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Academic tenure

Academic tenure is a commitment by a college or university to award permanent employment status. Most faculty contracts stipulate that tenure can only be removed for cause or for financial exigency.   In the last year of my postdoctoral fellowship, I applied for tenure-track positions at various universities around the US. Tenure-track means that the university is looking to hire someone they believe will end up getting tenure. It’s not a guarantee of tenure; I’ve known plenty of people hired on the tenure track who were later denied promotion and tenure and had to leave for failing to meet performance criteria. In the event, I accepted an offer as an assistant professor and was tenured as an associate professor six years later. Recently, some universities have tried to work around the tenure commitment by cutting faculty salaries. Particularly at medical schools, non-clinical faculty are expected to recover 50% or more of their compensation from extramural grants. Faculty who fail...
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HPV vaccination

HPV infection accounts for 99% of cervical cancers. There’s a vaccine against HPV.   Back when we still lived in Missouri, we had our teenage daughter vaccinated against HPV. Glad to see that in our adopted state of Rhode Island, 95% of adolescents got at least one dose of the HPV vaccine. Why would any parent deny their child this vaccine? “Comparing adolescents ages 13-17 years across the country against Alabama -- where the 21% without at least one dose of the HPV vaccine approximates the national goal -- several Northeast states did significantly better, including Rhode Island (adjusted OR 3.05, 95% CI 1.40-6.66), Massachusetts (aOR 2.19, 95% CI 1.24-3.88), and New Hampshire (aOR 1.72, 95% CI 1.03-2.88).” *snip* “In the South, rates of unvaccinated adolescents ranged from 14% in Delaware and Virginia to 39% in Mississippi. The West saw unvaccinated rates ranging from 14% in Hawaii and 15% in New Mexico to 29% in Alaska and 30% in Idaho . . .” With real estate, it’s “location, l...
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Microplastics and RFK Jr’s brain

There’s no question that microplastics are ubiquitous our planet. Are they a threat to human health? RFK Jr, who is neither a physician nor a scientist, thinks so. “ Reaching for a number to convey the urgency of the problem, he cited research that "reports concentrations [of plastic] in the brain equivalent by mass to   roughly a spoonful ," a value he said "has gone up by 50 percent since 2016. And inevitably, it's going to go up exponentially if we continue along the same road." Unlike other claims RFK Jr has made, this one is actually based on a publication in a refereed journal. Unfortunately, the measurement technique is flawed, in that it cannot distinguish microplastics from other natural brain biomolecules. In other words, this is likely an overestimation. A second recent study that used four different measurement techniques found 100-fold less microplastics in the brains they analyzed. Which study is correct? As we say in the science biz, extraordinary...
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Musical recycling

Don’t ask me why, but I was listening to Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” yesterday. If you’re familiar with it, you’ll recall a tune that appears five different times: 1.       Part I, No. 21   – "Erkenne mich, mein Hüter" 2.       Part I, No. 23   – "Ich will hier bei dir stehen" 3.       Part II, No. 53   – "Befiehl du deine Wege" 4.       Part II, No. 63   – "Ergötze dich, mein Seele" 5.       Part II, No. 72   – "Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden"   The tune was originally composed by Hans Leo Hassler in 1601 for a secular love song before Bach repurposed it. More recently, Paul Simon re-purposed the melody yet again for “American Tune.” Music is choc-a-block with plagiarism. Handel did it in Messiah. Jazz does it all the time. Hearing it in St . Matthew Passion was like hearing the voice of an old friend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
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Mothers Day

My mom led an extraordinary and full life. The youngest of three, she was raised in Johnstown PA, northern Appalachia. Her dad died when she was a teenager. Her mom, who never finished high school, went to work as a domestic.     She was able to attend William and Mary thanks to money provided by an older brother who was a football star at W&M and briefly went pro. She met my dad there. They raised five children. Shortly after her youngest was born, she started taking graduate school classes, and in her early 40s, earned a PhD in experimental psychology. After a two-year postdoc at The Rockefeller University in Manhattan, she returned to East Tennessee to teach, and as part owner/operator of The Energy Outlet, a store that sold window heat pumps and woodburning stoves.   A few years before my parents retired, they bought a place in rural Washington County NY. After they moved there, my mom declared that she would live there until she died. She loved the area, and deve...
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MAGA means ‘immiserate workers’

This is what the MAGA GOP supports: “Workers are earning record low wages and other compensation compared to their labor output, according to the BLS productivity and costs report published Thursday. Called the “labor share,” this indicator essentially measures how much of the nation’s economic earnings is used to pay wages and other worker benefits.    “At 54.1%, workers are netting the lowest earnings compared to the income they’re producing since the data started being collected in 1947. Meanwhile, labor productivity increased 0.8%, output increased 1.5%, and people worked 0.7% more month over month.”  This is what happens when unions die.  When people talk about “The Greatest Generation,” they seem to refer to the generation that fought in WWII*. But it was also the generation of organized labor. While the US economy traded manufacturing for services, there’s no objective reason why workers shouldn’t demand better treatment. That’s the only way things will change...
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Do management consultants save non-profit hospitals money?

A typical administrative response to financial difficulty in large organizations is to hire consultants. The theory is that the expertise of consultants will uncover efficiencies that will (a) relieve the difficulties and (b) repay the investment in the consultants. So how’s that working out for American nonprofit hospitals, many of which struggling and threatened with closure? “ Findings     Nonprofit hospitals in the US (n = 2343) collectively spent more than $7.8 billion on management consulting services from 2009 to 2023. A stacked difference-in-differences design comparing 306 US nonprofit hospitals that used a management consulting firm for the first time with 513 matched hospitals that did not use a management consulting firm during the study period found little evidence of substantial, statistically significant, or systematic changes attributable to management consulting engagements.   “Meaning     These findings raise questions about the net value that ...
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