer mortality dropped 58% from 1975 to 2019. Localized, early detected breast cancer has a 99% 5 year survival rate. Modern mammogram tech was developed by NASA for telescopes. Last year, RFK Jr. cancelled 87 research grants on breast cancer. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/u...

Writing out a conversation I’ve been having a lot at this conference: Things in US science are far, far worse than people know. Far worse than even other scientists know. 1/

Every Friday, I open the NIH Guide TOC to find multiple early cancellations of funding opportunities--and virtually never anything new.

There are many great AI researchers at universities, but they pay a VERY steep price to be able to stay in academia & publish openly “The top 1% of publishing industry scientists now earn $1.5 million more annually than comparable academics, a fivefold increase since 2001” www.nber.org/papers/w34964

I like this piece from @timharford.ft.com but it largely makes the case for ‘blue skies’ type research as it may become useful later. There is a different argument I think we don’t make enough: it is part of the human endeavour to understand the nature of our world www.ft.com/content/0d60...

The is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war or their licenses will be pulled. A truly extraordinary moment. We aren't on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. Act like it.

Nature published another pile of trash i am trying to catch up on some of my reading but this one is getting under my skin so here’s a thread highlighting why this piece is either ill-informed or intentionally ignorant of a wealth of knowledge from embodied cog sci and related fields 1/

The US Administration has embarked on a large, unprecedented program of excluding lawful, highly-skilled workers and students from the United States. I talked with the brilliant @gracesegers.bsky.social at @newrepublic.com about the broad economic ripple effects. newrepublic.com/article/2073...

Despite recent controversial decisions, the FDA has stopped holding advisory committee meetings — which bring together regulators, companies, patients, and a panel of independent advisors to publicly discuss complex regulatory matters. I dug into why: www.statnews.com/2026/03/09/f...

🎉March/April Pulse Highlight🎉 Where @lsgeriatricem.bsky.social talks about her Fulbright experience in Australia! issuu.com/saemonline/d... Pages 66-67 @saemonline.bsky.social #emergencymedicine #saem #agem #geriatricmedicine #emergencydepartment

The data also reinforce a message that should be clear: American leadership in science and medical research requires far more than getting across the line on top-line budget negotiations and will require continued vigilance to track how HHS treats applications and existing awards.

The plot is only part of the story. The data do not include lost science via terminations, freezes, stalled payments, and award delays. The collapse in awards rates will lead to job loss, gaps in research programs, and drive scientists to spend more time writing grants rather than doing science.

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others. It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever

Luigi Guido speaking on The Economic Costs of Ambiguous Laws

"Structurally indifferent to truth is a good line" is a good line. Also worth noting that not all models are, just that LLMs weren't even designed to have a concept of truth. One of many ways the "AI" moniker distracts.

The critique of unmeasured confounding is often levied in a lazy/broad way. It is trivially true in any observational study. But if the critic can't think of a plausible such confounder and posit a reasonable direction/magnitude of its bias then they're not doing productive science.

Psychologists following a third-variable control strategy that may be best described as "sequential."

Join NYT's @jeneeninterlandi.bsky.social, Dr. Jonathan Mannheim, and me on Monday, March 2nd at 1pm ET, Live on Substack as we discuss the human cost of the administration's war on US science. Link to Live: open.substack.com/live-stream/... Info below: insidemedicine.substack.com/p/speaking-o...

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

The impact is already hitting science agencies hard. The NIH—the world's largest public biomedical research funder—has had to rely on leftover stopgap funds. New grant awards have slowed to a trickle — exacerbating the effects of a record-long shutdown in October. (h/t @jeremymberg.bsky.social)