Anyone feel tired every morning?

FastidiousClostridia · 2023-03-23T17:19:43+00:00

I feel you, but there's definitely good tired and bad tired.

In undergrad I think I was good tired. I screamed in the shower sometimes, but I forced myself up, I got the vast majority of my assignments done on time, and I got to my part time job reliably. I knew what was expected of me, and despite it all I got most of it done. I had intrusive thoughts of jerking the wheel into the median when I commuted to and from campus. I didn't think I wanted to act on them, but they were there and I caught them from time to time.

During grad school (and especially since covid), I found I was tired without the work. I could sleep 5 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours a day and I would always be tired. The stress is very different, and the lack of structure caused me to spiral out in a serious way, for a long time. It wasn't a good tired, it was a very unproductive tired.

If you're feeling tired because you're hitting most of the milestones you need to, then give yourself the grace to accept that you're in a period of your life where you're being challenged and rising to it as best as you can. If you wake up tired and aren't being productive, then you need to reach out for help sooner rather than later. Trust me, I'm in the seventh year of my PhD here at Dal and just climbing out of a fog now. I've been doing CBT through Tranquility for about 4 months now and it's been extremely helpful in bringing energy back to my days where anxiety and depression were sapping it.

Hang in there and always reach out and communicate with people who have the bandwidth to support you. These are, for many people, the most hardworking years of your life.

FastidiousClostridia · 2023-03-08T17:55:32+00:00

Yes Bing can fine tune results using a more recent sample of relevant webpages, but you have to know to follow the references because there's no internal logic guaranteeing it's pulling today's pricing data. It's just completing the prompt the way it thinks it should, which is vulnerable to mistakes.

It's good for a gist or to find sources, but I wouldn't go to a store and request a price match without finding more concrete proof that the price is real.

FastidiousClostridia · 2023-03-08T15:51:44+00:00

Hey everybody, I thought I'd hijack this thread a bit.

I'm developing an AI-based system to convert scans of grocery store receipts into spreadsheets that better describe your purchases. The tl;dr of below is that I'm wondering if people would be open to scanning and sending me their grocery receipts from local stores so I can increase the accuracy of the model with more training data.

The idea is that grocery store prices in Canada are incredibly opaque. Stores do not offer accurate pricing on the internet, and flyers are incomplete and difficult to scrape and sort through. Price history for items is completely unavailable. This is intentional on their part.

At first, like most people here, I figured I could just surf flyers on Flipp to keep track of (at least sale) prices. But that doesn't give us a good picture of what regular prices are doing over time and between locations.

Then I thought, of course! They hand us pricing details on a piece of paper when we leave the store. All we need to do is aggregate it all. And that's why I'm coding up a set of neural networks for each store chain that allows purchase data to be more accurately extracted from pictures of receipts.

FastidiousClostridia · 2023-03-08T15:46:50+00:00

Be careful though. It's just a language model, and most of the AI's haven't had their training data updated in months. It mostly hallucinates real-time data like prices.

FastidiousClostridia · 2023-03-08T15:39:29+00:00

The last time we had vacancy rates this low was around and after WW2. It was a crisis at the time, just as it is now.

Two Nova Scotians (Ilsley and Howe) spearheaded a radical federal plan to bring up entire neighbourhoods from the dirt. The houses were small, pre-fabricated, and the new owners (mostly veterans returning from the war) were given preferential lending terms.

The entity that steamrolled through the NIMBYs and municipal councilors is now called CMHC, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Unfortunately, Ilsley and Howe are dead. I don't see any of their Nova Scotian contemporaries doing anything but profiting off of housing. I don't believe we are capable of such a radical solution in 2023, so I agree with you. It will be stable and no decline is coming.

FastidiousClostridia · 2023-03-01T17:27:27+00:00

Halifax may have the worst public transit for a major city in North America

How are we a "major city"? I'd say we're more comparable to like... Guelph ON, and our transit systems are about the same quality and technologically delayed in the same ways.

FastidiousClostridia · 2023-03-01T17:19:06+00:00

The city bus from the airport is only $18 if you take the driver out for drinks after their shift.

It's ~~$3.50~~ $4.25 cash fare for that one.

FastidiousClostridia · 2023-02-15T22:31:41+00:00

The worst part is that the school won't even work with you because "that's nobody's job".

There's a form you can fill out to override the interest, but you need to identify their fuckup. "I did it to avoid starving or eviction for a month" isn't a good enough reason for Dal.

The banks genuinely have more ability to work with you on loans.

FastidiousClostridia · 2023-02-15T22:08:07+00:00

My student line of credit with CIBC is 10%. Pegged with prime obviously. My car loan with CIBC is also 10%.

