Making social media more accessible

Saw this on Twitter and I think it is really important so am sharing widely: How accessible is your social media game?? Check out some simple tips for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, & more here: https://t.co/c1pZJMNIgW — 🔬Samantha Yammine 🏳️‍🌈 (@SamanthaZY) August 5, 2018 Basically, this is referurgint referring to a web site from the Univeristy …

#MoBE #IndoorMicro new paper: isolation of bacterial diversity present in medical waste and health care settings in hospitals in Kenya

New paper of potential interest to the microbiology of the built environment crowd:  African Journal of Microbiology Research – isolation of bacterial diversity present in medical waste and health care settings in hospitals in kenya Nosocomial infections have impacted great burden in healthcare system and has led to deteriorating health condition and deaths. This study …

How important is hand-washing outside of a hospital environment?

I recently spent a weekend visiting a friend out of state and quickly came to realize that he rarely washed his hands. Before eating? No. After the gym? No. Even after going to the bathroom…and not just urination. No washing! I was disgusted and could not convince him of the same. How could an educated …

New #MoBE paper of interest: Exploring temporal patterns of bacterial and fungal DNA accumulation on a ventilation system filter 

This new #OpenAccess paper may be of interest to those out there thinking about microbes in the built environment. : Luhung I, Wu Y, Xu S, Yamamoto N, Wei-Chung Chang V, Nazaroff WW (2018) Exploring temporal patterns of bacterial and fungal DNA accumulation on a ventilation system filter for a Singapore university library. PLoS ONE …

Assistant Professor in Soil Microbiomics

Assistant Professor Position in Soil  Microbiomics with a 75% research, 25% teaching appointment. The Department of Ecosystem Science and Management seeks candidates interested in conducting research to understand the distribution, composition, diversity, and functional impact of microbial communities in soil-plant habitats. We seek individuals with diverse interests in soil microbiomes and in teaching related courses. …

Guide to MoBE talks and sessions at Indoor Air 2018

So Indoor Air 2018 is fast approaching (June 22-27th) and there are a large number of MoBE-relevant talks on the menu.  The preliminary program for the entire conference can be found here.  Paula Olsiewski from the Sloan Foundation sent us a list this morning of the talks relevant to the Sloan funded microbiology of the …

New Release! Infectious Diseases in the Urban Built Environment Proceedings of a Workshop

On June 8, the National Academies Press released a proceedings of a workshop on Urbanization and Slums: Infectious Diseases in the Built Environment, available for free download here. The workshop rapporteurs have prepared this proceedings as a factual summation of the sessions presented by the National Academies’ Forum on Microbial Threats, in collaboration with the Board …

How (and why) to use Twitter for Science

I’m going to guess that most people reading this have at least heard of Twitter, if not used it themselves.  Presidents tweet government policy, literal revolutions have been fostered on Twitter, and celebrity feuds consume the tabloids. But what is it?  And how might it help your science? Twitter is just a platform… on the …

Fuzzy zeros in percentile normalization method to correct for batch effects

We recently published a method to normalize data that corrects for batch effects and allows for pooling of raw data across studies. In this post, I want to discuss more about the important (but potentially confusing) aspect of our method, where we add noise to the zeros before performing the normalization. I’ve gotten a few …