I got another fieldwork jumper

Just realised the model I've been trying to derive from scratch (including a partial proof written in February) is just a gravity model and now I have actual references and code I finally play with.

Full day of data analysis AUC 0.938122 threshold sensitivity 0.0949

Started watching Casualty thinking it would be BBC Grey's Anatomy, but more drama because NHS vs private hospital, but it turns out iplayer starts you with season 40 and no matter how much wilder I thought it would be, it's even more messed up.

🚨Palaeoverse Lecture Series - TODAY, 15:00UTC🚨 Joseph Flannery-Sutherland @joeflansan.bsky.social will be joining us with his talk: "Cleaning taxonomy, time, and their messy interactions with the fossilbrush R package". Sign up here if you haven't already: bit.ly/palaeoverse-...

I have no idea what causal inference means anymore. It's a grab-bag ranging from "we drew a DAG" to "we have identified Universal Truth and your puny RCT is no match for our IPW." Thinking clearly about your data, model and limitations isn't "causal", it's the bare minimum. #statsky #rstats #episky

Humanity can survive without AI. Human civilisation is unlikely to survive in +2°C world though.

“Even after the rescue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the future of its health and science reporting tradition is uncertain — and it’s not alone. Too often, specialized beats such as health and science coverage are among the first to go in local journalism, and that is a threat to public health.”

Options can be great, but they introduce dilemmas. Me and some classmates got permission to take Palaeobiology with credit towards our life sciences degrees in 2019. This forced me to take advanced cancer genetics with no proper cancer modules, because everything else had a timetabel clash.

I started listening to this podcast from the beginning today and the way the hosts described "Bluesky Research" in earlier research really resonnated with me (1/2)

🌟 TOMORROW! 🌟 Last chance to sign-up to Liam McGuire's #WingedWednesday #webinar! 🔗 www.batswithoutborders.org/webinars.html 📅 Wednesday 22 April 🕰 3pm SAST/CAT | 2pm BST | 9am EDT | 🌍⏰ Remember to adjust for your local time zone! 📸 Brock Fenton #bats #batconservation #migration #batmigration

One of these days I'm going to look at how much data I'm actually analysing, but for now I like to be at least a little naive on data volumes

I'm putting together my PhD structure for my first year review and as I'm sorting small projects into different topics for preliminary chapter outlines and I keep on running into the same question: How can I reformulate this title, to the implications the population ecology has for the disease?

In order to finish a bat survey, we had to get to a part of the sentinel tower that had been hit in one of the world wars. We ended up having to take an inflatable boat and when we got to the tower, we had to climb in from the top. The first thing we saw was a pile of neatly arranged animal bones.

Biologists Confirm Not Much Evolution Happened Today theonion.com/biologists-c...

New paper: possible track evidence of a small reptile or salamander being pursued by an azhdarchid-like pterosaur. Validation of the Witton and @tetzoo.bsky.social model of azhdarchid foraging? Maybe. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I have a little document called "science.txt" that contains things I was going to worry about later. Six months into my PhD, it has grown to 12000 lines... It's a good thing that I'm having a data management month.

AI-generated papers scoring better than human-written papers in conference abstract ratings probably says more about abstract ratings than it does about AI paper quality...

My PhD is fuelled by Walkers, Itsu, and Douwe Egberts at this point

New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We have an exciting position available in the Department for a Professor in Epidemiology/Pathology of agricultural crops. www.au.dk/om/stillinge...

First-Ever Egg of a Mammal Ancestor Discovered! Research by myself, Julien Benoit (Wits) and Vincent Fernandez (ESRF) presents the first-ever egg of the therapsid Lystrosaurus, finally answering the question: Did the ancestors of mammals lay eggs? Yes, they did! doi.org/10.1371/jour...

"Ten simple rules for postdoctoral mums to stay competitive in academia" provides good advice for anyone, but great to see an article focused on having a life in science

I'm reading WHO reports and listening to French music. Besides the intensity of the working hours, nothing much has changed about my work process since 2020.

When I was a child people always said that work in grownup jobs isn't fun. Now, that I'm doing academic research, yes, there's a lot to do, but I'm also having a lot of fun. The only logical conclusion: Academia is not a grownup job

Saw biohazard tape in the department Mail room -> thought to myself "that would make cute washi tape" -> remembered that an ecology and evolution department does need actual biohazard tape

I always have something on in the background when I work (I work better, if I feel like I'm in a noisy place), so me cleaning up my spatial analysis scripts will be supported by my Death in Paradise rewatch.

