Reading Things- Research into Cardiac Stuff
Today, I read these two lovely research papers: Clinical decisions and outcomes after switching high-sensitivity cardiac troponin assays in suspected acute coronary syndrome: A prospective interrupted time-series study and High-sensitivity cardiac troponin I and risk of dementia: the 25-year longitudinal Whitehall II study. I'm also going to read at least twenty more pages of 1984.
Full disclosure, this was definitely reading I undertook to prep for a meeting1 I had, and not something I independently sought out. As a bioinformatician, I'm somewhat trained in statistics and biostats, but reading the Whitehall study made me realise how deeply entrenched in Dunning-Kruger (the bad, overconfident kind) I was. When reading research in my field/anything closely related, I typically try and think of how I would do the exact same analysis, or if I have scripts lying around that I could plug the data into and run it with different parameters/modifications. This time though, while things seemed vaguely familiar, I realised I had no recollection as to what a Wald test or a Cox proportional hazards model was. I knew I've skimmed these before, they're vaguely familiar, and it wouldn't take me more than I day to figure out how to implement them, but I have no idea what the underlying math means, and it will possibly take me a significant amount of time to find out. I'm tangentially reminded of this meme, and I think... do I truly understand p-values? I thought I did.
Additionally, I'm helping a friend out on a Python assignment, and I've never felt so lost before. This is understandable, the assignments is a mechanics simulation, and I have no claims of knowledge in physics. We did, however, spend an hour brainstorming fixes for a piece of code that was simply missing the 'else:' line. He takes solace in the fact that someone who can code can make such a banal error. I marvel at my brain's ability to auto-complete. We continue to stay stuck on other bits of the code, jumping for joy every time the error message changes. I hope I can help him some more, although I have no idea how. It involves way, way more physics than I can understand.2
I'd love for you to write me your thoughts, or simply say hi!
I'm actively looking for jobs/PhDs/data analysis opportunities. This was a meeting with a professor who ultimately decided we weren't the best fit. It's disappointing news, but they did also offer to pass me on to someone better aligned. Bummer. I wonder if there's anyone on Bear that can help out... I should put out a whole page explaining my sitch.↩
It's been eight hours? or so since I blogged this in a 2AM frenzy of inspiration. I think all I had to do was sleep on it--I THINK managed to fix one of the wee things we found ourselves stuck at. Now we wait for him to run the code.↩