It’s important not to get depressed when you measure the burden of disease all day. Animal videos help.
Category Archives: global health
Mortality research got you down?
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Filed under global health
Applied Privacy
A multitude of events in the last week or so have made me want to blog about (and learn more about) the cryptographic theory of privacy. Journalist James Bamford’s new book about the NSA came out, the third in his trilogy. Bamford described his findings on Democracy Now last Tuesday, including how government contractors were hired to eavesdrop on US soldiers in Iraq:
Not only were they eavesdropping on a lot of these conversations, some of which were very intimate, but they would have sort of locker room chats about what they were hearing, and they would post—or they would notify their co-workers that you should listen to this, what they call “cut,” their conversations. You should listen to this conversation or that conversation. They’d laugh about it.
Also last week, (or maybe two weeks ago) the National Academy Press published a new report called Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists. The report’s primary recommendation, that “Programs Should be Evaluated for Effectiveness, Privacy”, is not too revolutionary, but the report contains some interesting summaries of technology and public opinion.
And kicking off this season of privacy discussion, there were demonstrations across the EU on Oct 11 in a world-wide protest against surveillance entitled Freedom not fear.
Or, almost kicking it off… just a few weeks before this tsunami of privacy, Adam Smith posted an interesting sounding paper to the arxiv, Efficient, Differentially Private Point Estimators. This sort of cryptographic approach to privacy is where I’m going with this post. But let me first mention why I’m going there.
Filed under cryptography, global health
Through the algorithmic lens, doctors = noise machines
A few years ago, some concerned citizens of TCS, like Sanjeev Arora and Bernard Chazelle, came up with this idea to promote the applications of algorithmic ideas more widely. Chazelle’s essay The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science is an example of this (with lots of nice pictures). The name for this world view seems to be “The Algorithmic Lens”.
I like the way that sounds, but it makes me imagine how kids will scorch ants with a magnifying glass. Maybe that is not the best mental imagery to frame interdisciplinary research.
This post is about an application of algorithmic thinking in health metrics. I hope I don’t burn the public health docs with my highly focused beam of algorithms. (That reminds me, if you can’t understand what I’m talking about, and want to, you can leave a comment with questions. I’ll answer. It’s likely that no one else understands what I’m talking about either.)
Filed under global health
Disease Modeling and the Global Burden of Disease
If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you might be wondering, what does Health Metrics have to do with sampling independent sets in graphs? (What is Health Metrics? you might also be wondering.)
In my new job, I’m not that interested in sampling independent sets. I’m mostly interested in sampling from a weird distribution that comes out of a Bayesian denoising problem.
Let me set the stage: a huge project that IHME is part of is the Global Burden of Disease study, which will (among other things) rank 200 diseases and injuries according to how severely they impact humanity. How you could possibly, ethically make this list is the topic of many books, and I won’t try to get into it now. IHME director Chris Murray seems to favor measuring impact in “disability adjusted life years” (DALYs), which is a fairly individualistic, fairly egalitarian approach.
Filed under global health
Healthy Algorithms 