Back in 2016, Robert Ponsi was bicycling through a neighborhood in Baltimore when he was suddenly attacked by a group of teenagers. From WBAL: “Robert Ponsi was found with multiple stab wounds at Venable Avenue and Old York Road around 9:10 p.m., police said. He was pronounced dead at 3:51 a.m. at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Homicide detectives said someone was…
One of the tools that we use in the investigation of outbreaks is the epidemic curve, or, as we say in the biz, the “epi curve.” An epidemic curve is a simple graphical representation of the number of cases per a unit of time over a span of time. For example, you could graph the number of new cases of diarrhea…
As I’ve been working on my doctoral dissertation, I’ve come across a few interesting homicide cases in Baltimore. They’re interested in that the victims had a chance to avoid being at the place and time when they were killed. They had that chance because of their own criminal activity. In essence, they should have been jailed but were not. Kinlaw…
Like so many people out there, I am horrified at the events that transpired on November 13 in Paris. Only people who are completely devoid of any kind of feeling would not feel something. I was listening to the Germany-France soccer game on the radio when the bombs went off and news of the attacks started coming through. It really,…
For the following graph, I took the population estimates from the US Census Bureau for the decades in question (1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010). I took the number of murders for each year from 1985 to 2012 from the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ Uniform Crime Reporting database. (One big caveat is that the data collection methods changed significantly in 2000,…
When I started working in Baltimore in 2007, plenty of people told me to be careful because of their perception of crime in Baltimore. That perception was fed by television dramas like “The Wire” or “Homicide: Life on the Street”. In those television shows, we saw somewhat of a dystopian Baltimore where crime was rampant and the police were in over…
People who don’t know any better like to put people into categories. Usually, the categories are binary, with only two options. Worse yet, the categories are on opposite ends of a spectrum. There are heroes and villains, and nothing in between. This is how I feel that the most outspoken anti-vaccine activists see people who support the proper (and necessary)…
