It is June 2015 and I’m riding in the smallest of cars on a highway leading out of Barranquilla, Colombia. I’m in the car with an epidemiologist from the state health department, and we are on our way to a place far from the city in a small town in the jungle. The temperature outside must be in the triple…
What else was I going to do when I got bored the other day?
When working with statistical software programs, you should do one or two calculations by hand just to make sure the software is working properly. The last thing you want is to have an error happen because you didn’t illuminate the inside of the black box.
Anti-vaxxers are spreading a new rumor, and so, here I am, screaming in the wilderness to see if anyone is paying attention. The new rumor is — as you may have guessed from my clever title to this blog post — that vaccines cause autism SIDS. SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) is a syndrome in which an infant dies suddenly…
With a relentless homicide epidemic ongoing, Baltimore still finds time to celebrate their football team. With so many issues around the world, we still like — and need — to be entertained.
There is a great podcast by economist Tim Harford about things that have gone terribly wrong and what we can learn from them. The podcast is called “Cautionary Tales,” and, believe me, they are. If you’re the kind of person who learns from their mistakes and the mistakes of others, you’ll like this podcast. Two of the recent stories really…
Baby Ren is now full-fledged Toddler Ren. As such, she has started to question my authority. This is very common among Rens, and your mileage may vary. The word “No” has become a very prominent part of her vernacular, and it is pretty much the default answer to many of our requests. Still, with our adult brains being a little…
A quick explainer of how you can calculate exposure time between cases and contacts using R programming.
Time flies, and you all of a sudden find yourself not thinking or acting the way that you used to. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Tell you all about it? Totally.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, so why not entertain you with a thrilling subject? Pop quiz: If you’re presenting the results of an analysis, do you present the odds ratio or the marginal effects? Let’s say you have 150 birth records, and you want to see if smoking is associated with premature births. You create a two-by-two…
