Monthly Archives: August 2016

I like AltMetrics now

Population Health Metrics

Dear Colleague,
We would like to share with you our most influential articles of 2015, according to Altmetric.com.
Influential Articles of 2015

Using maximum weight to redefine body mass index categories in studies of the mortality risks of obesity

Left behind: widening disparities for males and females in US county life expectancy, 1985–2010

Projected growth of the adult congenital heart disease population in the United States to 2050: an integrative systems modeling approach

The number of shares for every article is provided alongside accesses on every BioMed Central Full Text page, helping you to assess the reach and impact of the research. If you click on the Altmetric Badge you will be sent to altmetric.com where you can join in the discussions yourself!
Read our Blog Post to find out more about Altmetic and how they assess schlorlary impact.
Best wishes,
BioMed Central

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Filed under global health

Reading up on Spatial Big Data

So much to read:

Click to access CressieMassiveData.pdf

Click to access cressie_FRK.pdf

Click to access 1512.09327v1.pdf

My brother wrote a tutorial, feedback welcome:

https://flaxter.shinyapps.io/zoowriteup/zoowriteup.Rmd

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Filed under statistics

Software Carpentry Training and the Code of conduct

I greatly enjoyed a recent Software Carpentry (SWC) training that I attended. It was on training trainers, and had a ton of useful information.

One thing that it included, which has stuck in my mind is a “code of conduct”, which SWC has for all workshops. [link]

I like the way it incorporates humor; this also actually help me think of it, because I made a conscious choice _not_ to make fun of certain text editors twice during the two day workshop (despite the hilarious joke that I had to refrain from telling).

A question though: how to do? Just putting on the webpage is a little too little, perhaps, but reading the whole thing at the beginning of the workshop is too much for some instructors. I thought the approach we took was a bad compromise, reading some and saying that it existed. It could be good, but it could come off like this is something required that the instructors do to tick the box “we broadened participation”.

What about having the text projected at the beginning of the session, so while people are coming in and settling down, they can read it at their own pace. It needs to be projected in a readable font, which might be a technical challenge, since it is long. And anyone who shows up late will miss it. (I showed up late, maybe I missed it…)

emacs

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Filed under education

Why are loops called loops?

One thing the SWC training got me thinking about is the word “loop” as in “for loop”. It is something so familiar to me that I never tried to figure out why it is called a loop. I think it must come from computational flow diagrams. Incidentally, I read a book full of vintage flow diagrams recently, as part of my efforts to get up to speed on microsimulation: [Art of Simulation]

loop

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Filed under software engineering