shaunmahony.bsky.social
Studying gene regulation and transcription factor binding with machine learning. Assoc Prof at Penn State. 🇮🇪
319 posts
1,494 followers
665 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
I think it's worth interrogating the metaphors. For example, I think the metaphor of regulatory networks as "circuits" has pushed a lot of syn-bio approaches down unproductive paths - e.g. the assumption that one can design a modular regulatory unit that is separated from the rest of the cell
comment in response to
post
For example, a hierarchical tree cannot represent all true relationships between gene expression patterns in a cyclical process (e.g., cell cycle, cyclopropagative development)
comment in response to
post
This looks great - congratulations! I disagree slightly with the framing: it's fundamentally impossible to have a dimensionality reduction method that is distortion-free in all settings. 1/2
comment in response to
post
I think this is referring to the accumulated number of years since divergence, summed across all angiosperm lineages. Still a bit of a weird number to calculate, but not as bad as it first appears...
comment in response to
post
That’s exactly right. If a university doesn’t believe that their DEI program violates Federal anti-discrimination laws, this suggests that they are free to keep operating it
comment in response to
post
I'm intrigued! How were they planning to go about this? Were they going to have you look for furin cleavage sites in ancient human genomes or something? 🤣
comment in response to
post
It thought you said “sibling cousins”
comment in response to
post
Hey @albertvilella.bsky.social - it looks like all your posts are being automatically labeled as spam in my field. Maybe because of the hashtags?
comment in response to
post
No... another clause in the bill limits to colleges with >500 students. The seminaries on that list are <500
comment in response to
post
Partial list of affected institutions at the end of this wiki page (list of universities with endowment >$1M per enrolled student): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
comment in response to
post
He’s a Trump appointee from the first time
comment in response to
post
I think the original post referred to grants that would be hypothetically pulled if restraining order doesn’t hold? Not clear, but I don’t think any grant have been pulled yet
comment in response to
post
Might even be a 1A issue, since the punishment would be based on an act of speech and not based on the work to be funded
comment in response to
post
But wouldn't this round of Council meetings have been the first of the fiscal year? If so, they would need to reach back to last year's grants, right? Is that possible?
comment in response to
post
Honestly, I think that wouldn't be a bad outcome. But universities & agencies agree what counts as indirects in their rate negotiations and the negotiation document explicitly says you are not allowed to use direct funds to pay for indirect items. So I think they (gov't) are being disingenuous here
comment in response to
post
Thanks, Scott - yeah, I think the CSR website lags behind SRO cancellations. Several of the meetings scheduled for today did not show up as cancelled on the CSR website until this morning
comment in response to
post
But Councils aren't meeting either... they can't approve funding on reviewed grants without Council
comment in response to
post
We think about this Q a lot--as noted above, we used CUT&RUN fragment size to infer that some nuc binding probably occurs, but our thought is that these events are likely transient so won't be efficiently captured via a re-ChIP-style method. FWIW C&R shows ~20% nuc-sized frags for FOXA1 ⬇️
comment in response to
post
What study section is this?
comment in response to
post
And I’ll point out that in the case of success stories like Bell Labs or many tech research shops, the advances did not come from big vision but anarchic autonomy, researchers told, “Do whatever you want.” The breakthroughs were rarely in anticipated directions. 8/n
comment in response to
post
But, to be clear, NOT "to fund the football team" as I see commenters elsewhere saying, right?
comment in response to
post
I'm not sure that SpaceX get grants as opposed to contracts. Much less transparency with the latter. But see here:
bsky.app/profile/shau...
comment in response to
post
Things that Ted Cruz thinks is woke:
Taking middle school kids on a field trip to see the eclipse
www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...
comment in response to
post
I'm so sorry - I served on a couple of MOSAIC K99 study sections and I thought it was a great mechanism.
comment in response to
post
I honestly couldn't recommend that anyone apply to this now as opposed to the parent K99. It's just too high a risk that they will pull it down and revoke review again. As you said... psychic damage
comment in response to
post
Plugging Penn State's numbers into this leads to a pretty scary scenario. Given 15% IDR and no other changes (i.e., same cost share amount and no overhead cost reductions), Penn State could only accept about 1/10th of its current NIH funding to "break even" on overheads.
comment in response to
post
In reality, I don't think the size of the cost share is as high as 20%. For example, Penn State is more like 4.4% researchsupport.psu.edu/wp-content/u...
That sounds like a good thing, but in fact the size of the financial hole caused by 15% IDC is even larger when the existing cost share is small
comment in response to
post
$44.5M direct = 178 grants would be around the break-even point in your scenario
comment in response to
post
@jeremymberg.bsky.social Great thread, but I think it's even worse than you suggest. 15% on $80M = $12M. Plus the fixed $20M cost share = $32M. That's 40% of the direct $80M, whereas you assumed above that 60% was the true overhead cost
comment in response to
post
Here's another source to back up >$100M for a NASA F9 launch:
www.govconwire.com/2020/09/spac...
Versus $67M as the sticker price for F9 commercial:
spaceinsider.tech/2023/08/16/h...