1/ Hiring: 2️⃣ Senior Academic Leaders in Global Health Data Science & Mathematical Modelling. #IDsky #EpiSky 🧪 Collab between 🔹Data Science & Computational Modelling Unit (DSCMU) at Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Research Programme (MLW) 🔹Civic Health Innovation Labs (CHIL) at University of Liverpool

👇 Upcoming opportunities for the Infectious Disease Dynamics community! ℹ️ View deadlines for open opportunities ranging from training programs to conferences & calls for article contributions. 📧 Have opportunities to add? Please reach out to [email protected] #IDsky #EpiSky #PublicHealth #OneHealth 🧪

Marking is fun. That being said, if the question asks for a drawing and you make something in Biorender, say that it's made in Biorender somewhere. Otherwise, I have to assume you either stole it from a textbook without citation or it's LLM-generated.

CLOSING SOON: Postdoc (London, UK) Investigating pathways of nosocomial transmission of respiratory viruses by integrating epidemiological and genomic sequencing data with @https://bsky.app/profile/anne-cori.bsky.social at Imperial... More details: http://iddjobs.org/jobs/2493

Work setup for today: - 37 unread google scholar alerts - 44 developmental biology papers to mark ~ 20 pages worth of notes to type - ?? papers to read

I have a love-hate relationship with google scholar: I love the new additions to my TBR, but I hate how they pile up.

I've had quite a bittersweet realisation recently (rambly thread ahead) : I hear a lot from women in maths about being often the only woman in a seminar or meeting and how difficult being a woman in maths is made by the field. (1/2)

Working on infectious diseases as an epidemiologist specialised in outbreak investigations is a really fun contrast to having a combination of autoimmune conditions that could make a good House M.D. episode.

Today, on learning about my own auotimmune conditons as an epidemiologist: I have the utmost respect for immunologists. (context below)

The one day I forget my maths textbooks at home just had to be the day my autoimmune flare-up got me to A&E.

At this point, I spend about the same amount of time on math stack exchange as on stack overflow.

I decided to make a gannt chart of all the mini research projects my supervisors and I started (and all the things on my To-Do list) to easier sort them by potential thesis chapters. Is it going to look overwhelming? Yes, but at least it will be pretty.

There have been no federal funding opportunities in the infectious disease space for close to 1.5 years. A while back, a few "forecasted" opportunities popped up, however, all of those just went the way of the dodo 👇 Good read on what's happening here: elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/inside-the...

My laptop is a relic from a time when I didn't know what ~/.bashrc was and I know have just enough knowledge to fix old problems as I encounter them while also holding onto this piece of hardware for as long as possible.

Fun tasks that will run on my laptop today: - reinstall anaconda from scratch, because it corrupted on the last windows update (If I didn't like gaming so much, I'd have a full Linux PC by now) - try to make a spatial raster of the UK that is only Wales and England without getting errors in R

🎙️ PODCAST | CVR Meets: Professor Akiko Iwasaki In this ep of Research Goes Viral, Bailey & Charlotte speak with Prof Akiko Iwasaki, 2025 Sir Michael Stoker Award winner, about Long COVID and how the pandemic transformed research overnight. 🎥 youtu.be/Iqbhq6dLLJs 🔈 open.spotify.com/episode/3spW...

We have very little idea about what plastics ACTUALLY do to wildlife

Nevermind the problem is so severe it got its name. Twice.

Protein Language Models (PLMs) could transform outbreak response New research from @kieranlamb.bsky.social & colleagues show that PLMs can identify mutation hotspots and key features of viral proteins - even from a single sequence. www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/...

Giving my harddrives silly names to get some whimsy into my research: - echo (accoustic analysis raw data backup) - democritus (external storage for rabies research) - eve (endogenous viral elments genome data storage)

Using applied mathematics in epidemiology research is all fun and games until I have to not repeat a variable name. #MathSky #EpiSky

I went on an academically inspired shopping spree (textbooks, external storage, a bat shaped coin purse to store all my external storage) and as a little treat, I bought more bat stickers. If you ever see me around, ask for a bat.