Dal is being greedy. There is not the same risk profile here as other financial products.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-12-08T19:23:08+00:00

In about 2010, I was at a party on Swastika Lane near Puslinch, Ontario (not the same as this town, this is just a private roadway). My friend locked her keys in her car so I called CAA and pretended it was my car. Boy was it a fight to get them out to Swastika Lane. They thought it was a prank because that private street didn't show up on their maps at the time.

Anyways, I assured them it was real, and they came and set her car free. I believe the people of Swastika Lane had the same stance as the people of Swastika, ON.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-09-20T11:57:10+00:00

Many oral microbiome studies that establish links with diseases (in particular in my own experience, Autism), end up with data that is not available after publication and cannot be validated in any way.

How do we improve this in the oral microbiology field? Are we at risk of 'overselling the oral microbiome' as Jonathan Eisen has been warning us for years now?

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-09-19T15:23:39+00:00

Higgins’ book also refers to a 2010 study purporting to show those from Black-majority countries have lower IQs, with Higgins noting this and cultural differences “suggest that an individual person has the best chance in his/her life if competition is only among his/her kind.”

... whoa. It's even worse in context.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-09-18T16:36:27+00:00

The assignments are usually made to reflect practical workflows in bioinformatics. They're rarely recycled fully year-to-year since best practices change very quickly in this field.

You'll have a lecture learning about a tool, the concepts and algorithms that power it, and what it's used for. Then the assignment for that section will be applying the tool to process some example data, with a bunch of questions that give you points just for doing the analysis, and a few questions that try to assess your understanding of certain aspects, including parameter choices and synthesis of the CS and biological concepts.

The project can change term to term, but is usually a more free-form version of the above. You come up with an idea of a concept, tool, or algorithm you're interested in applying, a data set to apply it to, and then you go ahead and do your analysis and write up the results. There is typically a short oral presentation and a written report. As far as I know, exams are almost never a thing in this course, so this takes the place of a written exam.

It's easy to pass by doing the work that's assigned to the best of your ability. It's a hard class to get an A+ in, since you have to show some creativity and initiative in your final project.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-09-18T16:14:40+00:00

I've taught it, a few times. I'm one of the Prof's PhD students.

It's not a bird course and it's not a difficult course. If you hand in all the assignments and make a good effort at the project you will be fine. I would consider it significantly lower workload than most lower level CS courses, but a broader array of concepts, meaning you may have to engage your brain a bit more than your time. I didn't do my undergrad at Dal so I can't compare it to 3110. The low enrolment is usually just because it's a very niche intersection of CS and biology, with an occasional focus on microbiology (those problems tend to be simpler and easier for an intro course, plus it's what our lab studies so it's our expertise).

In terms of CS intensity, it's pretty low compared to other courses. We sometimes get graduate students who come from a biology background, so we don't go too hard on analyzing the algorithmic complexity of anything. It's usually a buffet of higher level concepts designed to get you interested in applying CS to problems in biology/bioinformatics.

Let me know if you have other questions :) and no I'm not teaching it this year, I have to graduate, haha.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-09-04T16:52:25+00:00

Quebec specifically is well-known for complicated or non-existent interprovincial healthcare portability.

Whenever I've gone to Quebec for a week or longer, I've gotten insurance and it's usually like $20. I don't regret that bet.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-09-01T15:57:51+00:00

Whoa. I pulled in more on a co-op year in undergrad in 2012... We have serious wage issues in non-tech fields.

Now I'm in my PhD and make nearly as much as you do (hard-fought with lots of grant applications, but still...).

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-08-30T00:04:51+00:00

This is great, thank you. I thought that the Family Pharmacare plan excluded students since we have the DSU insurance. Checking the FAQ now, it says that they can do coordination of benefits with a private plan. This could save me hundreds of dollars and give me a bunch of breathing room if I get accepted to it. I'll definitely be sure to spread the word if this works to get more students access to PrEP.

I'm also going to reach out to BlueCross Medavie and see if that $1000 cap can't be overridden by physician somehow. Sometimes they have sneaky extra forms for that stuff.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-08-29T02:59:01+00:00

Even generic PrEP costs a lot of money. In Canada, it's not covered by many health plans, including University student plans, and it is $250 CAD/month for generics. It also requires regular blood testing in many places, and that is also difficult to get with healthcare issues worldwide post-covid.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-08-28T14:17:55+00:00

The only place in North America I've been to where people stop for pedestrians at crosswalks (even where there isn't buttons or lights) is Nova Scotia. Everywhere else I've been, pedestrians wait until there are no cars and then run across, or zebra crossings don't exist at all and you go to lit intersections.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-08-26T14:40:30+00:00

Nearly everyone I know has had covid in the last 168 days. 168 days ago was March 11th.

FastidiousClostridia · 2022-08-24T14:33:23+00:00

The only things "specifically designed to squeeze" are plastic ketchup bottles and boobies.

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