I have to work tomorrow, early, so this is going to be quick. I saw a news article about a couple from Connecticut who are suing in state court because the department of health is publishing information on vaccine exemptions. The health department data can be accessed here: https://portal.ct.gov/DPH/Immunizations/School-Survey If you look at those data, it seems like Connecticut would…
I’ve been at the annual conference of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists all this week. The first conference I attended was back in 2008, when I was working at the Maryland Department of Health as an epidemiologist doing influenza surveillance. I remember it being a lot of fun because I got to learn a lot from people who had the same interests as I did. This has not changed much since then, but things around us in the world have. Let me explain…
When comparing two or more health indicators, it’s important to keep in mind that they might be on a different scale and presenting completely different information. In order to make the comparison more accurately, you can standardize the variables’ values and then create a Health Condition Index. So let’s use R and some open data to see how this can be done.
Modern software programs allow you to analyze spatial data quite easily, but it may be hard to replicate what you did without a detailed how-to manual and instructions you write as you go. Programming languages such as R and others allow you to write code and comments in that code, so it will be easy to follow what you did and reproduce it time after time.
Sometimes, age-specific death counts are hard to come by. Something happened that doesn’t allow you to know how many people died in each age group, but you know the total number of people who died. So how do you account for differences in the age distribution of the population? Glad you asked!
If vaccines are as bad as anti-vaccine people and groups claim that they are, where is the evidence? We’ve seen other diseases and conditions be identified and dealt with. Why not these bad vaccine outcomes? Could it be that it’s not as bad as antivaxxers say it is?
R programming can help with a lot of tasks. In this blog post, I show you how it can help understand and visualize inequities in Baltimore with regards to poverty and violence.
Anecdotes are not data, but they could be canaries in the coal mine that are still worth looking into. If we don’t do due diligence and look into them, what could happen? What could we delay or even miss out on doing?
What happens when you get rid of your outliers? Depending on which outliers and how you chose to get rid of them, nothing might happen… Or you can royally screw things up.
More and more colleges and universities are treating students as customers, showing them how to push a button or fill in a formula without teaching them how to think and solve problems. I might be old school, but I’d rather train and mentor my future colleagues instead of just showing students how to push a button.
