There are some things in life that I just have difficulty wrapping my brain around, and one of those is how some people can be so incompetent that they don’t know they’re incompetent. Let’s take the example of people earning doctorates. You’d think that would be a pretty select crowd, right? From 1960 – 69,…
I can’t believe I haven’t written about this before – I’m going to tell you an easy (yes, easy) way to find and communicate to a non-technical audience standardized mortality rates and relative risk by strata. It all starts with PROC STDRATE . No, I take that back. It starts with this post I wrote…
SENSITIVITY AND SPECIFICITY – TWO ANSWERS TO “DO YOU HAVE A DISEASE?” Both sensitivity and specificity address the same question – how accurate is a test for disease – but from opposite perspectives. Sensitivity is defined as the proportion of those who have the disease that are correctly identified as positive. Specificity is the proportion…
In the early part of any epidemiology course, few things throw students as much as computing age-adjusted mortality. It seems really counter-intuitive that two populations could have the exact same mortality rate and yet one is significantly less healthy than the other. Thinking about it for a moment, though, before diving into computation, makes it…
This is part 3 of the series inspired by Cindy Gallop’s brilliant talk on finding talented women or minorities. Not only is your company not hiring female or minority employees, not investing in female or minority-led companies, but YOU ARE LITERALLY ADDING INSULT TO INJURY. The tech workforce is disproportionately white and Asian male, and…