To me, the end of 2019 was mind troubling. My deeply beloved mother, 76 years, was hospitalized on Dec 4th and passed away on Dec 19th due to end stage COPD. At the same time I was reading Samuel Shem’s new novel, Man’s 4th Best Hospital, the sequel to The House of God. The contrast created by my mothers’ treatment in one the smallest hospitals in our country and the book content could not have been greater, neither was the prospect of modern medicine more grim. Continue reading
Academia
Formatting scientific papers: a waste of time, money, and grey matter!
Those of you who have published a scientific paper or two will recognise the following process:
Format.
Submit.
Reject.
Reformat.
Submit.
Reject.
Reformat.
Submit.
Accept.
By the end of this process, not only have you lost the will to live (or ever reformat a scientific paper ever again), you’ve also wasted time = money. And chances are, the money has been entrusted to you to perform research, not reformat documents! A recently study counts the cost of this process, concluding that the average scientist spends 52 hours per person per year on formatting / reformatting scientific papers, with a cost of around $500 USD per manuscript or ~$2k per year.
Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 