Serious Emotional Disturbance in Children

National Academies Press, 2016, Workshop Report

See recommendations. What they cover, what they don't.

https://www.nap.edu/read/21865/chapter/1

1980 views on drug use

https://www.nap.edu/read/18827/chapter/1

Note word choices such as "redemption" of the overuser.

Is this word choice appropriate for science or for a science-based public health or psychiatry?

A worthwhile contribution from friend William Eaton

Big picture issues for our field:


http://www.jhsph.edu/departments/mental-health/about-us/origins-of-mental-health.html

WPA Section (Epidemiology and...)

Our Section counts the Aberdeen meeting as its first event.

It is fortunate that Nuffield Trust posted this volume and has made it available.

http://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/sites/files/nuffield/publication/psychiatric_epidemiology_1970.pdf

Take my advice and download your own copy, and study it.

Trace the themes forward.

Mechanic puts in print what we all know.
In epidemiology, the size of the prevalence estimate can be made as large or as small as you like (or as is liked by the funding agency).

Worked Example: See the original NIMH ECA estimates from 1984-85, and the downward re-visitation of those estimates created by introducing a novel "clinical significance" criterion.

I will try to insert the citations later on, or someone can post a comment with them.

I am thinking of Jerry Myers et al. ECA-paper from 1984 (maybe 1985?) and the paper in which Bill Narrow and Darrel Regier introduced their novel criterion to bring down the ECA estimates, perhaps 1989-2000.

(We put this sort of criterion to good use in our World Mental Health Surveys work on alcohol and other drug dependence.)

Great Oral History resource

Oral History Online is available via library electronic resources:

LOCAL LINK (requires log in)

Click on this link to external resource for Oxford Oral History books to purchase. 

Studying epidemiology, you can use your reading of oral histories to enrich your understanding of the epidemiological phenomenon you choose to study, in addition to patient, client, and community member encounters you must structure as part of your educational process and career development plans. Without building beyond family and personal experience, and beyond what you can read, you will have a narrow view of the phenomena -- typically not enough for transformative science.

The oral histories you read in preparation for these experiences can help you know what questions to ask, to create mental structures for recall of what you cannot transcribe or record on the spot, and to recall that our discipline's search for variation within pre-specified population boundaries is complemented by anthropology's disciplined search for the beginnings and endings of those boundaries (i.e., via deliberate anthropological search for sameness, lack of variation, and the edges of group membership and identification that are signaled by appearance of variation where the prior inquiry showed sameness). Recall the analogy from ecology: each flock of birds settles in the branches of old forest trees, ignorant of the county line. Possibly the 14th way of looking at a blackbird. 😉

Learn from the oral history tradition how to conduct your own interviews, en route to formal education and workshops on interviewing for ethnography.

I use such methods when I travel by myself, go to bus stops, sit, and wait for people to come ask me what I am doing there. I tell them, and we start sharing connections. They often take me home to visit with their families and share a meal after we stop at the market so I can bring something.

[Do not try this until/unless you are savvy about personal safety. I also have some robbery and extortion stories to tell.]

It's how I have learned about life in many places, including remote villages of Samoa, where to find their magic mushrooms (growing on 'cow pies' out in not-too-remote farm fields near Apia), etc.

Enjoy!

Photos by J.C. Anthony, all rights reserved:

Savai'i, ferry	Apia, rural family compound

Sometimes I get lucky, traveling to a place where a former research fellow looks after me. That was true for my study visit to Kerala State, India, a wonderful place.
The late Dr. V.S. Mani hosted my visit, took me up into the Southern Western Ghat mountains to meet local villagers, and for a cruise out of Alapuzha, and also taught me about Aryuvedic medicine, the Kalari fighters, and many temples in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu (e.g., . Here is a memorial web site for Mani, who completed but died too soon to publish his community survey of psychoses in Kerala:  http://www.thrani.com/mani1.htm

Here are (1) photos of three brothers in a mountain village we visited en route during an overnight trip to a temple in Tamil Nadu, near Vikramasingapuram (with waterfalls and monkeys), as well as (2) snaps taken in his lovely home, where his family hosted a dinner and sat for a portrait:

Non-thematic Halloween treats

Halloween treats:

Click HERE to see an animated Halloween treat.

http://66.media.tumblr.com/5b7bd9c128e2f05c3bbd5f58a5448f64/tumblr_mld3gugWzc1r9jbwno1_r1_500.gif

From Balzer's vintage collection. Print in color and trim to 12" to 16" diameter circle for your turntable, and spin it! Or, go to his online collection
 ( dickbalzer.tumblr.com ) and see a great set of animated gifs.

