Alex Francis
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alexanderfrancis.bsky.social
Alex Francis
@alexanderfrancis.bsky.social
530 followers 950 following 280 posts
Professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, studying how the demands of hearing loss and noise exposure affect health and well-being across the lifespan. Open science, sci comm, R stats, data viz, epidemiology, dogs, nature, TTRPGs. Etc. he/him.
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alexanderfrancis.bsky.social
This is ... not a good sign.
Screen shot of part of a regular, weekly announcement of funding opportunities from NIH. Under the heading "Funding Opportunities" there is a single, bulleted line saying "None". I've highlighted this single word which seems ominously direct.
August 23, 2025 at 4:55 PM
alexanderfrancis.bsky.social
There was a time when I thought I might grow up to be an entomologist. Now I’m just trying to learn how to photograph them.
Red milkweed beetle (Tetraopes tetraophthalmus) perched on the tip of a milkweed leaf. There is a leaf in the foreground that has a crescent bitten out of it. The beetle does not look ashamed of its gluttony. Blue dragonfly or damsel fly, possibly an Azure Bluet (Enallagma aspersum) just perching on large blade of grass. Blurry yellow flowers are in the background.
June 26, 2025 at 7:10 PM
alexanderfrancis.bsky.social
I am reading a paper in which the authors use the stats term "tertiles" and all I can think of is images like this of "smol, medium, and big tertiles" upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...
Image of three turtles, perhaps red-eared sliders, sunning on a log in the water with their necks outstretched. Ordered left to right the first turtle is large, the second medium, and the third small.
March 20, 2025 at 5:42 PM
alexanderfrancis.bsky.social
Ok so this is something new to me - I must have left Twitter before the pornbots etc. really got going - but I could use advice: what consequences might arise from being followed by so many obviously fake accounts? Should I block? Or ignore?
Screenshot showing a bunch of fake (?) accounts that all followed me at once. Names like “Alexxiaah” and “Aleexandraa” with porn-like handles like “sassyalexxx” dot bsky dot social.
January 6, 2025 at 7:11 PM
alexanderfrancis.bsky.social
An old dog, considering a snack.
A small brown dog with a grey face lying on the cushions of a grey-green sofa. Her eyes are open looking at the camera. Her chin rests on her paw.
November 5, 2024 at 7:13 PM
alexanderfrancis.bsky.social
Reading some (very) old articles, as one does on holiday, and was reminded of a recent discussion about use of casual language and first-person usage in academic papers (and whether single authors should use "we"). I just wish we could just all write as casually as S. S. Stevens (1955). For example:
"Let me try to list some of the asses and liabilities of these methods as they seem to be disclosed in the studies of other experimenters and in our work at the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory." (Stevens, 1955) https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1908048
December 28, 2023 at 6:36 PM