This week’s journal club selection is Performance of Health Workers in the Management of Seriously Sick Children at a Kenyan Tertiary Hospital: Before and after a Training Intervention by Irimu et al. That sounds hard to quantify, so I wonder how they did it.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Journal club: Performance of Health Workers in the Management of Seriously Sick Children at a Kenyan Tertiary Hospital
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Filed under global health
Software carpentry at UW
I’m spending yesterday and today helping out with a two day software carpentry workshop at UW.
Software Carpentry helps researchers be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills. We run boot camps at dozens of sites around the world, and also provide open access material online for self-paced instruction. The benefits are more reliable results and higher productivity: a day a week is common, and a ten-fold improvement isn’t rare.
I am impressed by the curriculum and by the attention to evaluation, not an easy task in any educational setting. The 20% productivity increase is an interesting claim. From what I observed yesterday, I would expect huge heterogeneity based on past experience, and I would expect this heterogeneity to be hard to predict.
Extra Journal Club: Cd exposure and neurodevelopment
I’m sure reading a lot lately. That is good. This week, I’m filling in for the PBF journal club, too, and today we’ll be discussing Ciesielski et al’s paper Cadmium Exposure and Neurodevelopmental Outcomes in U.S. Children, which uses 6 years of NHANES data to weigh the evidence that low levels of cadmium cause learning disabilities in children.
All the data is available on the CDC’s website, so I thought I’d take a look at it. Here is an interesting little plot that popped out: prevalence of parent-reported learning disabilities in 6-15 year olds as a function of income-to-poverty-line ratio.
Would you have expected that?
Filed under global health, Mysteries
Journal Club: GBD 2010
I wonder how we’ll tear holes in the arguments of this week’s journal club papers, since they are locally produced:
- Murray et al, GBD 2010: design, definitions, and metrics, The Lancet, Volume 380, Issue 9859, Pages 2063 – 2066, 15 December 2012.
- Murray et al, Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for 291 diseases and injuries in 21 regions, 1990—2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010, The Lancet, Volume 380, Issue 9859, Pages 2197 – 2223, 15 December 2012.
Also have a look at the accompanying visualizations.
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Filed under global health
Contests and links
There are a couple of Kaggle contests that I call your attention to, now that I have been convinced contests are fun, not tacky: Whale Detection Challenge and
Predicting Parkinson’s Disease Progression. The are both the kind of thing that someone might call “Big Data”, but in two different dimensions.
The whales have 23 teams entered at the time of writing, while PD has zero. I bet that is because there is a way to score interim results on whale detection, but the PD contest is judged based on a 5 page report.
Filed under machine learning
Journal Club: Comparison of a community outreach service with opportunity screening for cervical cancer using Pap smears
This week journal club takes on Comparison of a community outreach service with opportunity screening for cervical cancer using Pap smears by Chang et al.
Given existing nationwide organized Pap smear screening for cervical cancer in Taiwan, this study demonstrates that outreach Pap smear screening services may be a means of enhancing accessibility and thereby increasing attendance. Approximately 90% women attending outreach service had not previously accessed the pre-existing Pap smear examination provided in hospital. The enhancement of accessibility was particularly significant for certain subgroups of women (the elderly, the widowed and less well educated).
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Filed under global health
Journal Club: Death certificates for diabetes
This week we will investigate how frequently death certificates capture diabetes prevalence:
McEwen et al, Temporal Trends in Recording of Diabetes on Death Certificates
Cheng et al, Sensitivity and Specificity of Death Certificates for Diabetes: As Good as it Gets?
Results (spoiler alert): McEwen et al – Diabetes was recorded on 41% of death certificates and as the underlying cause of death for 13% of decedents with diabetes. Cheng et al – Among 1641 men and 1568 women, 378 decedents had a history of diabetes; 168 of whom had diabetes listed anywhere on their death certificates.
Filed under global health
How do you argue a query is impossible in SPARQL?
I’ve come to believe that I’m stumped in querying the existence of (s,t)-paths with SPARQL 1.0 or the k nearest neighbors with SPARQL 1.1 because of limitations of the query language, not limitations in my query-writing ability. But how to prove it? Or even provide some evidence? Tell me on cstheory.stackexachange.
Maybe this paper is relevant: Semantics and Complexity of SPARQL
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Filed under TCS
Better typography for IPython notebooks, now
I came across a long blog about how to make ipython notebooks more aesthetically pleasing recently, and I think there is a lot to be learned there.
The good news is that you can try this out on a notebook-by-notebook basis with a little trick. Just drop this into a cell in any IPython notebook:
import IPython.core.display
IPython.core.display.HTML("""
div.input {
width: 105ex; /* about 80 chars + buffer */
}
div.text_cell {
width: 105ex /* instead of 100%, */
}
div.text_cell_render {
/*font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif;*/
font-family: "Charis SIL", serif; /* Make non-code text serif. */
line-height: 145%; /* added for some line spacing of text. */
width: 105ex; /* instead of 'inherit' for shorter lines */
}
/* Set the size of the headers */
div.text_cell_render h1 {
font-size: 18pt;
}
div.text_cell_render h2 {
font-size: 14pt;
}
.CodeMirror {
font-family: Consolas, monospace;
}
""")
Filed under Uncategorized
Healthy Algorithms 