I had an escapist hobby that is captured in the history of this blog, making maze [link], and I need escape again. And now I have a 5-year-old User for the output! Cool things: the maze-making code from 7 years ago was pretty easy to get working again [links, links]; the scientific python ecosystem now has notebooks! [link]
[Photo of done mazes on paper.]
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Filed under combinatorial optimization
Some new research that I’m excited about came out last week: Variation in life expectancy and mortality by cause among neighborhoods in King County, WA, USA, 1990–2014: a census tract-level analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(17)30165-2/fulltext
In some ways, it is very specific to Seattle and the surrounding county: https://vizhub.healthdata.org/subnational/usa/wa/king-county
But it is also a demonstration of the “fractal” nature of population health—the variation between life expectancy from country to country around the world is big! But it is around as big as the variation between life expectancy from county to county around the United States. And what this work shows is that even in the county where I live, the life expectancy varies between census tracts almost as much as from county to county or country to country. Inequality is happening at all scales.
Here is the data: http://ghdx.healthdata.org/record/united-states-king-county-washington-life-expectancy-and-cause-specific-mortality-census
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Filed under disease modeling
https://betterhumans.coach.me/a-beautiful-observation-about-the-start-of-twitter-67ad066c0d3a
https://betterhumans.coach.me/how-to-get-promoted-based-on-merit-rather-than-hubris-e22ccca7b20a
http://www.betterevaluation.org/evaluation-options/roundrobin
https://betterhumans.coach.me/round-robin-a-dead-simple-management-skill-that-works-6ec3df250326
https://betterhumans.coach.me/a-meetings-manifesto-5a8caf6281b
http://www.internetincomecoach.com/meeting-mastery-book-review/
https://betterhumans.coach.me/rule-of-three-bad-ideas-arguments-and-brainstorming-ac0d06fbd4ee
https://betterhumans.coach.me/round-robin-a-dead-simple-management-skill-that-works-6ec3df250326
not necess related: https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men
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Filed under working
For the last six months I’ve made brief mentions of the happenings of IHME “Diversity Club” on Healthy Algorithms. What is it?
I’m not sure if I mentioned, but I’m a co-chair of the Department of Global Health Diversity Committee, and we had a strategic retreat in December, where we identified “Training (Stand-alone and in curriculum)” as one of our top three priorities. We had a good brainstorm on ways to advance this priority, and an idea that stuck with me from it was “Different types of workshops, trainings, dialogues (format and topic – individual, structural, policy)”
Diversity Club is a different type of workshop. It has low-overhead. It is regularly recurring. And it has drawn a range of interest, depending on the time of year, the topic, and the competing priorities around IHME.
You can see some of the things we’ve discussed tagged diversity club on HA https://healthyalgorithms.com/tag/diversity-club/
Looking back on them, discussing The Invisible Knapsack was the one I was most nervous about https://healthyalgorithms.com/2017/04/10/diversity-club-the-invisible-knapsack/ it went fine.
Counter-measures for implicit bias left me the most optimistic about the possibility of positive change https://healthyalgorithms.com/2017/02/24/journal-club-counter-measures-for-implicit-bias/
I’ll report back again at a year.
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Filed under Uncategorized
Healthy Algorithms 