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These are some the photos from the weekend that Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhride and his partner Linda stopped by on their way to Papua New Guinea.
No method of measuring a societal phenomenon satisfying certain minimal conditions exists that can’t be second-guessed, deconstructed, cheated, rejected or replaced. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be counting — but it does mean we should do so with as much care and wisdom as we can muster.
via The Way We Live Now – Metric Mania – NYTimes.com.
A nice article from the New York Times magazine about the importance of context when collecting and analysing data.
I found an ESRI shapefile for Queensland from the Electoral Commission here. I ran it though STATA and browsed the variables they were all empty and the bounderies were electoral with very low resolution.
The only variable I could map was area. The population variable was empty and the electoral divisions do not equate to postcodes.
The result is a rather useless map of the area of Queensland electoral divisions. I had some many plans to use Health data for hospital districts that I found on the Queensland Health public website (available here).
It also is little help that Queensland is a massive geographical area with all the voters living in a small area in the bottom south-east corner.
Now with integration of photosynth, Microsoft’s Bing maps look like they are more sophisticated then google maps. Watch and learn…
The notebook demonstrations for Wolfram’s Mathematica are excellent. This one gives an animated demonstration of the way the power of medical tests changes with different specificities and sensitivities.
More information can be found here.
Here is another trial of the STATA mapping tool where the health expenditure as a percentage of a country’s GDP is mapped.
The darker the colour the greater the expenditure. I included a statement to to exclude non-OECD countries from the generated map. Obviously the USA has the highest expenditure.
The data were obtained from the OECD stats website. There are any amount of data available here to play with.
This is my first go at producing a map in STATA. I followed the excellent tutorial by Friedrich Huebler that worked a charm.
I only changed a couple of variables such as colour and legend size to get the effect I want. The more I play with this the more determined I am to take the spatio-temporal epidemiology course this summer.
I hope to find some shapefiles of Australia and Queensland and have a bit of a play with it in more detail. It would be nice to map spatio-temporal trends in antibiotic resistance.
Connecting to a MySQL using a Microsoft Access frontend is much easier than I imagined. This is the connection to the MySQL database that runs this website using Access 2007. The total setup took about 3 minutes.
It just requires installing ODBC drivers form MySQL and setting up remote DB access with your host. Access may have a useless engine but it is a better interface for MySQL than the opensource variants.
This would be very useful to administer online public health surveys. It should be easy enough to make a PHP webform and populate a MySQL database. There would be additional benefits considering the ODBC connectivity in STATA. Obviously as it is ODBC it will also import straight into Excel.
