The appalling ableism in health care, government, academia, and society is even more evident than usual in this pandemic. Canada is one of the worst offenders. It’s hard to take. 🧵 This is not surprising, as we already knew that Canada does poorly compared to other countries when it comes to supporting disabled people. E.g., we do very poorly on, “spending due to sickness, disability and occupational injury.” data.oecd.org/socialexp/publ… data.oecd.org/chart/6hja

The UK has already vaccinated over 50% of people in their priority groups, which include young people with disabilities & chronic diseases.

The US guidance recommends people aged 16–64 years with high-risk medical conditions be vaccinated at the same time as those aged 65–74.

https://twitter.com/VaccineStatusUK/status/1362799531012808707

Meanwhile in Canada, those under 60 with disabilities & chronic diseases aren’t recommended to be vaccinated until after all healthy 60+ people are done.

I hope someone with the right skills & expertise is planning an international comparison study of ♿️ experiences & outcomes.

In my experience, most Canadians are unaware that Canada has extremely few available acute care hospital beds (meaning “beds that are maintained, staffed and immediately available for use”) compared to other countries. Here’s the international comparison: data.oecd.org/chart/6a67 What this means: we have less leeway than other countries to max out hospital capacity as intensive care units (ICUs) fill up with COVID-19 patients needing beds, equipment, and health care staff’s attention for days or weeks.

Thank you @WrightCensored! 5 minutes is a very tough length for me (1-2 minutes is easy, 20 minutes is easy, anything in between is hard to stick to time), so, as usual, I prepared my statement ahead of time! Makes it easy to copy and paste here. 😀

https://twitter.com/WrightCensored/status/1321161064776695813?s=20

1/Hello, thank you so much for this incredible honour.

Night owl thread. Not long ago, I finished my 3-year term on a national committee with the worst acronym, the Advisory Committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Program (ACEDIP). It's pronounced AY-suh-dip. (I died a little inside every time I said it.) chairs-chaires.gc.ca/program-progra… At one of our meetings (2018, I believe?) people came to present their work in progress on the design of a new Canadian program based on Athena Swan. One of their questions was, basically, “Should we start with gender, like the UK did, and expand from there?”

I’m starting to see discussion about serological testing for COVID19 antibodies as one of the ways that we will be able to safely allow people to start to interact more. To have informed public discussions about this, people will need to understand how test “accuracy” works. 🧵 Note 1: There’s a whole separate issue here about how immunity may or may not work and whether the presence of antibodies indicates long(ish)-term immunity. That is not the topic here. I recommend this article.

https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1249867382866284544

I gave a talk this week on things I have learned re: scientific writing. The talk was in French (my language at work) but I thought I’d share here (slides in French, tweets in English) in case it is useful to others.

Thread: As I presented to those at my talk, what worked for me may or may not work for you, but for whatever they are worth, here are my best tips.

1. Be honest with yourself about your issues.

I woke up earlier this morning, saw the date on my clock, and thought of women who were murdered 30 years ago today because a man was angry they were at engineering school. I was a teenager, very good at math & science. Five years later, I started engineering school. Marking December 6 wasn’t always the national event that it is now, but engineering schools marked it from the beginning. As a female engineering student who could speak French, I was asked on multiple years to hold a white rose, a candle, and say a French name.

After 36 years of type 1 diabetes (#T1D), the last year or 2 have been tougher than usual. Patterns shifting bit by bit, my old tricks not working so well anymore, hypo unawareness getting worse, lows coming out of nowhere, increasing fear of travel, fear of driving, less energy. I started using versions of this slide at the start of my talks earlier this year. The unpredictability had started to bleed into my talks. (“Hey, this isn’t a pager, it’s a medical device. It might beep. I might need to check it. I’m not being rude. I can’t turn it off. Sorry.”)

