Saddest day ever

I can’t get over this graph.

Friday, 29 May 2020 was the saddest day ever on Twitter. Click to enlarge. No seriously, click to enlarge. You really have to see it enlarged to feel what is going on in this data.

This is an amazing visualization of data. It is so rich. It shows a big picture (hm, why might there have been a downward trend in happiness since 2016?), but the details are so rich, both the highs and the lows.It reminds me a little of Charles Minard’s visualization of Napolean’s Russian campaign, which Edward Tufte has made famous.

And when you see what the lows were reactions to, in the labels of the data, it pushes home just how bad things have to be to create the saddest day ever on Twitter. And not just “saddest” by a little, but by a lot.

In a sense, this graph is helpful because it shows, “It’s not just you.” And it shows that anyone who does not acknowledge the pain that people are in now is not reading the room. People are hurting, badly.

I’m scared to see the data from Saturday and Sunday and the week to come.

Update, 2 June 2020: Friday’s record has already been broken. The last day of May, 2020, is now the saddest day ever on Twitter.

Spotted on the Hedonomter Twitter account. Data here.

Every empire falls

When you’re a kid and you study history, you read about all these empires of the past that rose and fell. Rome. Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. The Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire. (Yes, my history was very western oriented.)

And sometimes you wonder what it must be like to be in the tail end of that, when an empire is breaking apart. “What must it be like,” you think, “to live through that?”

Well, now I know.

Living through history sucks.

Top picture from here. Bottom picture by Associated Press photographer Julio Cortez. Bruce Janu writes: “The upside-down flag has historically been used to signal ‘distress.’ And ‘distress’ may not be a word that is strong enough.”.

When manuscript formatting is a deal breaker

Academics have bugbears. And a very common one is manuscript formatting. “We shouldn't have to spend our time fiddling with a word processor to meet a journal’s formatting requirements, we should be collecting data! Grumble grumble grumble.”

I get it. I get why people like to complain about this. But to be honest, of all the things to complain about in academia, I always thought this did not warrant the amount of whinging it got.

Most journals have clear instructions. They are usually not terribly difficult to follow if you’ve had a bit of practice. With modern reference manage software, switching between reference styles – the most time-consuming, tedious part of formatting – can be as easy as pushing a couple of buttons.

But today I was reminded that everyone has their limits.

I was looking for a home for a manuscript I was working on, and came across a journal I thought would be a very appropriate home. I looked at the instructions for authors, and came to a screeching halt here.

Do not insert references using software such as EndNote, which adds a layer of embedded coding to the manuscript; use only MS Word’s built-in endnote function to insert references.

I was surprised. I’d never seen a journal prohibit authors from using a tool that so obviously exists to make writing for journals easier.

I’ve used EndNote for years, and I have no desire to learn how to use Word’s referencing tools. Too far from my writing workflow. I will not be submitting my paper to this journal.

I don’t want to piss off editors by submitting a manuscript that doesn’t meet their manuscript guidelines. I like following instructions. But with other relevant journals out there, it seems like the easiest thing for me to do is to...

Just walk away.

I’m not alone here. To my surprise, a lot of people are willing to walk away from submitting to a journal purely because of the formatting requirements, based on this Twitter poll.

Notes from a pandemic: Coming back out

Back in March, a lot of people got very stressed going into social isolation, lockdown, stay at home, quarantine, whatever you want to call it.

Me? I was good. It’s being the prospect of coming out of isolation that is stressing me out. It’s not because I’ll have to be around people again. It’s that I am not at all convinced it’s being done safely.

As I mentioned, the University of Texas system has already decided all its campuses will have face-to-face instruction for fall.

Earlier this week, my institution had a video chat with the person in charge of “reopening” the university, and I learned that food services, the gym, and the libraries were going to open back up at the start of June.

I asked, “Given the increase in cases that other countries and states have seen after "reopening", as a medical professional, are you comfortable with reopening the campus? Is this a medically advisable course of action?”

I didn’t get an answer to that.

I did get an answer to “If it was not possible for people to be on campus safely through March-May, why is it possible now? What has changed from a public health perspective?” The answer was basically, “We know more now.” Personally, I’d be happier if that answer was, “We have a vaccine now,” but of course, we don’t, and won’t have anytime soon.

