Last year I hardly saw any of you. Grad school + running a team meant that I hardly slept and had almost nothing to say about life except hospitals and computing and whatever I know about biology. In three weeks school starts again. If I chose to go, it will only be worse. Much worse. The size of my team is rapidly doubling and I have more projects and grants then ever. How the hell can I be in class if I am the lead architect on a national project? I’m speaking at two conferences in the middle of the school semester. Actively hiring and training and setting up collaborations is not how one prepares for school.

Conversely, if I don’t go back this semester that pushes my PHD out another year. I need to explore the world beyond this city-- as awesome as boston is– I can't live here indefinitely. I can’t (won’t) leave until I am finished. The feeling of incompleteness haunts me, and I make a better jonny apple seed than gardener. I have started so many things and none of them are finished.

The middle path is to take a semester break and instead start the pharmacovigilance thesis project with my mentors. That would be top notch training and hopefully contribute to graduation. I recognize this is out of order but it fits my history. Could also reopen the genotyping work and try to find the common ground between genomics and public health and call it personalized medicine. I am hoping I could teach myself the methods on the fly enough to publish at least one more paper. I can return to school next semester when I train my team to run these projects without me.

I’m seriously at a vertex and I’m not sure what to do.
If you have any advice, please, I’m all ears.

--andy

already reached Wikipedia folklore.



No one ken to ken to sivmen,
nor yon clees toju maliveh.
When i gez aju zavateh na nalechoo more,
new yonooz tonigh molinigh,
Yon sorra shooo,
yes ee shooo, ooo.
-Ken leee
tulibu dibu douchoo
Ken Lee,
Ken lee meju more.
Ken Lee
tulibu dibu douchoo
Ken Lee,
Ken lee meju more
2.No one ken to ken to sivmen,
nor yon clees toju maliveh.
When i gez aju zavateh na nalechoo more,
new yonooz tonigh molinigh,
Yon sorra shooo,
yes ee shooo, ooo.

Excluding the obvious, here are my recent playlists. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO???

ELECTRO TRIP HOP
IAMX: This will make you love again
Sneaker Pimps: lightning field
Everything but the girl: single (photek remix)
Halou: Feeling this is like to fall awake
Lamb: Gorecki
Royksopp: what else is there
Sneaker pimps: wasted early sunday morning
Sneaker pimps: low five
Ladytron: destroy everything you touch
Ladytron: International dateline
Delirium: Heaven’s earth
IAMX: The alternative
IAMX: Spit it out
Talvin singh: Traveler
BT: fast and furious
Unkle: rabbit in your headlights
DJ Shadow: stem long stem
Frou Frou: let go
Orbital: halcyon and on and on
Thom Yorke: Cymbal Rush

TEAR YOU APART
She wants revenge: tear you apart
She wants revenge: sister
She wants revenge: these things
She wants revenge: true romance
You shriek: Bella lugosi
Blue diner: The Figurehead
Dead can dance: the arcane
Dead can dance: musica eternal
Smiths: The queen is dead
Smiths: Never had no one ever
Pixies: where is my mind
Placebo: every you every me
Placebo: running up that hill (kate bush cover)
Placebo: meds
Radiohead: videotape
Radiohead: all I need

The sound of portishead from the art exhibit in my building,
depictions of love in dystopian futures,
gasmasks and war helmets,
I had to have it all...

After some wine and more portishead, she takes me to this fantastical place I can only describe as urban legend. Upon arrival, we open the waist high metal gate concealed by foliage revealing a secret garden with children's carousel horses, flagstone walkways, someone's food supply, and giant pink stuffed rabbits.

Now thoroughly intrigued, she leads the path to a giant indoor structure that resembles an artist commune's idea of a tree house with mirrors deliberately placed to obscure senses, indoor foliage consuming the house, homemade chandeliers, and 30 years of artists contributing pieces to the corners and walls and every space that could house heads of baby dolls and freakish creatures

Saving the best for last, we climb antlers and door handles to the upper level with open exposure to the moon above. In the apolstered victorian chair, the crescent moon and freak garden in a single view, I suck in the experience and for a solid two minutes I was at a loss for words.

As a guest, I wonder if I'll ever have the privilege of returning. She leaves in three days.
I bought the image of dystopian love as a souvenir. I'll remember this night for as long as I live.

I was recently promoted to lead-architect for linking all Harvard Med School hospitals for clinical research by way of massive NIH policy change in funding. I'm hoping to extend this to support genomic inquiries as well, primarily through genotyping and gene expression microarrays(for anyone who is interested I'm not a genotyping fanboy its just relatively cheap at 250$ a pop to 'sample-sequence' DNA).

I've resisted posting about this because it is much better described in person. I'm uber excited and still in a bit of shock.

