1/ For those wondering what the heck is happening in North Carolina, it’s a foreseeable train wreck that left the station in December 2016
(I could go back further to 2010, but let’s stay focused on state boards for now) npr.org/sections/thetw…
2/ In 2016, Republicans won NC’s electoral votes for US presidency and kept control of the gerrymandered state legislature (“surgical precision”, the Appeals court said).
But Dem Roy Cooper won the governorship…
3/ So fine, it would be split-party control (which lots of people prefer as an affirmative good)…
4/ Instead, right after election (Dec 2016), the legislature and outgoing governor (the one who’d lost) changed the rules of state government to limit newly elected Gov Cooper from doing his job
“legislature withdrew governor’s ability to make appointments to state board of education & boards of trustees of [UNC]-system schools; reduced # of appointments governor can make for govt jobs” (1,500–> 425) etc etc
6/ Anyway, now all these state boards that should be pretty boring, basic-function-of-government workhorses (education, elections, state employees health plan, etc) are partisan cockfights
7/ Living in and loving this state is like being in a decades-long, exhaustingly dysfunctional romantic relationship that has so much goodness in it - and yet…
8/ Even if you live elsewhere in the US, NC is worth paying attention to because these blueprints have been and continue to be circulated among political operatives all over the country vox.com/policy-and-pol…
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1/ Good overview of challenges of doing “big data” health care research in US. For instance, nice description of basic pros and cons of insurance claims vs #EHR health care records
2/ But the article has a prematurely triumphant tone at the beginning (and in the default Twitter tagline). N3C is great but limited, as the article does make clear
3/ And it’s not totally novel. But the novelty to me is that it’s
a non-“federated”* model
*not* run by for-profit companies,
so the data are accessible to the public for analysis
Retweets & comments on Bloomberg article are great 😁
A good #epitwitter teaching example: In research, we can frame causes as 1) personal biological deficits or 2) structural systems that (for some reason!) don’t accommodate common life processes mostly affecting women 🤔
2/ Meanwhile accommodations for sexual harassers, people who frequently have violent outbursts, who fail to pull their weight re: tedious administrative work, etc, are so culturally ingrained in many orgs that they are not even written policy…
3/ These kinds of off-the-books, unwritten, but very real, accommodations are expensive (eg, lawsuits, revolving door of talent, decreased productivity of others) but often framed as unforeseeable and absorbed as a cost of doing business
🧵1/ I find #COVIDvaccine focus groups like this fascinating. I was struck by the broad distrust of physicians in this group of reproductive-aged women...
🧵2/ I study this kind of population a lot in my #gynhealth work through #EHR medical systems data. As a social epidemiologist, it’s a cool population to study in EHR data bc so many have frequent contacts with the medical system through routine gyn and pregnancy care...
🧵 3/ So you really get a peek into a broad cross-section of the population, unlike other kinds of EHR research.
“To be able to get high volumes like that in a one-day setting, you need to have proper outreach...We rely heavily on our community partners to flyer the apartment buildings and, you know, contact local groups or agencies to make sure that they’re aware of the pop up as well.”
🧵2/ I’ve still been processing the response to CDC’s change in guidance about *outdoor* masking! Remember that?! npr.org/sections/healt…
🧵3/ In that case, I thought guidance was pretty sound bc that’s basically how I’d been living even before I was vaccinated. Outdoor transmission risk so low. My family wore masks outdoors when close to people (playgrounds etc) or long face-to-face talking or just as a courtesy
1/ New #COVID19#K12 paper in @ScienceMagazine: the part that most excites me is zooming in on the safety measures that best predict low #COVID19 risks...
2/ Parents & school staff & community members really want to know: What is most important? What measures should be prioritized at my school? This paper models that in detail: results reinforce findings from previous work
3/ importance of extracurriculars consistent with a lot of what’s seen in contact tracing of #K12 outbreaks - it’s usually not the classroom contact; it’s the less regulated extracurricular time.