I personally will be teaching online in fall, so I am not so much worried for my own health as the safety of my colleagues and students.

My worries got even worse when I saw news last night about the University of Texas’s flagship campus at Austin. Despite having an almost empty campus, they’ve had eleven of their janitorial staff test positive for COVID-19.

(University spokesperson J.B.) Bird said that UT officials did not know exactly how the virus spread among its custodial staff members, but said they had been practicing social distancing and wearing masks.

I just don’t see anything that convinces me that universities – including mine – can realistically expect to keep people safe.

External links

Q&A with Dr. John Krouse, Dean of the UTRGV School of Medicine (Recorded from Facebook livestream)

Virus outbreak hits nearly empty University of Texas campus: What will happen this fall?

Some people will literally die rather than change their minds

I have been thinking a lot about the craziness of “re-opening” and how some people refuse to take any precautions. Just a day or two ago, I was imagining asking these people, “What would it take to get you to change your mind, short of you getting hooked up to a ventilator because of COVID-19?”

Then today I saw this. Physician Ryan Morino tweeted (lightly edited):

I’ve been called a lot of names and accused of a lot of things by emergency patients but it’s surreal to have a patient accuse me of falsifying their COVID result – because they don’t believe the virus is real – as I’m actively trying to keep them from dying from multi-organ failure from COVID.

My “short of you getting COVID-19” qualifier turned out to be an unreasonable assumption. I thought that the personal first-hand experience of getting so sick that you are hospitalized would be something would force people to reconsider their views. How wrong I was.

(Aside: Hospitalization is bad, but this description of being on a ventilator proved to me that I had not idea how bad things could while trying to keep you alive from COVID-19.) 

From my experiences trying to talk about evolutionary biology, I know lots of people are intransigent. They not going to change their minds in front of you. People have values and beliefs and community ties that matter to them more than evidence. For a long time, I’d been okay with that.

But these sorts of reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic have shaken me. I’ve never felt so depressed and pessimistic about the prospects for science communication. This is the fight of our lives, and we’re losing.

Another piece that hit me hard was this article by Adrienne LaFrance about conspiracy beliefs, and how one in particular has gained so much traction over the space of three years. For someone like me who had never heard of this much before, the conspiracy stories (I refuse to call them “theories”) are unbelievable. They are inconsistent, and they have consistently failed to say anything meaningful. Edited excerpt:

I asked for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events (that had been) predicted that never happened(,) they said that deception is part of (the) plan.

It brought to mind this from Jessica Price (emphasis added):

I guess it’s time to repeat the main thing I learned from reading a fuckton of Holocaust memoirs again: propaganda does not need to be persuasive, only pervasive. Its secondary purpose is to convince. Its primary purpose is to exhaust.

LaFrance arrives at a point that I had independently been thinking about before I read her article. People often talk about the “politicization” of events in the US now, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

This moment in American history is better understood as being driven by a new religious movement rather than existing political movements.

I don’t mean “religion” in the usual sense of the major Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) – although those are often intertwined with the new zeitgeist.

Like LaFrance, I mean that people are describing and responding to events in ways that you normally see in religious communities rather than political parties. Such as the unshakable beliefs in things unseen (“COVID-19 isn’t real,” says the one about to die from organ failure from it), belief in prophecies, communities springing up around practices not held by everyone.

And certainly, some political leaders act more like old school gods than traditional politician. They demand tribute, sacrifice, and threaten those who oppose them. A thunderbolt or two aimed at demigods who aren’t “respectful” or grateful enough. They sure aren’t above lying (you know, turning into a swan to get laid).

And they sure as hell don’t care about puny mortals. “So a few humans die. So what?”

It’s a radically different vision than one I have for politics, which is more about negotiation and compromise and trying to make most people’s live better. But probably my view was skewed from living most of my life in a relatively peaceful few decades, and mistaking that as normal.

From my point of view as a scientist who wants to do science communication, I think that treating opposition to COVID19 information as being based in religious opposition (in a secular, non-tradition sense) rather than political opposition changes the dynamic and changes the approach that you take.

It makes it clear that the task ahead of us is far, far harder than we ever could have expected.

