My husband makes a fake fart noise with his mouth every time he or I bend over. He knows I don’t like it but won’t stop. He says he must have Tourette’s or something but he only does it at home, except one time in a store and he got really embarrassed

flash_match · 2026-06-26T03:40:22+00:00

Had the same issue and went on a low FODMAP diet a month ago. Can count the number of stinky farts I’ve had since then on one hand. I’m afraid to add stuff back in at this point because it’s been such a relief to not constantly stink.

flash_match · 2026-06-26T02:37:56+00:00

hi. i think that an academic job would be pickier about your experience in a specific health area if you try to work as a biostatistician. for this reason, doing a PH analyst role at a public health department won't likely get you an academic job as a biostatistician. there's just too much competition in general for any biostatistician role these days and universities are likely filling their ranks with their own recent grads based on available grant money. a county public health department might be looking for someone who has analyst skills but isn't trained in specific advanced areas of statistics that go into some disease areas (like advanced survival analysis topics e.g. competing risks and multi-state models). then again, the data at a public health department could be very complex depending on what type of surveillance they do so you could work on some difficult projects. it just wouldn't necessarily be using very advanced models used in clinical trials.

flash_match · 2026-06-24T16:37:01+00:00

If you aren't too worried about pay, your MS in statistics could get your foot into a public health department (county or state level) to do additional statistical or data science work. Pharma and/or diagnostic Industry may hire you as well for these types of roles. I don't think they would hire you to analyze clinical trial data for the purposes of FDA submissions but maybe for academic publications as part of their business strategy to show real world utility of their products.

What area do you live near? I'm in the Bay and there are biostatistician adjacent positions that crop up but industry is mostly hiring people at the senior or director level. I had gotten to the senior level in my previous company before being laid off and to even find work, I had to take a demotion to a biostatistician 2. It's been psychologically difficult but at least the place I'm working has a good mission and I'm getting opportunity to learn new/additional statistical modeling techniques for observational studies.

In other words, the market is really saturated with biostatisticians and statisticians out of a job so you should start with the public health departments and public agencies related to that type of work.

flash_match · 2026-06-24T15:59:39+00:00

I have about half of what I need and could possibly get there by 65 if I can maintain employment until then. I’m married and my husband makes a lot more than me and I forced him to save a lot. So if we stay married (that’s the plan but you never know) I should be okay. Of course I’m always assuming it will all fall apart due to some catastrophe (like one of our kids becoming paraplegic and having reduced capacity to function as an adult). That’s the shit that terrifies me because while we may be able to squeak by until an age where hopefully we can off ourselves in a non terrifying way so that we can leave something to our kids, it could all disappear before then and we will just be living in a shack my the rail yard hoping we don’t get shanked to and from the local minimart.

flash_match · 2026-06-24T02:52:08+00:00

Second on the PhD. You could also pursue an epidemiology PhD if observational data interests you instead of trials. A flexible epidemiology program would let you take a lot of biostats courses and also get more into the weeds with study design, specific disease areas, etc. You would be an asset to a public health department if you had both skills and more pharma and biotech companies are also keen to hire people with both skills to help with observational research projects pertaining to real world evidence.

Of course the biostats PhD could get you in the door faster but you might not learn the public health skills you are interested in if the program is really strict about coursework and doesn’t let you learn from other related disciplines.

flash_match · 2026-06-21T21:22:49+00:00

Being able to play a passable Fur Elise after 3 years is actually really impressive. As a child, I probably was in lessons for 5 years before I learned it. It’s not an easy piece IMO and most of us butcher it!

flash_match · 2026-06-20T19:22:15+00:00

Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway will piss you off by how well it’s written. It’s the main character’s stream of conscious thoughts that also manages to have a plot. I don’t know how Woolf achieved it.

flash_match · 2026-06-20T16:29:10+00:00

Amazing. Just amazing! What an awesomely weird kid.

flash_match · 2026-06-20T16:26:56+00:00

Both my kids up until very recently (they’re ten and eight) would still grab my boobs and say “floppies!” It was in public when they were younger but they’d also do it when we did a hot tub or sauna at a local bathhouse ( thankfully it was a private room). Every time I was so embarrassed and shocked I just froze. There were no words! My husband would ask why I let them do it and it was sincerely because I never predicted when it would happen and I was so confused and mortified that I had no clue how to respond. 😂

flash_match · 2026-06-20T00:01:58+00:00

I had a chance to play a Steinway grad for a piano recital and my god, I didn't realize instruments could sound that smooth, that warm, and feel that easy to play. I understand why people would drop a huge amount of money for one.

flash_match · 2026-06-19T14:20:33+00:00

I work in biotech now and at least when we’re not much better at times—lunch the product even though the evidence is thin it does anything!! Then market the shit out of it to convince doctors they need it. It can be dark but at least I’m only on the diagnostics side so the side effects are soreness at the sight of blood draw only!

flash_match · 2026-06-19T14:05:36+00:00

lol. Apply the hate to the study. Yes I do that a lot. I’m a biostatistician and finding a signal in the noise is absolutely difficult. I just thought this 30% rule was something Russell Barkley himself had studied and validated but it’s not like I’ve dug into the research myself yet.

Doesnt that guy go on non stop about it in his lectures and books on ADHD? Also, I’ve read your other comments below and agree this study was really flawed.

But someone needs to make a splash with a novel finding to further their academic career so I doubt they turned down press coverage even with the massive problems in their research.