"We took an in-depth look at equal pay for equal work by gender in Ontario’s academic institutions and found the gap widening among all faculty ranks. [...] pay gaps increase as women faculty move up the echelons of the university system"

https://twitter.com/b_momani/status/1122218444777238529

"these pay gaps are even more prominent among the top research-based universities, also known as U15" cc @U15ca

I got an email from a staff member in @KirstyDuncanMP's office on Tuesday about #Budget2019. It included the line: "We were also thrilled to see the support for the tri-agencies scholarships and fellowships, to finalize implementation of recommendations of the Fundamental Review of Science."

My reaction: "finalize"?

It has become clear to me since we published this paper a month ago that a fair number of people are under a misconception about the way(s) in which bias can occur in peer review.

https://twitter.com/TheLancet/status/1093826070476918785

tl;dr Some people seem to mistakenly think that bias is something that happens exclusively in the heads of reviewers, at the time of review. This is naive and potentially harmful.

Longer version:

If the 84 applicants were ~40% women (a reasonable stab in the dark for this career stage) and women were equally likely as men to be funded, then the Fisher’s Exact test result for the observed scenario is p=.04.

https://twitter.com/dr_perreault/status/1105144495652462593

I don’t know if this review process was fair or unfair. Small numbers (n=10) mean it’s easy to have unbalanced results just through chance. But I’d be curious to know more about what measures were put in place to ensure fairness.

I had an interview-by-email recently about the made-in-Canada Athena SWAN charter. cc @KirstyDuncanMP The journalist used my positive answers to earlier questions (overall, I like the charter) but didn't use my answer to the final question. That may be understandable. It was long. But the reason I responded was to get my answer to that question across, so here we go. thread/

Yesterday: PhD student’s paper is accepted! Yay! But also, other PhD student’s paper is returned by the journal after nearly 6 months due to inability to get reviewers. This happened to another trainee’s paper last year as well. Anecdotally, it sounds more & more common. Journals: Please improve your processes. Make your default review times longer. See if you get all reviews in faster if you ask for reviews within 4 weeks rather than 2. Also: invite more junior people to review. They’re often more eager to review & are up on newest methods.

It is interesting to me (and not in a good way) that I recently had a semi-viral thread that spelled out How Academia Works that got very positive responses for the most part, and yet my colleague & friend @andpru is getting negative responses for his.

https://twitter.com/andpru/status/1024005699737509888

I’ve known Dr. Pruszynski for several years. We’re in different fields but collaborate actively on science policy & advocacy @ACECHR_ACCSDC. We chat about careers sometimes. We are both ambitious & got prestigious grants in the same cycle.

A thread about power and professionalism in academia 1/This thread is inspired by comments about how it's "human nature" to be sexually attracted to other people, that sometimes you really do find your soulmate at a conference or a lab bench, and that so-and-so, who is known to be a harasser, is a "good scientist."

A new entry in my top 5 favourite xkcd's ever. The hover text especially. 😂 HT my awesome friend @wayfound xkcd.com/2025/ Because the alt text field is not long enough to fully describe: The image is a cartoon of a woman sitting at a computer. Text bubble says:

This would be a smart thing to do, Americans. Paper ballots are completely doable. Many countries use paper ballots. HT @shanselman

https://twitter.com/thomasfuchs/status/1022684416206876673

I've voted in every election in Canada since age 18. How it has worked each time:
1. Walk 5 mins to polling station
2. Greet neighbours
3. Present ID
4. Get ballot & pencil
5. Put an X in a circle next to 1 candidate's name (like this: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2008…)
6. Walk 5 mins home

I have berries from Île d’Orléans *and* peaches from Ontario and oh my goodness this is why things would have to be very bad for me before I’d try keto. Notes:
1. Île d’Orléans is an island visible from Quebec City on which much fruit is grown. quebecregion.com/en/quebec-city…

CW: abuse

There have always been people who did science in ways that were unethical. The Nazis did appalling experiments. Tuskegee was an appalling study. Appalling nutritional experiments were done on hungry Indigenous children in residential schools in Canada. The knowledge gained from those experiments has never, ever been worth the costs incurred by the people harmed. We do not honour the experimenters. We do not give them prizes. This is a principled position.