Ultimately, I have to believe that at some point, reality will sink in. I hope that many people who aren’t wearing masks today, for instance, will one day look back at their actions and think, “Maybe I should have worn that mask.”

I hoped that we might have gotten to that point by now.

Additional: Just after I posted this, Andrew Thaler wrote:

The mistake we're making is thinking we have a science communication problem when what we have is a terror management problem.

Not sure I agree, but I think we both agree that “science communication” is not what the moment calls for. Science communication is a default mode. We need a crisis mode, and we don’t have one.

More additional: Emily G also has a thread that makes a similar point:

Here’s the thing no one wants to hear: you fight propaganda with propaganda. Unless SciComm can fundamentally scale to address the propaganda machine in sum and substance – and it can’t – then it’s doomed to ineffectiveness.

Even more additional: And just to show that some elements of this problem are widespread and not just an American thing, a new report shows a lot of Canadians have false beliefs about some aspect of COVID-19.

More than a quarter think the virus was made in a Chinese lab.

Almost a quarter thought there were drugs that could treat the disease, notably hydroxychloroquine.

More than one in ten think the virus is a cover-up for 5G wireless.

And just to top it off, there’s a lot of overconfidence to go with the misinformation.

Sarah Everts, a Carleton journalism professor and co-researcher in the study, said she was “floored by the overconfidence Canadians have in their own ability to distinguish conspiracy theories and misinformation.”

For example, 58 per cent of respondents who believe the 5G conspiracy theory also said they could “easily distinguish” between COVID-19 facts and misinformation.

External links

The prophecies of Q

The hard truth about ventilators

Nearly half of Canadians can’t tell coronavirus fact from conspiracy theory: survey

Cameo in article about scientific illustration

I make a very brief cameo appearance in this Nature article by Jeffrey Perkel on scientific illustration, particularly BioRender.

That’s it. That’s the post. Back to grading for me.

External links

The software that powers scientific illustration

Notes from a pandemic: Not good

I was doing fine until this weekend.

Then I realized that I screwed up in my online classes. I made a mistake when I changed courses to accommodate for extended spring break back in March, put it in the syllabus then, but nobody caught it (including me) until Saturday. Like, right before it mattered.

The mistake shouldn’t be too bad for two courses (except for me own grading load), but is... not what I would have done in the third. Students are grumpy with me, rightfully so, and I’m not happy with myself, either, so that fits.

Then Texas has decided to start to “re-open” and I saw images like this at my field site on the beaches of South Padre Island:

We are going to watch so many people get sick or die. And the reporting of this story bothers the hell out of me because there is no talking to anyone in public health, no epidemiologist, nobody to assess what the consequences of packed beaches and open restaurants is going to be.

And what is just killing me inside is that I am worried that a large chunk of Americans have decided not to care. That they are going to take the same approach to COVID-19 that they have with guns for all these years: they are just going to get used to it. Get used to constant deaths running along the chyrons of news channels, shrug and say, “That’s just the price of freedom.”

Of all things, what caught the moment for me was this review of a Godzilla movie box set.

In 2019, the world is on fire. We should know better. We move on because this is what we do: We get used to the flames, the poison, the death and destruction. We constantly erect new normals, and once those are surpassed, we craft newer normals, and pretend those have always been. When we see signs of that which we cannot escape, we change the channel because it isn’t our cup of tea. We shrug at the monsters, huge and black and opposing silhouettes on the horizon. We get used to the apocalypse because we can get used to anything.

It’s just a virus we’re getting used to instead of kaiju.

External links

Visitors return to South Padre Island, local businesses reopen

Criterion's Gorgeous Godzilla Box Set Is a Testament to Our Ability to Get Used to Anything

Notes from a pandemic: Football is not more important than life

I am still mad and disappointed I was by the University of Texas system’s decision to open campuses for fall, no matter what. More Texas universities have decided to open up, and I’m not just mad, I’m disgusted.

On Thursday, Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp told all 11 university presidents in the system that they will reopen their campuses next school year and be ready to play sports, a university system official confirmed to The Texas Tribune. Texas Tech University has also announced that it plans to resume on-campus classes in the fall, and university President Lawrence Schovanec told the Tribune that Tech is planning to play sports, too.

