A student asked for help with a statistical analysis the other night, and I was happy to help. However, he threw me a curveball when he told me he needed to conduct an ANOVA test using only summary data. That is, all he had was the table of results (from a publication) and not the data. Doing an ANOVA by…
When I was studying medical technology, my professors and mentors emphasized the need to learn to do by hand all of the procedures that automated instruments did. Those instruments, which are veritable robots, can do a complete cell count in a few minutes. Doing a complete cell count by hand takes at least an hour if you’re good and organized……
I’ve been tutoring some students in online MPH programs for a few weeks. We started talking about 95% confidence intervals. All you need to know when reading a confidence interval is that it is used for telling you (the reader) where we (the researcher) are 95% confident that the true measure is located. Here, let me explain… This is why…
There’s this thing that you do when you work in public health. You try to look at the top causes of death and disability so you can better understand what you need to do in order to save lives “millions at a time” or some such. To do this, you need to be mindful of all sorts of things, like…
Just listening to the news, you’d think that all of us were going to get killed tomorrow from a massive terrorist attack. Heck, some of my colleagues have been going on so much about Zika that they make it seem like we’re all going to die from Zika… Or that a whole generation of children are going to be born microcephalic.…
Last week, after the events in Dallas, Texas, where 5 police officers were shot dead, the Chief of Police in El Paso, Texas, decided to make a statement. Unfortunately, he decided to label the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement as a hate group. This is unfortunate because we’re at a point in history where there needs to be a discussion…
Quick, what’s the difference between a gun and a swimming pool? Don’t answer that. It’s a stupid question. Anyone with a grade school education — or even no education — should be able to tell the difference between the two. However, there continues to be this comparison between guns and swimming pools in trying to justify the refusal of any…
Here’s a video that explains how things that are rare are not that rare.
Epidemiologists have to make sense out of the noise, out of the seemingly random. But what is random?
httpvh://youtu.be/9rIy0xY99a0
As part of my schoolwork this term, I’ve been doing a lot of research into suicide in the United States. It’s a delicate subject in my family because of events in the recent past, but, like any other fear of mine, I’ve decided to grab it by the horns, look it in the eye, and try to understand it. The…
