Things I work on…How I see them…and Health Informatics

Entries from November 2008

Visual Animation of Framingham Heart Study

November 15, 2008 · Leave a Comment

View the Dynamic Representation of the Framingham Study on Cardiovascular Risk here:

http://content.nejm.org/content/vol357/issue4/images/data/370/DC2/NEJM_Christakis_370v1.swf

Quantitative analysis of factors related to cardiovascular risk, especially obesity…

It will be nice to have such analysis automatically done on different disease conditions of public health significance at a high level, and perhaps with an underlying GIS layer…

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Arguments on Models, Theory and Data

November 13, 2008 · Leave a Comment

“Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all”.

‘All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.’ Have we reached a time where all of our tool-sets are now made moot by vast clouds of information and strictly applied maths?”

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/25/146250

The main article is here: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory . The comments even appear to be more interesting.

A reaction to this is here:http://miningdrugs.blogspot.com/2008/08/data-models-or-both.html

And Geoff sent me this link on same matter early this week:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php

It ends by saying this:

“Models are not perfect,” says Syd Levitus. “Data are not perfect. Theory isn’t perfect. We shouldn’t expect them to be. It’s the combination of models, data, and theory that lead to improvements in our science, in our understanding of phenomena.”

What is a model?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model

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