Seen in rural Shenandoah Valley of Virginia last weekend:

Critique of Meta-Analysis

Sir David Goldberg introduced me to the concept of meta-analysis. He was skeptical and expressed concern that it was difficult to build a sturdy wall as a conglomerate of miscellaneous pebbles, cobble, and boulders.

(I was reminded of a critique of Emmanuel Kant's system of philosophical thought as a sausage machine from which a homogeneous output flows from heterogeneous sources.)

Read what Senn (University of Glasgow Department of Statistics) says about meta-analysis, and try to avoid the errors:

Senn, 2009


p.s. You can learn a lot about a lot if you read Senn's paper carefully. Here is an illustration:

A meta-analysis by Hackshaw et al [16] in the BMJ considered passive smoking. The method involved weighting reported log-odds ratios using reported (or calculated from confidence intervals) standard errors. However, Peter Lee, in an extremely important but sadly neglected article [17] in Statistics in Medicine has pointed out that the fact that the standard error for a log-odds ratio is approximately equal to the square root of the sum of the reciprocals of the frequencies in the corresponding four-fold table provides various lower bounds on the standard error. Conversely, a given standard error implies a minimum sample size. In fact for a given total sample size N, the split of cases and non-cases in exposed and unexposed groups that gives rise to the minimum standard error is an equal split of N/4 subjects in each cell. It follows, for example, that for any reported variance, V [,] the total sample size, N [,] must satisfy the requirement that N ≥ 16/V. Similar inequalities exist for the total of any two cells and for the numbers in any given cell. 


Re-read this sentence fragment with care, and you will learn (or re-learn) a basic principle about 2x2 contingency table analysis that seems to be lost by many in the dense biostatistics curriculum [but here I would caution that Senn uses 'N' where an epidemiologist generally should be using 'n' so that big N denotes the population size and little n denotes the observed sample  size. [Statistics and epidemiology don't always have the same conventions here, but within epidemiology we can keep ourselves straight by paying attention to the population N versus the sample n.]

......the standard error for a log-odds ratio is approximately equal to the square root of the sum of the reciprocals of the frequencies in the corresponding four-fold table....


The rest of the same paragraph is worth reading and committing to memory. Doing so, you might get a sense of a rationale for senior epidemiologists always asking about the unweighted cell counts used to derive an X-Y estimate via odds ratios or log-odds-ratios. As  the cell count goes toward or to zero, the reciprocal of that frequency responds accordingly, and the size of the sum grows (as does its square root). What seems to be a large estimated association can be rendered essentially null by a small cell count in just one cell of the 2x2 table.

Of course, this postscript is not a critique of meta-analysis. It has to do with practical numeracy in epidemiology at a quite basic level that we could teach in primary school once simple division and square roots are grasped (even before logarithms are mastered). Epidemiologists worth their salt know and apply these principles of our field.

Child Psychiatry Diagnostic Assessments

Reliability and validity of child psychiatric interview, as of 1979, when I started paying attention.


More recent:
Kiddie-SADS and more

Egger-1

Egger-2


Click here for Potential futures

While chasing down these citations, I ran across the most amazing multiple co-authors work:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26799652



#child
#lapouse
#authorship

Farr on the concept of between-census population registers

#Farr
#tools
(Picture of Farr): click here 👍🏻

See the prior note on Humphreys's 1885 edited collection of Willam Farr's works.
The following image is from page 33 of that volume, and it is from an 1871 census report.

Farr is writing about the concept of a country's population.

