Varsha Shridhar is...

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 5/17/2013 8:39:00 PM

'... learning Unix!! OMG!....Taking a giant leap into the dark side!Actually, this stuff is a lot more exciting than I'd envisioned.Might I direct similarly clueless, yet interested, folks to this page:  http://korflab.ucdavis.edu/Unix_and_Perl/Hoping to be able to write my own Perl scripts to quickly extract large amounts of relevant genomic data!'

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Ani and Durga

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 5/8/2013 7:57:00 PM

'Durga is 8 weeks old today. She smiles, follows me with her incredibly beautiful eyes, and lets out indignant hollers if she's not carried around while awake.Ani is 3 years old and is in preschool. He says, "Only babies go to daycare, mummy! Big boys like me go to preschool", conveniently forgetting that less than 10 days ago, he was still in daycare himself.Ani is fascinated by Durga- for now. He gets highly tickled if she pees or poops, he says "Bless you!" when she sneezes, he th(...)'

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At Long Last....A Couple of Great Books

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 3/29/2013 8:00:00 PM

'Have been using much of maternity leave devouring the online books available at CLP. For the past few months, I haven't been able to read anything too upsetting- my mind goes into overdrive and I get visions of those horrible things that I've just read about happening to my kids and I spend the next week broody and depressed.This happened after reading the first half of J.K.Rowling's "A Casual Vacancy". That book upset me no end. Sure, the writing is beautiful and there are some sen(...)'

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The Name Game

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 1/2/2013 6:37:00 PM

'What's in a name, after all?Everything, I think. Or at the very least, a lot. A name can be, and is, more than just a label. A name embodies traits and meanings and can serve as a beacon to its holder.And that's why choosing a name for one's child can be so fraught with stress. It needs to be perfect!The process of choosing a name is just as important as the name itself. In my parents' and grandparents' generations, the process of choosing a baby's name was very different than it is(...)'

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Kids and Pregnancies and Men

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 12/19/2012 7:24:00 PM

'I don't think I'm going to have any more kids.This thought came to me suddenly and with all the urgency of ...(hmm... the simile I have in mind is not particularly elegant, but it conveys the message appropriately, I think).. with all the urgency of a need to pee as a fetus kicks one in the bladder.I've just received my diabetes screening results and hurray! I don't have gestational diabetes. Phew!Since working in a diabetes lab for a year, and writing up multiple pages of molecular(...)'

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A hard week

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 12/14/2012 8:32:00 PM

'I have wept a bit this week. I attribute part of the reason to hormones. Apparently, hormones rage during the 2nd trimester. I'd like to know, when do hormones not rage? Teenagers, menstruating women, menopausal women, pregnant women, lactating women- everyone appears to have hormones that rage. Why don't hormones just do their thing quietly and leave?And really, why haven't more hormonal studies been done in men? I'll bet my bottom dollar that men in their 30's, men in their 4(...)'

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Books and Authors- My Latest Discovery

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 12/3/2012 4:29:00 PM

'Deanna Raybourne has written a series of mystery novels in the Lady Julia Grey series.The first three books of the series are pretty gripping: great language, imaginative plots- if slightly twisted, and great protagonists.The suspense and plots fall a bit flat after the protagonists get married, but the books are still good for a lazy afternoon's read.The series reminds me of Lindsey Davis' Marcus Falco series, with a few key changes:The Falco series is written in the voice of Falco(...)'

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What's the big deal?

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 11/13/2012 3:02:00 PM

'http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-petraeus-allen-sex-scandal-20121113,0,29930.storyDavid Petraeus had an affair with his biographer. The affair came to light when the biographer supposedly sent anonymous and threatening emails to some other woman whom she thought was also sleeping with Petraeus. Somehow, through some convoluted rigmarole that hasn't yet been unearthed, the investigation into these emails not only revealed the affair between Petraeus and the biographer but (...)'

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Ranking of the Pittsburgh hospital cafeterias

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 11/1/2012 6:36:00 PM

'Hospital cafeterias in Pittsburgh (to the best of my knowledge):UPMC PresbyterianUPMC MontefioreMagee Women's HospitalChildren's Hospital of PittsburghAllegheny General (how many?)West Penn Hospital (how many?)I'll rank them using the NIH scoring system (given below, lifted directly from a presentation by Freeman and Friedman on Developing Competitive Grant Applications)I'm a vegetarian. So I'm biasing my scores towards how vegetarian-friendly these cafeterias are. You may have diff(...)'

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Thank you, IBGP!

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 9/4/2012 2:36:00 PM

'There are many things I need to thank my graduate program, the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Graduate Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, for. But definitely, topping that list will be Foundation Conference, a mandatory 4-credit course taken in the first semester of the 5-year program.Foundation Conference gives a callow, nervous first-year the guts to take a paper like "IRE1a Induces Thioredoxin-Interacting Protein to Activate the NLRP3 Inflammasome(...)'

