We had a very different sort of research paper in journal club three weeks ago, and I was too busy to jot it down until now. Dewachi et al, Changing therapeutic geographies of the Iraqi and Syrian wars. This is certainly not our usual metrics-heavy approach, so it was good exercise to try to understand it.
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Last week for IHME seminar, we heard from Kate Starbird about Crowds, crisis, and convergence: crowdsourcing in the context of disasters. It reminded me of the visual displays of quantitative information I hacked on after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
Did I ever tell you how the US State Department called to ask if they could use that graphic in a presentation? I thought it was a prank.
As often is the case, a recording of the talk is available online.
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A recent IHME seminar by Mark Wheldon described a Bayesian approach to estimating past populations and vital rates by age. I like this stuff. The talk is online, and there is a CSSS working paper on it, too: http://www.csss.washington.edu/Papers/wp117.pdf
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Last week we read Repeat Bone Mineral Density Screening and Prediction of Hip and Major Osteoporotic Fracture by Berry et al. It argues that repeat screening does not improve predictions. But I think the world needs a better way to measure the quality of predictions like these. Area-under-the-curve doesn’t cut it when you are predicting the unpredictable.
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One exciting announcement that I got to make at the Verbal Autopsy Congress last October is that the PHMRC gold standard verbal autopsy validation data is now available for all researchers. You can find it in the Global Health Data Exchange: Population Health Metrics Research Consortium Gold Standard Verbal Autopsy Data 2005-2011.
Insert an example of doing something with it here.
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Our paper comparing the performance of several verbal autopsy (VA) analysis algorithms is now published. This was a long time in the making, so I’m very glad that it is now out in the literature. It is open access, too!
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Tomorrow is journal club, starting up again for the winter quarter. We are reading Racial Discrimination & Cardiovascular Disease Risk: My Body My Story Study of 1005 US-Born Black and White Community Health Center Participants (US) by Krieger et al.
One exposure paper uses is measured with the Implicit Association Test, which I was trying to explain and couldn’t remember the details of. So I checked online, and learned you can take one yourself! It takes about ten minutes, and may reveal surprising things about you: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
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Tomorrow we have our weekly seminar at IHME, and I’m getting ahead of the curve in mentioning it here. We will hear from Sienna Craig on maternal and child health above 10,000 feet for over 10,000 years. Insert jokes about how that is a long time to be so high. If you are not here in person, you can view the talk online: http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/news-events/seminar/fertility-variation-and-child-survivorship-among-tibetan-women-northern-nepal-bi
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It is time for seminars to start up again at IHME, and yesterday we had one already! Here are the remaining ones from last semester that I did not get a chance to mention individually:
Paying for Health Results in Developing Countries: Current and Future – Rena Eichler
A country perspective on the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project – the case of Norway – Stein Emil Vollset
Improving the quality of siblings’ survival histories: results from a randomized controlled trial in Niakhar (Senegal) and next steps – Stéphane Helleringer
A Statistician’s Challenges with HIV and AIDS – Nicholas P. Jewell
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I’m almost caught up on recording last quarter’s journal club papers, with this second to last topic: Investigating health system performance: An application of data envelopment analysis to Zambian hospitals by Felix Masiye.
This data envelopment analysis (DEA) is an approach I’ve been hearing a lot about recently, and it seems to work through quite an operations-research lens. I hope I’ll be looking into it more in the near future.
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Healthy Algorithms 