Our preprint on the impact of reopening schools on reproduction number in England is now available online: https://t.co/CpfUGzAJ2S. With @Jarvis_Stats @amyg225 @kerrylmwong @KevinvZandvoort @sbfnk + John Edmunds. NOT YET PEER REVIEWED. 1/

Now, what exactly is an applied epidemiologist, and why are they needed? In the late 90s- early 2000's there were a series of articles in AJPH, AJE, JECH, and IJE dedicated to answering these questions. I'll focus on Stephen Thacker's review.

He states, “The applied epidemiologist is by definition an activist, moving rapidly from findings to policy, putting epi knowledge to good use. The 21st century epi must do all these things while maintaining a foundation of high-quality epi research and practice.”

Susser warns the field of what he considers “the black box paradigm… the current international focus on risk factor epidemiology.” He advocates for expanding our academic training to include socializing epis to “keep the improvement of the public’s health as a primary value”

Morabia argued that epidemiology has historically found its balance in the tension between the search for causal relations and the improvement of public health; overemphasis on either perspective puts epidemiology at risk of losing its value.

How does this play out in real life? I’ve been an applied epi for 13 years, working mainly in local, state, and federal health agencies. My work has focused on conducting cool analysis that lead to policy or systemic change.

⭐ I’m a frontend dev. I work mainly w/HTML, CSS, & JS

last year I built stuff that doesn’t sound like frontend work:

- custom APIs and DBs (both GraphQL & REST)
- user dashboards
- video manipulation

but it all *felt* comfortable & within my skillset

how? a thread: 🧵

I do all sorts of demos and "hello world" projects, but I want to focus on real-world apps only in this thread. specifically, I'll talk about this production project:

✨ Jamstack Explorers 👩‍🚀

this is a load-bearing app that a lot of people depend on

to build Jamstack Explorers, we needed:

🗄 a custom database to track mission progress
📝 a content management system
🔐 user authentication
🎬 video manipulation

we were a small team of frontend devs and we needed to ship quickly — this was a daunting todo list 😅

🗄 custom database

using @HasuraHQ Cloud, we were able to create a new DB, configure it, and test the API all from a web interface — no config files or server setup required

we got it running in a day & I never felt like I was in over my head, even though DBs make me nervous!

📝 content management

we chose @sanity_io as a CMS. we used their CLI + JSON schema to set it up for Markdown + @mdx_js, exposed through a GraphQL API

the docs were great — it still felt like I was well within my frontend wheelhouse while we set this up

Many of us are about to begin a new semester of online teaching. The learning curve for moving my lecture units last semester was STEEP, so I compiled some sort of hand over notes to people approaching this for the first time. I hope it's useful for someone somewhere.

Reduction in the amount of content was important. What used to be 2 x 1 hr in-person lectures/week had to be condensed down into 6 x 10 minute prerecorded videos (aka aynchronounous content) with 1 x hr live zoom session (synchronous). Even that was too much.

For the sake of yourself and your students, SLASH. Slash your content down. This doesn't mean having to lose important stuff, but keeping it short and sweet.

10 minute video chunks was just about short enough to hold attention. Have you tried watching an online lecture? It is HARD to maintain focus. The shorter the better.

Importantly, each 10 minute video had an explicit Intended Learning Objective given at the end and in the associated text, so that everyone knew what the point was (and how this might relate to assessment later).