A potentially useful quotation is shown below. (You might evaluate his 19th century noun choice as you might evaluate the 18th century Declaration of Independence's "We hold these truths....")

"Statistics is in some respects, in the present day, dealing with men like trigonometry dealing with lines and angles, able to deduce from certain given data others of which there is no trace; from a basis of observed facts other facts can be determined; ...."

Kratom in the news

NIDA:

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/kratom

DEA:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/10/13/2016-24659/schedules-of-controlled-substances-temporary-placement-of-mitragynine-and-7-hydroxymitragynine-into

https://www.dea.gov/divisions/hq/2016/hq083016.shtml

https://www.dea.gov/pr/multimedia-library/publications/drug_of_abuse.pdf#page=84



NPR:
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/12/497697627/kratom-gets-reprieve-from-drug-enforcement-administration

Drug Policy Alliance:

http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2016/10/unprecedented-move-drug-enforcement-administration-withdraws-emergency-kratom-ban

DAD:

http://www.drugandalcoholdependence.com/article/S0376-8716(14)00793-5/abstract

Continuing notes on William Farr

A series of notes on William Farr.
#Farr
#Susser
#tools
#Condorcet
#Switzerland

Back in 1975, I read this essay in my effort to understand epidemiology. It is in Am J Epidemiology, 1975.

Susser, M. and Adelstein, A. (1975)  "An Introduction to the work of William Farr," American Journal of Epidemiology 101(6): 469-476.

Link to M. Susser & A. Adelstein (1975)

(This is not a stable URL. Perhaps JSTOR has a stable URL and either Jacob or Adnan will do us the favor of writing a comment to this blog, with the stable URL in the note, either via JSTOR or the publisher, NCBI PMC, or other repository.).

Down below are two versions of URL link to Humphreys's edited version of Farr's collected works, possibly not a stable URL:
https://archive.org/stream/vitalstatisticsm00farruoft/vitalstatisticsm00farruoft_djvu.txt

Humphreys, N.A. (ed.) (1885) Vital Statistics: A Memorial Volume of Selections from the Reports and Writings of William Farr, London:  Office of the London Sanitary Institute, 74A Margaret Street, West Edward Stanford, 55, Charing Cross, S.W.

There is a google books version, where it is easier to read the tables via page image, but requires google sign-in:

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=uvKToo__d5QC

[Down at bottom of page there is a page number tool. Might need to use it to work from page to page. I sometimes get a blank page.]

In 1978, Morton Kramer showed me a table in his bound copy of this book, and allowed me to sit in his office to read the book. Many years later, while we both were professors at Johns Hopkins Schhol of Hygiene and Public Health, Mort inscribed his copy of the book for me as a gift. I've loaned it to JHU Professor Alvaro Munoz, but few others. There now is the online version, from which screenshots can be made, and perhaps the online version is the best place to start reading Farr in the original.

If time is short, I recommend these two starting passages:

During his two years' residence in Paris, Dr. Farr attended the lectures of Orfila, Louis, Dupuytreu, and Lisfranc on various branches 
of medical science ; of Andralon hygiene ; of Gay Lussac and Thenard 
on chemistry ; of Pouillet on natural philosophy ; of Geoffery St. 
Hilaire, Dumeril, and Blainville, on comparative anatomy and 
physiology ; of Cuvier on the history of natural sciences ; and of Guizot 
and Villemain on history and literature. It was during the course of 
his studies in Paris that the subject of hygiene, and of medical statistics 
bearing thereon, began to attract his special attention, and to engross 
his interest. 

AND

On leaving Paris, Dr. Farr and Dr. Bain [physician W.P Bain, Farr’s friend] travelled in Switzerland, and the latter writes : "I had many opportunities of studying and admiring my friend's character. In a diary which I kept of our tour, I find recorded that <Mr. Farr>, while of a simple disposition, is endowed with a vastness of ideas and a philosophic mind.” He gave evidence then of observation and research. “I well remember the scene at our inn at Martigny, when, after a walk to see the celebrated waterfall about four miles away, I returned weary and hungry to dinner. To my surprise, I found the entrance blocked up by at least a hundred of those miserable beings, the Cretins, who inhabited the Valais in great numbers. On inquiry of the landlord he told me that the gentleman inside had commissioned him to get together as many Cretins as he could, so that he might examine them. After some difficulty, I wedged my way into a room, where Mr. Farr was standing ....”

