This is unknown, it's individual, and varies over orders of magnitude between different diseases.
309 karma · joined May 18, 2018
I run tricky R&D projects. From inception to product and spinoffs.
Collaborative efforts spanning multiple disciplines, countries and cultures. Usually around 15-30ppl, 2-5y, 5-10 organisations. Mainly in medtech / biotech, fintech, computational modelling. Too curious to focus, often stray outside my comfort zone.
Work globally. Based in Liechtenstein / Zürich / München, Gothenburg / Oslo / Copenhagen. Mostly consulting, sometimes entrepreneurial, occasionally employed.
20y R&D leadership, 10y academic research. PhD on computational physics in medicine.
ping me at: jiro.csol@gmail.com
Some guy vomited in a restaurant. Then you can clearly model the time from exposure to symptoms in everyone else based on how far away they were when the guy vomited. Though in this case the viral exposure was very high for everyone in the restaurant.
Instead we could grow lots of viral particles. Irradiate them to certain death. Then use it to repeatedly challenge the immune system over a long period. Very expensive and nowhere near as effective or reliable as a proper vaccine, but would induce some level of resistance in a fraction of the population.
This is a misprint. They meant to say 0.99 or 99%, not .99%
That means it's very reliable that any positive signal originates from covid19 antibodies, instead of from something else.
That does not mean that it's 99% accurate with regards to sensitivity.
Trust your people. Make sure they feel safe (not afraid) to make decisions and take action.
It drastically reduces the need for management. It makes people feel happier about their work, raises quality and reduces employee turnover rates. It makes it simpler to keep high skill people, which in turn makes it easier to recruit high skill people.
The counter argument I run across is that the mistake rate will increase. But that is simply not true. Through all my data I have never seen that happen. Generally the mistake rate goes down, and the cost of mistakes goes down a lot. And the cost of all actions goes down since fewer people are needed.
Couple this with transparency, asynchronous communication and decision making, and you have drastically reduced your company's management overhead, increased speed, increased well being, increased innovation, etc.
Just get it done. Don't ask.
A potential customer had been debating a problem for a couple of months with feasibility studies, lots of meetings, etc.
They asked me about it as an aside over a coffee. I implemented a quick prototype while they were describing their intended project structure to me. I gave it to them for free.
I did not continue with this customer. But I heard later on that a VP refused to accept the solution because he insisted it must be wrong since it was completely inconceivable that it could be solved that quickly.
I often come in and ask people to stop doing meaningless tasks, just to be told that the previous, much more expensive, consultant had told them it's the bees knees.
There is also a common misunderstanding that if a bigger or cooler company is doing something it must be the right thing.
Cargo cult.
Smaller companies tend to have stronger focus of just getting stuff done. It's clear who has responsibility. People can more easily make a decision on their own or in small groups and just get it done, without involving a clown car of middle managers.
When I build projects I only have two "levels". Management have final say on budgets, targets and priorities. Experts/devs/techs get the work done. They generally make decisions with full autonomy and self organise. If they need help with coordination, planning, followup, etc then management steps in. Management also monitor and track. Usually my management has very strong technical skills and tend to be part of the daily work in the trenches.
Nope. That was perhaps the case in the 50-80s, but today we can do much better, and it's dependent on the people, the culture, and the market/product structure and strategy.
Your model is in the right direction but misses more important aspects. When consulting I measure overhead of the orgs I'm working for in great detail.
Cultural aspects like fear, autonomy, transparency, etc have a much higher impact on management overhead than the org chart structure itself.
Feels insane to store youtube vids, but quite often they are simply gone for one reason or other after a few years.
Eg: Work on autonomous air sensor, then find simple off shoot application for tuberculosis using a completely different technology.
Eg: Build a medical laser for transdermal drug delivery then find applications in dental work and scar tissue removal.
Eg: Design a flexible heterogeneous compute cluster for hpc application, then get customers who want it for the low administration cost.
You start by bringing some very competent and diverse people together to tackle some tricky and new problem. Then after a while you'll have found a bunch of peripheral questions and applications for one thing or other you create in the project.
People talking and sharing experience and knowledge will almost always find new stuff out in the dark. If you're working on the edge of knowledge there is almost always interesting stuff hiding just outside the light of your personal flashlight. Bringing people together in multidisciplinary projects is amazing.
IIRC the 2004 bsg called everyone "sir" regardless of gender. I remember that nudged me the first and second time I heard it, but then it was just second nature. It had lost it's (for me) implied gender.
Many middle managers have been moved into that layer from technical roles. They are often happy to return to more technical work.
In my projects I don't use a middle layer. I have the technical people who have the core scientific/development/production skills and I have a final decision layer of those who by reality have the final say over how money is spent and which goals to prioritise.
This has worked very well up to about 50ppl with exceptionally low overhead. That said, would not try this with people I can't trust. But I would never hire people I can't trust.
In my experience it's easy to convince top management or company owners/investors, but difficult to get middle management on board. Especially since the requirement for middle management in a distributed project is near zero.
When moving to wfh:
- move to asynchronous, shared, transparent communication. Don't use email.
- trust your people to know what to do, give them more autonomy and responsibility.
- stay in touch, but make sure it's on dev-schedule not management-schedule.
- help your people to eliminate all annoying friction wherever possible. Good audio, soundproofing, temporary walls for their house, good desk, chair, etc. Grocery delivery, child care, errands, and so on. This stuff is cheap compared to lack of time and focus for your devs.
- Ask the existing team for a set of dude recommendations, and the reasons.
