To follow along with the analyses in this blog, download and install a trial version of SpaceStat here. An earlier blog defined the small numbers problem and illustrated that rates calculated with small denominators (e.g. small at-risk populations) have high variance...
Report from the NASA Public Health Program Review
The 2011 NASA Public Health Program Review was held September 14-16 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is an annual event where Principal Investigators of projects funded by the NASA Public Health Program are invited to present the status and results of their work. NASA’s...
Announcing Our Membership in Esri’s Business Partner Network and the Release of SpaceStat 3 with Geodatabase File Format Integration
I am very excited by our release of SpaceStat 3, which links BioMedware to Esri technology using the geodatabase file format and is an important step towards addressing unmet needs in data access and geohealth analysis techniques. This is very timely, as...
A Vision for Geohealth Analysis, and Geohealth Solutions in SpaceStat
Others have blogged on the directions for Esri technology, the emerging role of GIS-in-the-cloud, crowd-sourcing data, and the potentials for social networking in geohealth. I attended the recent Esri International User Conference (UC) and realized that,...
vacciNATION: Improving the nation’s health through health communication, social networks and gaming?
NOTE: vacciNATION is currently running with data from the 2012 season. This blog introduces an app BioMedware developed in response to CDC’s Flu App Challenge. This challenge calls for an innovative use of technology to raise awareness of influenza and educate...
It’s About Space and Time: From the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) to the Modifiable Temporal Unit Problem (MTUP) to the Modifiable Spatio-Temporal Unit Problem (MSTUP)
I recently returned from the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers, which convened in Seattle in April, 2011. While there I had the opportunity to attend a few of the featured sessions on space-time geography. This special series, with...
The small numbers problem–Part 2
Using persistence in spatial time series as a diagnostic for extreme rates in small areas. In my last blog on the small numbers problem, we found that rates calculated with small denominators (e.g. small at-risk populations) have high variance and we thus have little...
The small numbers problem Part 1: What you see is not necessarily what you get
The ability to quickly create maps of health outcomes such as cancer incidence and mortality in counties, census areas and even Zip codes is now available through websites and data portals. (See for example Atlasplus, State Cancer Profiles, and Cardiovascular Disease,...