AND search for Farr's notes of admiration for Condorcet, French revolutionary and early contributor to sociology's emergence as a science, who shared a vision of universal education for all people, irrespective of sex, skin color, religion, or other personal or familial attributes used to constrain freedom of non-royals at that time.

Finally, let me draw you attention to archives.org as a bibliographic treasure house, with a handy search tool in the upper right hand corner at the top of each text file: 

https://flic.kr/p/Mb8mZz search tool link image

Be skeptical about weighted survey estimates and inspect the alternatives

Why do I insist that scientific articles must show unweighted numbers as well as estimates based on these two weights: (1) weighted by probability of selection only, and (2) weighted by the sampling weight and the post-stratification factors as well. If you study only (2), but not (1) and the unweighted numbers, you've started to drink some of the Jonestown kool-aid.

Read this article for some insights:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/upshot/how-one-19-year-old-illinois-man-is-distorting-national-polling-averages.html?_r=0

If no information is available beyond (2), as in R-DAS, at least ask for an approximation of unweighted numbers, whether subgroup estimates have been reported based on surpassing a minimum unweighted observation count, and ask for a distribution of estimates stratified by quantiles of the available analysis weights. Look for anomalies.

#survey
#tools

Instructions to Reviewers Who Critique NIH K-type Applications (updated July 2016)

Definitions of Criteria and Considerations for K Critiques

1. Study them carefully.

2. Use them as a checklist when you are writing or critiquing a K application.

3. Mentors, co-mentors, consultants, and referees should be alerted to the specific questions, and their letters of support should highlight the criteria. I try to write a few sentences or paragraph on each item when I am writing letters of recommendation.

4. Recall that these are instructions. Some reviewers do not read them and some reviewers do not follow them.

If I said this book makes a synecdoche error, would you understand my meaning?

Synecdoche, a term from rhetoric covered in a recent post.


Click here, then scroll up and read the review of Kurweil's HHMM book to see why I think the error is an example of synecdoche.

Here, I am conveying how to apply what you learn in rhetoric to constructive criticism of scholarly work. ( This comment takes nothing away from Ray Kurweil's demonstrated brilliance and insights. We should count ourselves lucky to have one such insight. He has had many. )

Cross-links

Other pertinent blogs: APEAL

As you find others, post them as comments to this post, and we can add them here in the cross-link post, rather than scatter them all around.

See Ian Colman's margin of error note in that post's side margin ( or search for it because APEAL probably changes its sidebar from time to time).

There is no need for me to mention the Donald's favorite: praeteritio

Professor Ament's Glossary of Terms in Rhetoric

praeteritio

Or my own favorite:

synecdoche:

*I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

p.s. Don't forget:
pleonasm:
Prof Naomi Breslau introduced me to pleonasm in a paper we were critiquing. I had not encountered that term since I was born.

#2 of 2: Logic in the Presidential townhall "debate" assignment and what to watch by checklist

Read #1 first to understand this additional checklist.

This one is on "Logos" and Professor Wheeler covers items under this rubric here:

Logos

But here is your checklist material for home study.
Wheeler calls it a "handlist" here.

This checklist might be even more fun than the first checklist I am suggesting.

Certainly you would agree that scientists must use logic, even if you have sceptivism about rhetoric generally.

Where to learn more?

Every good philosophy department offers courses on rhetoric and logic.

Again, have fun with it!

#1 of 2: Presidential townhall "debate" assignment and what to watch by checklist

Your homework assignment tomorrow is to drop everything and watch the "townhall debate" in this election cycle. Almost certainly, this event will qualify in your lifetime as one of those "Where were you and who were you with when <this event> took place?" events.

Organize your life to get other assignments done, and try to focus on the interactions.

