In hospitals, “sentinel events” are events that carry with them a significant risk of unexpected death or harm. It is estimated that ⅔ of such sentinel events result from communications failures during the handoff of a patient from one provider to another (e.g. during a nursing shift change). In a recent paper, a team ofContinue reading “Social Network Analysis (SNA) in Medicine”
Category Archives: Data Exploration
Football Analytics
Preparing for the Superbowl Your team is at midfield, you have the ball, it’s 4th down with 2 yards to go. Should you go for it? (Apologies in advance to our many readers, especially those outside the U.S., who are not aficionados of American football, but it’s Superbowl week in the U.S. A quick guideContinue reading “Football Analytics”
Job Spotlight: Digital Marketer
A digital marketer handles a variety of tasks in online marketing – managing online advertising and search engine optimization (SEO), implementing tracking systems (e.g. to identify how a person came to a retailer), web development, preparing creatives, implementing tests, and, of course, analytics. There are typically three types of employers: Marketing agencies that contract outContinue reading “Job Spotlight: Digital Marketer”
Things are Getting Better
In the visualization below, which line do you think represents the UN’s forecast for the number of children in the world in the year 2100? Hans Rosling, in his book Factfulness, presents this chart and notes that in a sample of Norwegian teachers, only 9% correctly identified the correct answer. Rosling, who died two yearsContinue reading “Things are Getting Better”
Work and Heat
If you are working on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, odds are it is from home, where you can (usually) control the temperature in the home. Which, from the standpoint of productivity, is a good thing. According to a study from Cornell, raising the office temperature from 68 degrees to 77 degrees increasedContinue reading “Work and Heat”
Benford’s Law Applies to Online Social Networks
Fake social media accounts and Russian meddling in US elections have been in the news lately, with Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder) testifying this week before the US Congress. Dr. Jen Golbeck, who teaches Network Analysis at Statistics.com, published an ingenious way to determine whether a Facebook, Twitter or other social media account is fraudulent. HerContinue reading “Benford’s Law Applies to Online Social Networks”
Dialects
When talking to several people, do you address them as “you guys”? “Y’all”? Just “you”? And is the carbonated soft drink “soda” or “pop?” Maps based on survey responses to questions like this were published in the Harvard Dialect Survey in 2003. Josh Katz took the data and produced extended visualizations and, last month, aContinue reading “Dialects”
Needle in a Haystack
What’s the probability that the NSA examined the metadata for your phone number in 2013? According to John Inglis, Deputy Director at the NSA, it’s about 0.00001, or 1 in 100,000. A surprisingly small number, given what we’ve all been reading in the media about NSA’s massive data collection effort. Of course, that’s an unconditionalContinue reading “Needle in a Haystack”
Terrorist Clusters
The “righteous vengeance gun attack” is just one of 10 types of terrorism identified by Chenoweth and Lowham via statistical clustering techniques. Another cluster is “bombings of a public population where a liberation group takes responsibility.” You can read about the 10 clusters, and the 44 dichotomous variables (suicide or not, bombing or not, religiousContinue reading “Terrorist Clusters”