I know people miss their past times. I know people love their sports. But football? Football absolutely, positively, should. not. be. the. lede here. I hate it. Football is not what a university is for. A game for the masses is not worth reopening campuses and putting hundreds of thousands of people across the state at risk.

A long time ago, I seem to remember someone comparing being at a university to owning a pet wolf. Everything is fine as long long as you keep feeding the wolf. But you should never, ever forget that the wolf will turn on you the instant there’s a problem. I feel a lot like that pet owner these days.

External links

Texas A&M and University of Texas systems expect to reopen in the fall, and A&M says it will play football

 

Notes from a pandemic: Back to work orders

The Daily Texan is reporting that all University of Texas campuses will be opening this fall. My initial reaction has not changed.

OH SHIT NO.

I cannot see any scenario in which UT System campuses being open for fall will not mean a lot of people are going to get sick and some are going to die.

If anything, I’ve gotten even angrier with this plan. Because the Daily Texan article makes it pretty clear that what is driving the decision is not the best interests of the students or the faculty, but money.

Milliken said the UT System has encountered economic hardship as campuses shut down.

The article goes on to describe refunds to students who can’t live in housing, the loss of income from elective surgeries in health institutions, and the drop in funding coming from oil sales (which support the state’s Permanent University Fund).

I’m upset that money seems to be a higher priority than health.

I’m upset that the decision is to try to push everything back to the old model instead of taking steps to create something new, like offering much more remote instructions.

I’m upset that the decision is being taken months before the start of fall, when Texas is deciding it wants to let restaurants and movie theaters and such open again, and we have no idea of how that is going to pan out. The possibility of things getting worse before Fall semester begins is very real.

The one good piece of news is that I was already scheduled to do a semester of courses online. So I personally will not have to go to campus very often.

I wish my students and colleagues had that option.

Update: My skepticism about Texas’s handling of the pandemic and “getting back to normal” feels justified.

The Texas Department of State Health Services reported fifty new deaths from COVID-19 in the state, the largest single day increase during the pandemic. For only the second time since tracking began, it also reported more than one thousand new confirmed cases.

We do not have COVID-19 under control. Not even close. So why is Texas allowing businesses to reopen, exactly?

External links

UT System plans for fall reopening of all institutions

Fallacies of composition and division in journals and publishers

“Publishers” and “journals”are related. One academic publisher typically has many journals. Each journal is independent and has its own editorial board and practices. But I’m surprised by how often I see people committing either the fallacy of composition or the fallacy of division with publishers and journals.

“I had a bad experience reviewing for Journal X from Publisher Y” should lead to the conclusion that Journal X is problematic, but I frequently see people conclude that everything from Publisher Y is problematic. Fallacy of composition.

That there are 53 disciplinary journals with the word “Nature” in the front of their title from Nature Publishing Group might be in part because people commit the fallacy of division.

What’s interesting is that which fallacy people are willing to commit seems to be mainly a factor of the age of the publisher.

I’ve seen people argue, “You can’t process the quality of each journal separately” for a relatively new publisher with less than 250 journals. But people do judge journals individually for old publishers that are home to ten times more journals.

Notes from a pandemic: Two degrees of separation

Earlier, I wrote:

It’s an epidemic when people you don’t know get sick. It’s a pandemic when people you know get sick.

The pandemic has now struck only two degrees of separation from me. The person who some might call my academic “grandparent,” Don Kennedy, died from COVID-19.

Don Kennedy supervised Dorothy Paul’s doctoral work, and Dorothy went on to supervise me. I wrote about my one interaction with him here. I really hope I can find that letter.

His Stanford obituary paints a picture of someone who did well with the time he had. I was a little disappointed that his research was given short shrift, but his papers are in journals. I loved the details like him having students run with him. How me met the Queen Elizabeth. I particularly love the picture above of him riding bicycle while holding a briefcase. It has a lack of pretense that I like.

Related posts

Heritage

Heritage expanded

Classic graphics #2: Crayfish tailflips

External links

Donald Kennedy, Stanford’s eighth president, dead at 88

Cowboy caterpillar

This is all B.W. Williams’s fault.

• • • • •

Classic.

• • • • •

Adventurous.

• • • • •

Atmospheric.