If you can, remove yourself from a circus atmosphere, and make it a learning process that can help you in your career in science.

How is this possible?

The answer involves rhetoric and persuasion, as well as logic.

Make a checklist for yourselves and for each of those watching with you, and draw upon what you know about rhetoric, especially the three main rhetorical appeals and its three "flowers" that you should be learning and using in your work.

{ Rhetoric in science? Is there a need to learn rhetoric in science? }

How do you persuade a reader to read beyond the title or first sentence of your next scientific article?
How do you persuade a study section that you deserve a fundable priority score and an award to do your next big study?
How do you approach a skeptical department chair when you approach with a request for a new or renovated lab space?

Yes, Virginia, there is a need for rhetoric in science.

I do not have time to write up what I know, but others have done it for you, better than I could.

To create your checklist and use it to rate the "debate" elements with your fellow viewers, turn to this webpage created by Professor Kip Wheeler at Carson-Newman, or to something like it:

https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/resource_rhet.html
https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/resource_rhet.html

And use it to create the checklist for you to evaluate the utterances of the candidates.

If you wish, make it a game between teams to see who can correctly identify the rhetorical element being used ( but skip the impulse to make it a drinking game http://www.debatedrinking.com/ ).

By completing this homework assignment, you'll increase your mastery of an important set of tools for science writing, a set that Socrates described as the "cookery" of our transactions ( Gorgias ).

Sometime later in the year we can compare notes and try to polish up our collective understanding of what should prove to be both an educational and entertaining event.

Have fun with it!

Adolph Meyer and a story about DSM-5

 I added some annotations.

An important theme, pertinent to fussing about DSM-5:
 

"You have to know your cases, and if you do, the name of the illness will be of a secondary matter." (Adolph Meyer, quoted in 2012 Hopkins magazine article).

Original format without annotation:

http://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2012/fall/the-90-year-divide/

With my annotation:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9Ud1oy4LsimcGdDLWI4RnBHanM/view?usp=sharing

Note to self: PDF is on gdrive/blogger and in the 2bmailed folder on x220 main

Biography of William Farr now available as free e-book

 Link to that excerpt from Hare (1883):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9Ud1oy4LsimUHJ3RktWZWIwV00/view?usp=sharing

Morton Kramer introduced me to the work of William Farr when I was a Hopkins postdoc in 1977-78. About 15+ years later, as Mort was clearing out his office before full retirement, he gave me an inscribed copy of Farr's collected papers. (Mort's gift should be in my office unless I've loaned it to a student and haven't collected it.)

I think there now is an e-book collection and PDF-scanned version of that same book now available online. Maybe someone can find that e-copy of the set of collected works by Farr, and submit the URL via a comment to this blog post. I am seeing Volume 2, but not Volume 1, and it would be good to see URL for both volumes, or the entire collection, if the whole set is out there somewhere publicly accessible.

Here is  a link to the short biography based on Hare (1883):
https://goo.gl/kNHrqQ

It is curious that Hare said nothing about Farr's studies with Pierre Charles-Alexandre Louis in France, nor of Farr's work in what we now know as iodine-deficiency-diseases in mountain-areas (either the Swiss or French Alps), according to other biographers. In addition, Condorcet's influence on Farr's world view is not mentioned. I'm not seeing any UK origins of Farr's liberal ideas about universal education. By inference, one might attribute Farr's thoughts in this matters to what he learned by reading or hearing about Condorcet.

Once I find the hardcopy book or the e-version, you should read Farr's own words and make your own decision. He also speaks glowingly of Halley's life table, but Hare does not mention it.

Within this post I have placed a sample from Hare's biographical note, and Hare might have had an axe to grind. Maybe someone can find some interactions of Hare and Farr on the topic of population density, mortality, and the 'fast [and] debauched living' of city-dwellers. Perhaps the city-dwelling readers of this blog post can enlighten us about the kind of fast and debauched living Hare had in mind. (I'm not sure we know much about that kind of stuff out here in rural Michigan.)

