Not perfect, but perfectly scary. — I teach epidemiology to graduate students at two universities, and I’ve decided to forgo the essay as a measure of their understanding of the material. It’s not that I don’t have time to read essay after essay on the same topic. …

The dots on a map may seem like they are clustering, but are they just indicating the clustering of something else? — Using Philadelphia’s open data portal, I downloaded the Part 1 crime data reported between January 1 and November 8, 2022. I then filtered the data for only criminal homicides, and I threw the location of those homicides on the map of neighborhoods in Philadelphia shown below. At first glance, you…

It’s an election year, so there must be some sort of moral panic. — Criminologist Stanley Cohen defined moral panics as a time when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Moral panics are interesting to study, and a little scary to live through. …

For fans of the old series, the new Quantum Leap may seem unfamiliar. I think that is the point, but it’s a weakness. — I’ve now watched the first two episodes of Quantum Leap on Peacock (online streaming platform from NBC), and I have some issues with it. Or, rather, it has issues I’ve detected. The show is definitely not like the old series that ran from 1989 to 1993. …

After three years as an epidemiologist at a county health department, it’s time to move on to bigger and better things… — I remember when my friend Shawn called me to tell me about the job being posted at the health department where he works. Shawn and I met while working at the Maryland Department of Health in 2008. He was an outbreak epidemiologist. I was the epidemiologist responsible for influenza surveillance…

This is going to be HIV in the 1980s all over again, isn’t it? — If there is “a tradition like no other” in public health, it must be the fumbling of communications on an emergency situation. If there is “a tradition like no other” in American public discourse, it must be the tradition of blaming ‘the other’ for the problems of the nation. When…

I would be laughed out of my profession if I used any of the rhetorical and logical fallacies people use on the internet. — A friend of mine posted a screen capture of the “stop the bleed” training they are doing as part of the intake process for their new job as a high school teacher. The training explains how to stop bleeding from injuries due to stabbings and gun shots. My friend expressed…

One Lorenz Curve can tell you a long story — In a previous post, I showed you different ways to visualize time data on homicides in Baltimore using data from Baltimore’s Open Data portal. For this post, I’m going to show you in one image how homicides in Baltimore are related to income, and how lower-income neighborhoods bear most of…

Don’t limit yourself to simple graphs, or simple maps. — Baltimore City in Maryland is one of the world’s most violent cities, constantly ranking in the top 50 most violent cities in the world, and the top five most violent cities in the United States. The reasons for this are many, and they are complex. …