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A Risky Venture?

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 8/28/2012 9:42:00 PM

'Which job to choose? One which is safe and known and has a clear connection to what I want to do in the future, or one is which is unknown but promises to be very exciting, future goals be hanged?'

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To Tell or Not to Tell

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 8/23/2012 4:02:00 PM

'I have been pondering a lot about pregnancy and women in the workplace. When I was first pregnant, nearly three years ago, I had conflicting emotions: happy and excited when I was with my husband or parents, but incredibly nervous at the thought of telling my thesis adviser.My adviser is an awesome guy- supportive, friendly, excellent mentor. But he was not pleased when I told him I was pregnant. His first look was almost accusing- 'how could she be so irresponsible' were probably t(...)'

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Curiosity might join Opportunity tonight!

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 8/7/2012 5:53:00 PM

'The NASA spacecraft to Mars, appropriately named Curiosity, will land tonight, if all goes well. This is exciting on many levels. For one thing, our nearest neighbor has a lot more stories to tell than we originally expected, as the data collected by NASA's previous spacecraft, Opportunity, indicates. Mars used to have water, and therefore might have once contained life (as we know it). Curiosity, in fact, has been targeted to one of the sites that scientists consider like(...)'

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The Marcus Didius Falco series

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 6/30/2012 5:13:00 PM

'Lindsey Davis started this series sometime in the late 1980s. What makes this stand out among zillions of mystery and suspense novels?For starters, it is based in Rome. And not the pasta-pizza Roma of today, but the Rome closer to the one brought to such comic life in the Asterix novels of Goschinny and Uderzo. Asterix's Rome is, of course, based in the times of Julius Caeser. Davis's Rome is nearly a century after that, in the time of Vespasian, but equally peppered with centurions(...)'

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Embarrassing Illnesses

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 6/30/2012 3:44:00 PM

'No, no. Fret not. I have no STDs. But I do have something which, when I first described it to my husband over the phone, made him sit up and take notice and think of them. It all started off innocuously enough. Fever, sore throat, chills. I took my ibuprofen, took a surreptitious nap while at work (unlike my graduate-student days, I can no longer slumber away, drooling, at my desk, in front of all and sundry. Postdocs, for some reason, are expected to behave with some more dignit(...)'

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UN-effing-believable!

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 2/6/2012 9:56:00 PM

'http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/when-it-comes-to-tardiness-shouldnt-the-punishment-fit-the-crime/2012/02/06/gIQAC4VUuQ_story.html?hpid=z3I don't get the author's ultimate point, but this is the main thing that she's talking about: If kids are late to school, their parents get hauled off to court! Apparently, this is the norm in this country! Can you get any more ridiculous than this???This prompts such a visceral reaction in me because I am always late for everything. And what's(...)'

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Fighting for a Feeling of Self Worth

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 1/19/2012 9:01:00 PM

'One of those weeks which leave me battered and bruised.My ego's taken a severe beating this fortnight: a series of failed experiments in lab, failed because of my carelessness, a so-so presentation by me about my work at lab meeting, halfway through which I realize the lack of multiple important controls in the experiment and have to come up with mediocre explanations for the same, someone at home admitting that he didn't feel comfortable there because it was too disorganized and un(...)'

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The ACCORD study

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 1/13/2012 5:09:00 PM

'Am attempting to increase my knowledge about the field of diabetes research by scanning the top journals for all their articles on beta cells and diabetes. Came across the ACCORD study (Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes), which concluded prematurely in 2008 because the treatment arm of the clinical trial ended up with greater numbers of deaths than the control arm.The writeup in Science is found here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/319/5865/884.full.pdf?sid=2b4ab3(...)'

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My book

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 1/8/2012 7:15:00 PM

'I am going to write a book. I am fairly sure it is NOT going to get published in Mills and Boon, which is where I will first send it to because they have some kind of audition going on to find India's next great Mills and Boon writer (did you even know India had a Mills and Boon-India edition? I didn't. Checked out the books that have been published under its aegis- exactly the same story lines as the British/Aussie ones, except with Indian names... and maybe with brown skin. I say (...)'

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A Pat on the Back

Author : stixnixpix      Blog : The Other One      Date : 11/17/2011 1:52:00 PM

'It's been 1 month and 1 week since my parents left for India. And I think I can at last say, at the risk of drawing the attention of some mischeivous imp of Fate, that I am beginning to better juggle the different roles I play. Evidence: I am actually on time (in fact, well before time) for the 9am lab meeting. This is the first time I have managed that in many, many weeks. And I did this and managed to pack lunch for Ani, get a decent breakfast into him, give him a bath, get myself(...)'

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