MIYO and mentor co-authorships

A note to my fellows and mentees:

I learned a habit from Morton Kramer at Johns Hopkins. You'll have to tell me whether it's a bad habit.

During my early years studying with him, I would give Mort a close-to-final draft of a paper and tell him I was going to submit it after I did a bit more work on it. Promptly, and typically within a few days, he would hand it back to me (or more often would put it in my mailbox), and it would be covered with red pen marked suggestions for improvement, accompanied by some background papers I should read and cite. Often there would be a copy of one of his papers on the topic because he didn't use Bitnet or primordial FTP file-sharing protocols, and there was essentially no access to electronic library resources.

He never told me that I had to make a change. He simply gave suggestions and left it to me to 'make it my own' and this is the orign of the MIYO acronym in this blog post's title.

When I give you something I have edited, you will see two main types of marks. One type involves issues that I formerly had to fix when I was editor for newsletters and newspapers. Typos. Word choice ambiguities leaving one's meaning as an uncertainty. Grammar mistakes. A lead paragraph that did not tell who, what, where, when, how in order to lead the reader from the first page of the issue into the body of the issue where the advertisements would be seen.

The other type of mark will consist of whole sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs, of the type I never had time to draft when I was an editor.

The first type of mark requires deliberate decision-making by the first author, and contradiction when the first author thinks that I am making a mistake. (Yes, I still make mistakes in this category. The British and the Americans have different practices when it comes to punctuation of quotations, and whether the quotation mark goes inside or outside the comma or period of a sentence. I never bothered to store those rules in memory.)

Another example of an opportunity for contradiction includes my insistence that the reader of a science article deserves a first paragraph that declares the research question or its equivalent (e.g., a hypothesis) in order to provide a True North orientation -- i.e., say where you are going in the first paragraph before you bog me down in the scholarly details that you've worked so hard to master. I might decide that I'm not at all interested in where you are going and I can make an efficient decision when I read your first paragraph.

Where does this insistent point of view come from? In good science writing, the lead paragraph is equivalent to the who-what-where-when-how material that every good journalist learns to place in the lead paragraph of a front page newspaper story, with exceptions being certain types of human interest story. (If a man bit a dog, it sure better be stated in the first paragraph of the story. If the story is about a dog biting a man, you might want to bury that detail in a later paragraph.) One of the best lead sentences I ever read was from a Science article by Linus Pauling, and it started out something like this: "Vitamin C is an interesting compound." And of course the rest of the article was about the vitamin. (It might not have been C. It was one of the electron-grabbers but it's been decades since I read the article.)

The style of starting articles with a scholarly review of the literature that funnels down to a statement of purpose or intent is perfect for the medieval university tradition of scholarship out of which the PhD concept emerged. It's pretty much what you are required to do in a degree thesis or dissertation. But it's not quite right for science writing, even though many journal article reviewers never learned to draw that distinction and will complain about what you are covering in your first paragraph. You have to be strong enough to tell the editor and those reviewers that this is an issue of style rather than substance, and that your approach has good logic.

It is the second type of marking that always should prompt discussion until you understand the meaning behind what I have marked up. No need to discuss whether to put the comma inside or outside of the quotation mark; do what the journal tells you to do in its style guide, and don't worry about teaching me what that journal thinks is right.

But do discuss anything of substance about which you disagree or do not understand. It's an opportunity for you to teach me something I'll value

And now I cycle back to what I always had to do when Mort gave me a paper with lots of red pen marks. I had to learn from him, and then 'make it my own' from which the 'make it your own' MIYO acronym originates.

Finally, it was a rare occasion when Mort asked for a co-authorship role on the papers he worked hard to mark up. In this, he followed the tradition of his mentors, who were like Wade Hampton Frost (first Professor of Epidemiology in the US, and perhaps in the world). Frost's perspective that he had no need to be listed as an author of anything being written by his students.

