I’m quite taken with the Software Carpentry approach to teaching scientists computer skills, especially since I saw it in action in UW a few months ago. One aspect that I’ve been trying out for my own course is the “mastery table” approach that the Software Carpentry Instructor Study Groups use. Here is a mastery table for teaching version control. I have made a few of my own, but I don’t think I said enough for any novice to leave competent, according to my ambitions. I will keep trying.
Journal Club: India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana, an Impact Evaluation
We’ve selected a locally grown paper for discussion in journal club this week, India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana, a conditional cash transfer programme to increase births in health facilities: an impact evaluation, by Lim et al, with a focus on the methods: the paper has “used three analytical approaches (matching, with-versus-without comparison, and differences in differences) to assess the effect of JSY on antenatal care, in-facility births, and perinatal, neonatal, and maternal deaths.”
Filed under global health
Graph Analytics Challenge
I was playing around with SPARQL queries and the semantic web earlier this year, inspired in part by a contest I entered. Well, the good news came out that my project was second runner-up! Of course, I would like to be first place, but the projects that beat mine were both really cool. Information Week did a nice story on all of us.
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Filed under Uncategorized
GHME 2013
Posters and talks have been accepted for the Global Health Metrics and Evaluation 2013 Conference! Would you like to see what some oral presentations in 2011 looked like?
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Filed under global health
Journal Club: Digital Epidemiology
This week I had to draft a fellow to present, so I picked something short to read: Digital Epidemiology by Salathé et al.
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Filed under global health
ML vs Stats
What is the difference between machine learning and statistics? Can it be captured in a tweet?
A colleague of a colleague is hiring
A colleague of mine writes:
A colleague of mine at PATH is looking to hire a health economist and particularly someone who has versatile, nimble modeling skills. Do either of you know of anyone who may fit the bill? If so, please share with them the link below.
Sounds like a cool position: https://path.silkroad.com/epostings/index.cfm?fuseaction=app.jobinfo&jobid=299724&version=1
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Filed under global health
UW Math Day
I had a fun time on Monday talking to area high school students at the UW Math Department’s annual Math Day event. My slides and some others are now on the web.
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Filed under education
Happy Pi Day
I recently came across a stack overflow post just perfect for Pi day. The path to knowledge is asking many questions, and it is a strange feature of the days in which we live how steep this path can be: a question that starts “How to determine whether my calculation of pi is accurate? I was trying various methods to implement a program that gives the digits of pi sequentially…” eventually receives an answer that starts “Since I’m the current world record holder for the most digits of pi, I’ll add my two cents…”
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Filed under software engineering
Journal Club: Nets, spray or both?
This week in journal club we will take on yet another locally produced paper, Nets, spray or both? The effectiveness of insecticide-treated nets and indoor residual spraying in reducing malaria morbidity and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.
TL/DR? both.
Or as the authors put it: “these findings suggest that greater reductions in malaria morbidity and health gains for children may be achieved with ITNs and IRS combined beyond the protection offered by IRS or ITNs alone.”
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Filed under global health
Healthy Algorithms 