- Track down a set of dudes myself. Usually from publications, open source, or previous products.
- Discuss with the dudes regarding the greater project target, team, goals, initial tasks, scheduling. Ask the dudes for other dudes they can recommend, and why.
- From here on I pay the dudes for their time and effort during recruitment, always:
- Have the dudes look at previous problems and solutions, if available, and ask for feedback.
- Have the dudes spend time with existing team on current work and ideas. When populating entire teams I have dudes work with each other. I especially look for people who are freely sharing even with people they are (technically) in competition with.
- I always followup on my initial predictions over time, to see where I'm right or wrong, and what to look for in the future.
I often hire scientists or other people who do a lot of work out in the open. It's just so much easier to quickly get a feel for peoples' output by looking at, and discussing, previous work. And most of my projects require bleeding edge specialists.
I advertise <25% of my positions (guesstimate). This is a failing on my part. I have no magic lens to read CVs, so they carry no additional information value for me.
Hiring is expensive and often takes a long time, but hiring the wrong people is much worse.
Throughout my projects I have only had one person leave, and that was for a once in a lifetime offer. I very rarely need to fire anyone.
I would rather hire two excellent dudes than five good dudes. So I tend to have the budget to pay good rates. Then I call up temporary manpower to solve the more mundane tasks so I can keep my excellent people on the more difficult and interesting items.
Red flags I look for when I'm on the other side of the table:
- Who is doing the hiring? Some checkbox HR drone, the owners/investors, or the actual team?
- Hiring evaluation tools. Have they actually bothered to read up on the latest few decades of research, or are they just following dogmatic trends? Do they even track their own prediction skills when hiring?
- What is their understanding of the project, tasks, etc?
- Do they respect my time investment?
1) a "dude" is gender and ageless, of no persuasion, has neither skin nor eye colour, and so on.
Personally I've worked on a half dozen global research network projects bringing together both public and private funding and 10-15 organisations, mixed universities, research institutes, and small to behemoth companies.
The target is always some wide ranging new radical technology platform and they spawn a bunch of startups and spin off projects.
Some targets can turn out to be too difficult, or simply wrong, but I've never seen a project that hasn't lead to at least one startup / product / new technology.
Designed for Nordic climates but insulates just as well if it's warm outside :)
The initial target was a modern starter house pattern, that could be expanded as the family grew, then split for renting out parts when the owners got old. It had to be cheaper, environmentally friendly, and healthier to live in.
As a bonus it has excellent fire resistance, and is very quiet.
It's fun to work with this kind of problem. Quite far from my normal projects. But holy hell, I didn't realise how truly broken the bureaucracy around construction is in many regions.
Revolution (Broken Sword, etc) tend to have fewer puzzles outside the context of the story than Lucas Arts (Monkey Island, etc).
Some of the modern groups have built some really good stuff. Try Resonance for a great brain fry, or Technobabylon, Gemini Rue, Shardlight, Cathy Rain for lighter noggin usage. IIRC telltales Sam and Max had fun story and humour while light on puzzles.
adventuregamers.com has a large library of reviews with a general scoring and som "good" and "bad" points. I've found their taste to be relevant enough to look at, while figuring out which good/bad to look for or avoid respectively.
Currently play Broken Sword on pass-the-tablet with screen duplicate streaming to the wall size tv, for effectively social couch coop. Try it with friends and family, or whoever you happen to be locked in with at the moment.
Back in the day I built a 6x40w flourescent ramp right above my work desk, 3 phase staggered for effective 150Hz to eliminate the flicker. Worked wonders to get me out of my Murder-Winter-Zombie state during my PhD Up North.
Nowadays there are sooo many good diode ramps available. And fortunately I can take lots of time outside nowadays as well. Still 20/20 vision :)
Coupling good capture with amplification and detection is required. When working on dna detection you use something like pcr for signal amplification.
But surface detection can in some cases be more sensitive, since you generally have a lot more surface fragments available than you have dna or rna. Especially since many viral diseases form have huge ratios of surface fragments per every well formed infectious viral particle.
Generally: a sequencer by itself doesn't have the sensitivity required. For example, for norovirus we're talking about detecting a few virus particles per cubic meter of air. You need insanely sensitive detection tech to be able to do that.
Unfortunately the funding for continuation was lost in the shambles of the partial collapse of Getinge a few years ago. I was not able to find anyone else interested to continue funding the prototype development when the remnants of Getinge did not prioritise the project.
Near real time in this case can mean as little as a few hours.
We had a total funding of ca EUR 5M for the first prototyping project. If anyone has interest and money, I can pull together people and ip.
That said, I enjoy watching Expanse and look forward to s4 :)
Insane example: just the average cost of processing the legally required paperwork for partitioning and buying a plot and get all permits to build is higher for me today than it was for my grandfather in 1960 to buy the land and all materials to build a house. As measured in net income - hours of work after taxes. And I'm in a higher income bracket than he was.
I spent 10y in academia. Loved my PhD and subsequent research positions. Went back to industry because I wanted to spend more time with my lady.
For me the research years have paid of exceptionally well. Lots of interesting people and projects, and enabled work I would never have been able to get off the ground without the training and network.
But my case is very uncommon.
Do not agree. Netherlands has remarkably poor statistics when accounting for total incidents and outcome from the months before and after births. They have more than double the shit rate compared to other high quality healthcare western European countries. Anecdotally I've heard this attributed to the custom of having close to 30%(?) of births done at home, which is an outlier and increases risks of poor outcome when complications arise.
But parent's notes on assistance post natal is probably correct and a very good thing.