• • • • •

Vintage.

• • • • •

Post-modern ironic.

• • • • •

Twangy guitar.

• • • • •

Inspired by Jake and Elwood Blues.

• • • • •

Magnificent.

How was your Easter Sunday?

Notes from a pandemic: Not a time to jump into science communication

I’m seeing a few people bemoaning the lack of science outreach from professional scientists during this COVIC-19 pandemic. Efra Rivera-Serrano wrote:

Still amazes me that some principal investigators (PIs) and leaders can write whole pages on their grants proposing “outreach activities” but haven’t moved a finger to educate the public when it is mostly needed.

Jen Heemstra chimed in:

Science faculty, part of our job is teaching science. What better time than now to share our science knowledge with everyone? Even better, support students and postdocs who want to learn and participate in #SciComm!

I love me some science communication, but I worry. Something we have seen repeatedly during this pandemic is that very smart people, but who are not experts or have any practical experience, in epidemiology, public health, or modelling, think they have something worthwhile to contribute. And they make some model or prediction or say something else that is badly flawed.

As a personal example, I was in a meeting Friday where one of my colleagues opined that COVID-19 probably wouldn’t too bad in South Texas because of our geographic isolation. That wasn’t a crazy thing to say, but it was said, perhaps, from a limited point of view. An article the next day indicated that was not a good prediction. Culture matters.

(Local health authorities) have begun to notice something else particular to South Texas: strong family ties are exacerbating the virus’ spread.

“We have large households and these large households, they like to visit with other members of their family,” (Dr. Emily Prot, regional medical director of the Texas Department of State Health Services’ Region 11) said.

That needs to stop, she explained.

“We need to really avoid that and stay within one single household. So, no visiting tias, tios. No visiting the mother-in-law. That has to stop. We’re seeing too much spread right now within those family groups,” Prot said.

Prot hammered home the point, adding, “Those interactions are leading to more spread and we’re seeing that at a regional level.”

The Valley as a whole is at higher risk for seeing patients needing acute critical care, or who experience serious complications from the virus, Prot said.

“Well, we have more rates of diabetes in our region, and most of them (deaths caused by COVID-19) are due to older age, but we also had in Laredo, one of the deaths was in his 40s,” she said.

We need people with relevant expertise to provide that information. But I am deeply worried about people deciding, “I need to do science communication!” when do not have the relevant expertise, are unpracticed or untrained in communication (or both).

I would like all scientists, especially science communication novices, if their planned science communication in the time of COVID-19 passes the Craig Ferguson test for science communication.

The three things you must always ask yourself before you say anything:
Does this need to be said?
Does this need to be said by me?
Does this need to be said by me now?
Three fuckin’ marriages it took me to learn that.

(From Does This Need to Be Said? Epix, 2011)

Or, as I put it when I was curating the @IAmSciComm account, “When it's not your area of expertise, shut the hell up.”

External links

DSHS: Majority of RGV cases are young people

Three words that could use a rest in fandom

I have gotten tired of these three words (okay, two words and one phrase) in discussions of genre fiction.

1. “Plot hole.”
2. “Retcon.”
3. “Canon.”

First, those three give “realism about the fictional world” too much weight in judging artistic works. They make is sounds as though the best feature of any story is how well it mimics the consistency of reality.

You can see this same obsessive drive to try to find absolute perfect consistency in world-building in classic geek questions like, “Who’s stronger, Hulk or Thor?”, or “What is the speed of the White Star spaceships?” (I mention the last, because Joe Straczynski would reply, “They move at the speed of plot.” Which I imagine must have been a very frustrating answer for some fans. Flat out refusing to play the game.)

I remember loving technical manuals and handbooks that tried to list things like the height, weight, and eye colour of every character in the fictional world.

All of that is fun. But increasingly, I’m finding that discussions over story consistency overshadows analysis of character, emotion, humour, thoughtfulness, or any of the other myriad of things people might want to experience a story for.

Second, these three feed into a bad geek habit: always trying to show how smart you are. Watching a story becomes a protracted game of, “I’m smarter than the script writers, because I thought of this thing that they clearly didn’t.” Needing to show how smart you are is not an attractive part of nerd culture. (I say this as someone who has often been guilty of this bad habit.)