Essentially the idea is that patients are "enrolling" themselves in clinical studies everyday just by showing up to the hospital. However, few studies occur across hospitals with sufficiently sized patient cohorts thereby causing incidental medical "facts" and false alarms. There are so few massive studies published that when they do occur they cost millions of dollars for each study.

We want to change all of that.

By querying all the hospitals in near-real time, we are able to treat large populations (e.g. boston) as a single entity. With access to all that data with strict privacy, we are able to write machine learning (AI) algorithms to search for patterns and correlations between diagnosis(flu, hard attacks) with associated factors (vioxx, co-morbid conditions, etc). And when we identify significant correlations we can correlate these measurements with DNA isolated from routinely collected blood samples.

Looks like I'll be here for at least a few years more.

I feel like someone just told me I won the lottery.
I'll give a more excited post when I fully acknowledge what just happened.

LJ is great for blogs.
Facebook is great for everything else.
MySpace (in my opinion) is epic fail.

I suppose the best of all worlds is Facebook that you can blog from.

The real question is: what is the best way to keep in touch with friends?
Emails and list-serves are a dying breed. The world is 15 seconds of attention, tops.

How does one actually have a discussion?

Cheers to a non-informative 8 second update,
--andy

getfirefox.com

It is actually rare that a technology blows me away.
Usually I understand how it works so I'm not all that impressed.

Firefox 3 is so fast, I'm stunned. I don't understand how they did it.

I repeat: if you use the internet, DOWNLOAD FIREFOX 3 NOW!

"this is the end and george bush knows it. His policies are deliberately bringing the end of the world"

who knows, maybe he is on to something....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7353025.stm

A Russian man trying to sleep off a night of after-work drinking failed to notice a six-inch (15-cm) knife in his back - until his wife woke him up.

"We were drinking and what doesn't happen when you're drunk?" he was quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying."

PHD = 4 years asking one specific question.
That is going to be the make or break.

You can't do a PHD on instrumenting the health care enterprise for pharmacogenomics, drug/disease outcomes, and genome wide association studies spanning SNP chips, expression microarrays, and clinical phenotypes.

That is a 20 year PHD. Picking anyone of those alone while dropping the others seems wrong but necessary for PHD work.

tough decisions to make.
I want to know a little bit about everything.
PHD = everything about one thing.

....ponders.......... .. .

Today I made the first step at starting a full-fledged PHD.

My mentors over the last 4 years fully back the idea while actively reminding me of the sacrifices I will need to make.

Part of me says "you have an opportunity to receive the *BEST* Jedi training by your favorite Harvard Professors"

Part of me says "holy shit ramen dinners and walking away from your empire"

But I believe curiosity is going to get the better of me.
I want the burning insight they have to offer.
They routinely bomb my brain with shocking simplicity.

Granted, I haven't started a PHD yet and I need to finish the masters first (1 more year).
but....My mentors are already assigning me research topics beyond my current capabilities.
I told them I dont have time right now and they reminded me "that is the point- you wont have time for the other stuff, so just drop it".
Of course in practice that means hiring and training more people to take over in my absence.

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.

If I *DO*, then I get the best training available while eating ramen.

If I *DONT*, then I continue running a team at a director level with the luxuries of candlelit dinner and a sweet apartment.
That sounds nice until I think about all the questions I want answered.... and I love questions.

Either way, its a good position to be in I just have to figure out what's next.

As we were parting, he said "and the part I like is that with a PHD I can finally put you on the Harvard Faculty".
That sorta hit me weird too. All this is so abstract yet strangely available right now.

Lots to think about.

--a

Sneaker Pimps: lightning field

Strike me down
Give me everything you've got
Strike me down
I'll be everything I'm not
Count the questions on one hand
You don't ask me what I planned
Strike me down
Should have asked me what went wrong
Strike me down
Should have stayed away too long

Strike me down
Give it everything you've got
Chance me now
I'll be everything I'm not
Hope's the child of what luck brings
Points the faith in higher things
Ask me now
Fire at everything at once
Strike me down
Take it anyway you want

Strike me down
Better left it all unknown
Strike me down
Should have held it all along
Wash the questions off my hands
I'm the fate in no one's plans
Strike me down
Give it everything you've got
Strike me down
I'll be everything I'm not
Everything I'm not

China: Tibetans Planning Suicide Attacks

Does China realize how absolutely ridiculous that sounds?
"We are under attack from hundreds of years of non-violence!"

Translation: we are about to kill Tibetans and make it look like suicide.

Perhaps they are taking clues from the US and UK:
If you say terrorist enough times, do people start believing it?

This will be the only Olympic event that I watch.
Sovereignty of Tibet is so much more acrobatic than some silly gold.

( Read more... )

In other news:
Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Honestly, is this democracy?