Archive for Geoffrey Jacquez, Ph.D.

The National Cancer Plan of 2023 

The National Cancer Plan of 2023 

Recently the National Cancer Institute released its National Cancer Plan which provides a comprehensive framework to develop cancer control strategies, share knowledge, and accelerate progress.  The overall objective is to end cancer as we know it; a target that has...

The 2 Different Types of GIS Data

The 2 Different Types of GIS Data

There are 2 categories of data utilized in geographic information systems: Vector Data and Raster Data. This distinction goes back to the founding days of GIS technology, when there were two major types of geographic information systems, one worked with raster data...

How does GIS work?

How does GIS work?

On the surface, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and geospatial analysis can seem quite mysterious. Where does all that data come from? How can it be rendered into maps? Is it really possible to ask questions about maps—to use them for analysis? Let’s take a...

BioMeanings Update January 2015

Two proposal tips We write a fair number of research proposals, with most of them going to the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and surveillance. We also submit proposals to the National Science Foundation and NASA. For those...

Ebola and “R naught”

There is a certain amount of false information regarding how infectious the Ebola virus is, see, for example, some of the statements by certain Congressman. Mathematical epidemiologists use something called "R naught",​ the basic reproductive number, to quantify how...

Thoughts from Austin: NAACCR Annual Meeting

This week I am attending the meetings of the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries that is being held in Austin, Texas. The topic of this year’s conference is “Thinking big, the future of cancer surveillance”, and I’m involved in two activities. The...

Drugs recalled by New England Compounding Center: The tip of the iceberg?

As hypotheses are tested and rejected, the remaining hypotheses are those that plausibly might explain the observed pattern. But how often do we include medications contaminated with foreign agents — fungus, bacteria, or otherwise — in our set of explanatory hypotheses? Until now, rarely, if ever. What we are learning from the New England Compounding Center is that contaminated medications largely explain the observed outbreak of fungal meningitis.