The NSF GRFP problem, 2020 edition

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) awards were announced today. And the familiar “Matthew Effect” pattern continues.

• The entire University of Texas system, with 167,028 undergraduate students, gets 55 awards (0.03% awards / student).
• The entire California State University system, with around 484,300 undergraduate students, gets 39 awards (0.008% awards / student).
• Harvard University, with 6,788 undergraduate students, gets 22 awards (0.3% awards / student).
• Yale University, with 5,964 undergrad students, also gets 22 awards (0.3% awards / student).
• MIT, with 4,530 undergraduates, got 68 awards (1.5% awards / student).

The success rate of Harvard and Yale is about ten times higher than the Texas system and about 45 times higher than the California State University system.

If you want a GRFP, go to an Ivy League university. Or some other well-resourced east coast university.

You can download the NSF GRFP data here. Scroll down and search for “Export options” to get an Excel spreadsheet.

It has been five years since Terry McGlynn did the important job of first pointing out how slanted the playing field is. It’s been four years since NSF announced changes to their rules to try to create more diversity. But the same pattern keeps happening.

Is this NSF’s fault? Not necessarily. The NSF doesn’t release data on how many applications come in from each institution (as far as I know), and that is almost certainly extremely uneven. The missions of something like the California State University system is very different from that of an Ivy League institution.

I still think we need to call the NSF on this every single year. Something like an NSF GRFP is the sort of thing that can make a career happen. An award from a national funding agency creates so many opportunities that it’s not clear that the goals of the NSF are best served by those award going to students from extremely well-resourced institutions,

They’re two years old now, but if this question interests you, please do see these two amazing posts by Natalie Telis.

• The price of a GRFP, part 1
• The price of a GRFP, part 2

This concentration of GRFP awards is puzzling given that for regular awards, NSF does think about its overall portfolio of awards and is aware of the problems with concentrating many awards in a few institutions. It considers factors like whether a grant is coming from an EPSCOR state, which is essentially a measure of how successful a state has been at getting NSF funding.

Related posts

Fewer shots, more diversity?
The NSF GRFP problem continues

Notes from a pandemic: Scholarship stoppages

Among academics, there is a particular anxiety about being stuck at home. It’s a touchy subject. Productivity and overwork is always a sore spot in academia.

A lot of people are saying, “Academics’ cult-like worship of productivity is insane. It’s unreasonable to expect to be productive in a global crisis.”

And some people are pushing back, saying, “I need routine and work helps take my mind off that we are in the middle of a global crisis. Leave me alone.”

Whatever people’s personal feelings about continuing to do academic work, a lot of people are asking, “What is my university’s expectations about research?”

A couple of administrators and some scientists have basically said, “Keep getting data so we can keep papers and grants coming.” There’s a real worry about how this compromises social distancing and the safety of researcher. And it’s probably stressful for a lot of people to be told, “Keep working like nothing has changed.”

Most institutions have said that the fact that this has been a “pandemic year” will be taken into consideration at annual review time.

Some institutions have said they are going to “stop the clock” for tenure, which relieves some people but scares others. A year delay in review means a year delay in promotion and the raise usually associated with tenure.

Looking at data from Texas, the average salary increase between assistant and associate professor is over $8,500. Because that baseline is often used for various kinds of salary adjustments, the hit to someone lifetime earnings is much more than $8,500 for that one year.

I bring all this up because I encountered an unexpected obstacle to continuing with my academic scholarship. I have a project where I have all the data. I am starting to write up a manuscript about it. so I need to read the prior work. I find a book that looks highly relevant to the topic, and my library has it on the shelves. Excellent.

That’s when I discover the library isn’t lending out its books.

And even though the library is nominally open, the stacks are closed, so I can’t even go in and read the volume in the library itself.

That’s a little obstacle I should have expected to writing up articles, but didn’t.

There are going to be tons of obstacles, large and small, even for someone like me, who is not particularly affected by social distancing measures and working from home.

Notes from a pandemic: Inching closer

Fifteen days, huh? Longer than I thought.

It was fifteen days ago that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my university announced it was extending spring break and moving all instruction online for the remainder of the semester and until further notice after that.