[When I no longer have to report on my own scientific productivity to NIH, and when the university begins to count mentoring as a duty that is the equivalent of a PI writing his or her own grant applications, I will do the same. When Frost and Kramer were professors, the university counted mentoring as more than the equivalent of being a PI on an NIH grant application. Nowadays it seems that the only thing valued by the university is the size of your latest (and preferably this year's) NIH notice of grant award for which you are the main PI, whether you are submitting your own proposals for new funding, and whether you keep publishing new discoveries and making progress as shown via publications in the peer reviewed scientific literature. In the meantime, I won't object when I'm responsible for your funding and career development, and I do heavy-lifting on your papers, and you listed me as author. In time, I start asking people to take my name off the paper's authorship list, and if I've done anything, it's acknowledged only in the paper's acknowledgments section. This might be taken as a signal that I don't want to have anything to do with the paper, but if you begin thinking along those lines, I want you to remember the Frost and Kramer tradition, and MIYO.]

So what does MIYO mean, operationally?

(1) You are going to analyze the meaning of what is being conveyed, as best you can, and re-write it in your own words and sentences, and submit the paper (if you are first author). Typically, when my first drafts have long Latinate/Germanic sentences. (Read Kant if you want to see what I mean about long Germanic sentences.)  At minimum, you need to replace the Latinate polysyllables with pithy Anglo-Saxon equivalents, if you can. And you need to break those long sentences into shorter pieces so that the ideas are understood more readily. (A man bit a dog and there was no full moon.)

(2) You are not going to understand what I'm trying to convey, and you are going to put it on the agenda for discussion so that we can talk about the issues in our weekly work group meeting. Or, if time is of the essence, you are going to take it up with me directly. (Better the first approach so that others can learn and I can allow others to contradict me as well.)

(3) You are going to add or subtract details, perhaps not even cite the papers that I'm recommending for you to cite (e.g., you face a hard deadline and you don't have time to read and digest them and add them into the material).

ETC.

Via the MIYO process, you develop independence as a scientist. Isn't that your goal at this stage of your career in neuropsychiatric epidemiology?

Is it a bad habit I picked up from Mort Kramer?

Hiding field codes in Word documents

Thanks to Hui for showing me this trick.

#Word
#Annoyingfieldcodes

Percent Effort on NIH K awards (p.s. to prior post on salary levels)

Some of you have or should have questions about this topic:

(1) Each agency specifies a minimum % full time equivalent (FTE) effort. The K candidate and sponsoring institution are required to agree that this % FTE will be guaranteed as K-related career development and research activities time. The sponsor must agree to hold the sponsoring institution responsible, and to intervene as needed (e.g., if a department chair assigns teaching or service obligations that make it impossible for this requirement to be fulfilled).

To be safe, I recommend stating that the K candidate's FTE will be 5% above the minimum set by the agency.

Somewhere prominent in the application (e.g., budget justification), this type of language can explain If Itthe situation.

Here the example is written with an assumption that NIDA requires 75% and that 5%+ would be 80%

I am able to commit a full 80% FTE to the proposed K01 career development award activities -- that is, 5% FTE more than NIDA stipulates as the minimum. Nonetheless, in fact, I plan to spend 100% FTE at the specified salary dollar amount -- unless there are unforeseen circumstances that require me to add to this salary income (e.g., unexpected family medical expenses). In any event, I can fully commit to the 80% FTE as required by NIDA, even if there is need for this type of salary supplementation.

This approach takes off the table an issue that sometimes surfaces.

(2) How do you get that extra money?

It depends. If you are clinician, you generally can optimize income for the resident % FTE by seeing patients and billing for them. Or, you go find a teaching gig, either within your department at the sponsoring institution, in another department, or in a totally different educational institution. Or, you work as Co-Investigator on some other PI's research project. Or, you become a private consultant, helping others with research and NIH grant writing, etc. (Here, become as clever, but more ethical, than Gurdijieff was when he tricked the Russian Army into thinking that their typewriters required major time-consuming repair and all he was doing was rewinding the typewriter ribbon for about two minutes time and effort. See GI Gurdjieff: "Meetings with Remarkable Men," started as manuscript in 1927, then translated by Orage and published in English in 1963).

More on Gurdijieff, if you are interested:
http://www.gurdjieff.org/owens2.htm 

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