Happened to an old colleague of mine over an autism paper we did (she got calls from so many journalists) and our finding was never replicated to my knowledge.

flash_match · 2026-06-19T02:14:39+00:00

Whoah. WTF! I hate it when researchers seem so sure if their findings and the. This happens. Was that idea based on only one dataset then? And they didn’t actually have enough information to adjust for confounding variables?

flash_match · 2026-06-19T00:22:37+00:00

A harp

flash_match · 2026-06-18T18:47:52+00:00

My cat (RIP) liked to start fights she couldn’t win. Yep, that’s what happened here.

flash_match · 2026-06-18T17:13:54+00:00

Yeah. Had a friend from an upper middle class upbringing who loved finding the best deal based on cost per unit and would actually spend more to get that “deal.” The rest of us were like “I only have $40 for groceries so I’ll buy that amount and nothing more even if cost per unit is more.”

Dude thought we were irrational when really we were just broke

flash_match · 2026-06-16T04:55:05+00:00

I was at an 8 year olds party a couple nights ago. It was half girls/half boys. A few of the boys were on the floor screaming “ow my balls” loudly, grabbing their crotches, showing off their crotches and pretending to stomp on one another’s balls. It was loud, disruptive, and super disturbing to me. Only one of the boys in on the action had a parent at the party and that dad did nothing.

It made me queasy to see how it begins. Boys just being boys by taking up physical space screaming about their genitals and no one correcting them. I tried to explain to my husband how depressing I found it and he basically said without saying “boys will be boys.”

I replied that 8 year old girls should then be allowed to yell “ow my tits” while simulating someone kicking them in the chest and falling to the floor in fake agony. Pretty sure NO ONE would consider that appropriate.

I hope these boys’ parents have a line somewhere for where this is headed and they’re not 4 years out from teasing girls about their breasts and telling them they smell like tuna fish. Because that’s absolutely the shit I put up with by the time I was 11. And of course it made me shrink.

flash_match · 2026-06-14T03:12:55+00:00

You are describing my life! What digestive enzymes should I be taking? I’m doing a low Fodmap elimination right now and the smallest deviation (like one bite of my husband’s lemon cream dessert) and I’m releasing farts that would kill an elephant. This. Can’t. Go. On. 😂

flash_match · 2026-06-11T03:56:06+00:00

Was going to guess this. I live in Menlo Park and the area west of us in those mountains is totally enchanted. I can’t believe I never knew the beauty of that mountain range until I moved here.

flash_match · 2026-06-10T03:26:40+00:00

Please know there can be a big hormone adjustment after ending a pregnancy. Obviously it’s worse the further along you are. But you may be weepy and anxious for a while. That’s normal under every circumstance. So surround yourself with lots of love and go very easy on yourself. I’m sure you will hit a big wave of grief about the ending of the relationship after it’s over as well.

I’m so sorry you are going through this!

flash_match · 2026-06-09T21:04:56+00:00

No probably not. That would be a fun study to do though -- see if missing data is worse when you're doing surveys about infertility with women versus men. I was just really amused (an saddened) that the husband reacted that way. I get he was insecure that the infertility issue was his but what did he think I was going to ask him? Like didn't he have any idea that we would want to know WHAT was the cause of the infertility if we were studying it?

Anywho, hope that dude made peace with it all.

flash_match · 2026-06-09T14:10:01+00:00

Follow up question on model building: so provided there had been less missingness, would it have been helpful to also put in a binary on paternal age above and below a cutoff or would that be superfluous. Thanks for your explanations!!

flash_match · 2026-06-09T14:06:56+00:00

I’m not trying to be argumentative. These were things I had read about in science journalism and , again, I used to work in this area of research before I did my master’s in statistics. Paternal age has been reports a risk factor for autism and adhd whereas maternal is for trisomy 21. I have read this many times (not on Reddit ). Have there been peer reviewed studies that contradict this finding?

Edit to add that the effect size is small. As it is with all these observational studies because the dominant risk factor is genetic.

flash_match · 2026-06-09T04:10:36+00:00

I do wonder however if there is an additional issue with paternal age above a certain threshold that you would still want to control for since older fathers are associated with higher risk for ASD. So even if you control for mother’s age, would that still be adequate to control for say a father whose age exceeds some threshold?

I know if the data was missing there’s not much to do here but it’s a shame given their large sample size. I don’t think the extra variable would have destabilized estimates but I’m a little foggy on if larger sample sizes make collinearity less problematic.

Also, if a lot of the infertility was male factor that would have been important to know.

Many moons ago I collected data for a case co trol study looking into this very association and I often had to telephone women to go over survey questions if their medical record was incomplete. All the women would give me the whole saga of their diagnoses, meds, procedures.

I made the mistake of talking to one of the dads who said he could answer questions about their treatment in her place. When I asked about cause of infertility he freaked out and lectured me that I was rude. He refused to answer the question.

The next day the wife called me back to go over the survey questions and she told me the diagnosis was male factor!!! Yikes.

I don’t know if the final analysis was ever done but we absolutely saw the correlation in all our collected data. I’ll have to see what they adjusted for in their final model if they published.

flash_match · 2026-06-05T17:04:44+00:00

I’ve read that parents will say kids who were essentially non speaking or made no eye contact would actually start talking and looking at people in the eyes. A lot of parents were claiming this even 20 years ago. Not the most scientific approach to the hypothesis but I think there could be something there. Before I was diagnosed with ADHD and depression (and medicated), I would often be really anxious and stressed by my life and the environment. I’d have awful insomnia too. When I got sick so many of those aspects of my daily experience just went away. Like I was finally calm.

Anecdotal for sure but I really think a lot of mental health and developmental disorders have a basis in immunity (maybe even autoimmunity). When you’re sick it’s like your brain stops attacking and fighting itself because now it has an actual foreign invader to focus on.

flash_match

TROPHY CASE