Data Science Update March 2022: What’s Hot and Happening!

*This post contains links to educational resources for which I earn royalties if you actually purchase them.

I have been so busy with my livestreaming and consulting work over the past month, I have not given you much of an update. I’ll cover here what I’ve been doing, as well as what is hot and happening this March in data science!

Let’s Celebrate Women Scientists for Black History and Women’s History Month

I meant to make some content about these Black women scientists for both February and March, but the time got away from me. Allow me to do it now.

Dr. Kimberly Sellers

Dr. Kimberly Sellers is a Full Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, specializing in Statistics, and is one of my connections on LinkedIn (hi there!). She is an American Statistical Association Fellow, and I’m linking you to an old Q&A the ASA had with her because I enjoyed reading it, since she talks about her opinions and philosophies. Among the many things she does (including teaching and research ), she co-authored R package COMPoissonReg for fitting Conway-Maxwell Poisson regression models. She is an inspiration to all of us fighting with distributions!

Dr. Timnit Gebru

I don’t know Dr. Gebru personally, but I have been following her story since I read the profile in Wired Magazine about her getting fired from leading Google’s team researching bias in AI because she was trying to do a peer-reviewed paper that had already been pre-approved by her boss. This is roughly the same thing that happened to me when I worked at the Army. If anyone wonders how women in science are aggressively oppressed, here’s one way: Our bosses don’t even let us submit papers to the peer-reviewed literature.

Dr. Gebru has used her power for good, and has set up the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute to continue her and her team’s important research. I will continue to follow DAIR, and encourage you to do so, too. It’s amazing what great science can come from women when we dislodge the collective patriarchy’s foot from our necks.

Dr. Kechinyere (Kechi) Iheduru-Anderson

Dr. Kechi is my close friend, and though she’s not a “data” scientist, she’s a scientist you want to watch. She recently achieved tenure as Full Professor at Central Michigan University, and her research was featured in a USA Today article .

Since Kechi is a nurse educator and administrator, her research has always focused on improving nursing education. I have watched Kechi’s research evolve towards a sharpened focus on institutionalized racism in nursing, and how that essentially destroys any hope of improving nursing education. I encourage you to visit her Google Scholar page and read her different publications. I co-authored a few, so I am intimately familiar with some of her research. It will really enlighten you, and change how you think.

Central Boston Elder Services Black History Month Celebration

As a final note on Black History Month, Central Boston Elder Services (CBES), a non-profit providing home care services to a predominantly African American elders in Boston where I’m on the board of directors, had the most lovely Black History Month celebration this year, and I’d like to share the video with you. Please consider donating to CBES , because they make a lot of good things happen in our community.

Monika Update

I spoke with a learner yesterday who inquired about my livestreaming. I realize it had been about a month since my last livestream. That’s because I’ve been busy! Here’s what I have been up to.

“Framework to Evaluate Level of Good Faith in Implementations of Public Dashboards” just published!

My faithful forever intern, Natasha Dukach , and I have co-authored this new book chapter (which was just finally published) after fighting angrily with a publicly-available healthcare-associated infection dashboard here in Massachusetts. We could not make head nor tail of the dashboard from the government, so we started questioning the role of open government data policy if the government can still hide data behind ugly and useless dashboards.

So Natasha fixed it ! We hope to do a presentation at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) meeting in Washington DC in November about it. I just submitted the abstract – cross your fingers!

Other Business

Here is a summary of what else I have been working on over the past month. If you want to know more, please comment on this article and tell me the topic, and I’ll address it in my next livestream!

• Doing more experiments with weights, BRFSS , and the R survey package
• Dealing with issues with peer-reviewed journals, especially predatory journals
• Working on more research with my lipedema group led by Dr. Catherine Seo of Lipedema Simplified
• Keeping up with my favorite casino blogger Robin Aubin , who published an update to my original analysis , “Massachusetts Casinos Compared” on his blog NETimeGambling
• Meeting on Skype and Zoom with data science learners and guiding them in their data science journeys . Please contact me if you want a free consultation!

Connected Health Summit Session March 24 on “Telehealth and Remote Monitoring”

These sessions , which have been virtual but are coming back to in-person, are put on by Parks Associates. You get to see innovators talk about their new products and services. I try to attend when I have time. For me, it helps me anticipate future innovation in data science. Remember, every telehealth function creates some data that needs to be protected, but also could be analyzed!

Timon Vinke’s New Free “Business Boost Program” Starts April 5!

I’m great at mentoring people learning public health and data science, but I admit, I’m not a very good businessperson. I have a lot of trouble getting new customers for some of my higher-ticket services (like helping quality assurance/quality improvement departments at hospitals meet their key performance indicators). I have been conversing with successful business coach Timon Vinke about this, and I realized that I did not really understand what a business coach actually does.

It’s not unusual that others may not know what your services are all about if you are some sort of coach. I admit, a lot of people do not know what a paid data science mentor (like me) does, so I posted this blog post to help people understand.

Timon is doing something similar, by offering this free Business Boost Program to businesses like mine, who think they need Timon’s services, but don’t really know what happens when you set up business coaching. I look forward to participating, and encourage you to sign up and find out what it is all about.

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