At the time, there were no confirmed cases in our area. But based on what I knew and based on conversation, I thought, “There are people infected here.”

And predictably enough, people testing positive started to pop up in the lower Rio Grande Valley. But today things went to a new level when one of our Brownsville students and a faculty member tested positive for COVID-19.

Friday, March 27, 2020 :: Office of the President

Dear Campus Community:

UTRGV learned today that one of our students and one of our faculty have each tested positive for COVID-19 (coronavirus). Our student tested positive after traveling out of state and our faculty member after returning from international travel. Please join me in sending positive thoughts to these Vaqueros for a speedy recovery.

Meanwhile, a few people in the science online community are starting to say, “Hey, I’ve got COVID-19.” Folks like Clement Chow and Adam Rutherford.

It’s an epidemic when people you don’t know get sick. It’s a pandemic when people you know get sick.

External links

UTRGV COVID-19 Case Update

Notes from a pandemic: Misanthrope report

Occasionally, when someone I know asks how everyone is doing (particularly on social media like Facebook or Twitter) how they’re doing working from home / self quarantined / social distancing, my response is usually something like:

“Misanthrope reporting in. What is everyone bitching about? Social distancing is the best thing ever. I’ve never been happier in my life!”

This statement is about:

• 50% true.
• 40% joking for the sake of joking (also known as me being a smartass).
• 10% false bravado.

I am pseudo-extrovert. I can dial up the energy level and sometimes even charm for a presentation, conference, or teaching, but it takes it out of me. I recharge by getting away from people. This is one more reason why, as I said before, my life has been disrupted much, much less than many other people.

Part of me is digging the fact that nobody expects me to go to meetings in person. That traffic is now relatively light all the time. I don’t have to generate as much small talk.

That false bravado, though, is real. As in, really false.

Not long ago, I stumbled across the TV series Alone, and watched season 2 - partly because it was set on the north end of Vancouver Island, Canada, which is close to where I used to live. (Victoria is on the south end of the island.)

Participants film themselves. They have no film crew. They have nothing but a “panic button” to connect with the outside world.

The show is kind of an ode to boredom, punctuated by rare moments of crisis.

Watching the show, what became obvious was that for some participants who made themselves reasonably secure physically did not mean they were okay psychologically.

One participant said something like, “If you have an unresolved issues, they are going to bubble up and consume you, because there is nothing else to distract you and beat them back down.”

I’ve felt a very tiny little bit of that in the last couple of weeks.

Now, to reiterate my point earlier: I’m all right! But even we introverted, slightly misanthropic human beings are usually social animals, and we need something to keep ourselves occupied besides our own thoughts.

I am super glad for the internet and my pocket friends. I’ve said for years, “Online conversations are real conversations.” Online friendships are real friendships. This will be something that will save a lot of people from falling into bad places in their own minds.

Notes from a pandemic: “Research that actually matters”

On Monday, a now deleted tweet from Andrew Timming said something along the lines of, “This crisis is a wake-up call. COVID-19 shows how much academic research is just castles in the sky. ‘Moving forward, let’s do research that actually matters to the world’.”

Andrew has deleted the tweet, so I can’t confirm the exact wording. That last part – “research that actually matters to the world” – is an exact quote. I don’t think Andrew deserves hate, which he says he received, but I do think his comment deserves commentary. Maybe even critical commentary.

I get the sentiment. I do. In times of crisis, a lot of people feel useless.

Timming was making a variation of an old, long-running argument about “basic verus applied” research. Now, I’ve heard a lot of retorts to this. I like, “If we only ever did applied research, all we’d have would be better mammoth traps.”

According to (probably untrue) legend, a politician once asked Michael Faraday what good electricity was.

There are two versions of the story of Faraday’s reply.

1. “One might as well as what good is a new borne baby.”
2. “One day, sir, you may tax it.”

(I like the second one.)

But the next day, I was listening to Maddie Sofia interviwing Ed Yong on ShortWave. It shows the COVID-19 pandemic itself shows the problem of focusing research on what “actually matters in the world.” (My emphasis.)

SOFIA: So one thing that I found really interesting in your article was the state of coronavirus research in general and how that plays into how prepared we are right now. Like, this is a big group of viruses that cause a decent bit of disease throughout the world. But one researcher you talked to said that until recently, not that many people were studying coronaviruses.

YONG: Right. So a very small group of people - maybe, you know, several dozens of researchers - have focused on coronaviruses for a few decades now. But it really has been a very, very niche field, even among virologists. When SARS classic first emerged, I think coronavirus researchers were really shocked that the things that they were studying were suddenly of public health importance.

SOFIA: Right.

YONG: And they are even more flabbergasted now.

SOFIA: And so because of that - because even after SARS, there wasn’t a huge uptake in how many people were studying this, we don’t necessarily have surveillance networks in place for coronavirus like we do for the flu.

YONG: Right. A lot of our preparedness measures in general have been focused on flu as the most likely next pandemic - and for good reason - because flu actually is the most likely next pandemic. It just so happened that this time, it was a coronavirus. And we don’t have surveillance for coronaviruses. We know, actually, surprisingly little about coronavirus biology. And all of those deficiencies have contributed to this dire situation that we’re facing when we don't know enough but we're forced to act as quickly as possible.

Arguably, the situation we now find ourselves in with the COVID-19 pandemic is not despite the view that researchers should do work “that actually matters to the world,” it’s because of it.

From a rational assessment of risk, need, whatever, I’m sure people argued in grant agencies that we should not invest much money and resources in coronavirus research. The best estimates were that coronaviruses didn’t pose much of a threat, so we should put that money into influenza or something else.

This isn’t even the first time we’ve seen this happen in the last decade.

Remember when people were freaking out about zika? (I know, it seems like something that we read about in history books instead of only four years ago, in 2016.) The CDC director tweeted this picture of every paper about the zika virus published in the world to that point.

It was pretty short freakin’ stack of paper. And the headline was that scientists were caught “flat-footed.”

I’m sure that on September 10, 2001, there would have been a lot of people in the US arguing that universities should think about shuttering programs in, say, contemporary Islamic thought or Arabic language studies.

If we discovered an comet, asteroid, or meteor on a collision course with Earth tomorrow (and given how 2020 is going, I feel like we should be watching the skies more), the headline would probably again be that scientists were caught flat-footed. Even though people have known this is a possibility for decades.

Hell, Hollywood knew this well enough to make a movie about it in 1979. And Sean Connery disaster from space movies are the best disaster from space movies. (Don’t @ me, Armageddon and Deep Impact viewers.)

Things are only irrelevant until they’re not. And then people complain, “Why wasn’t anyone studying this?!” Society pretty much told us not to. Society told us that we weren’t doing research that “actually matters.”

External links

Why is the coronavirus so good at spreading?
One tweet that shows how the Zika virus caught scientists flat-footed

Notes from a pandemic: Coronavirus campus

These pictures of UTRGV were taken Monday, 23 March 2020, when I went to campus to feed my crayfish. You could be forgiven for thinking they were taken the first day of spring break rather than the first day after spring break.

There were a few people on campus, but not many.

And frankly, I’ve always loved campuses when there are not many people around. I like the calm, and it was kind of beautiful.

Through a weird series of events, I am probably one of the people least affected by the COVID-19 pandemic I know.

Because I had spent the better part of the last two years mainly working on the Better Posters book:

I had been teaching online courses for the last couple of years. My teaching load was anywhere from mostly to exclusively online for the last few semesters. I had only one face-to-face class this semester, my neurobiology class. That course didn’t have a lab component. I had a good idea of how to move its course content online from my other online class experiences.

I didn’t have a lab to shut down. Because I was writing from home, I wasn’t taking students. My lab space (with my consent) got reassigned to another group of researchers from another department. I didn’t fight it because I wanted to be a team player, and I was working on the book anyway. So I thought, “No problem, I’ll get lab space once the book manuscript is done and out of the way.” Getting new lab space had taken longer than I expected, and I was getting antsy about it. But this has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since I didn’t have to go through a process of putting everything away, worrying about trainees, and so on. I only have some crayfish to feed occasionally.

Unrelated to book writing, there’s one more thing that makes my life much less disrupted than many other people.

I don’t have kids. I feel for people who suddenly have kids at home and not at school.

Which is to say:

I’m all right!

Look after yourself and others.

It’s going to be a rough ride.