Last time I posted I had a substantial amount of trouble with the formatting of the post and the internet was being unreliable. Maybe that is why I chose to not post for several days. Actually, it wasn't really a choice at all. Things move at quite a pace here in Boston. Harvard School of Public Health advertises the program as "relatively intensive" and I'm encouraging the removal of the "relatively." Despite the high speed program, it is quite enjoyable. Over the past several days we have continued classes in Biostatistics, met with various epidemeologists and epidemeological students. Had an introduction to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and an introduction to their community health / outreach program and what it does. We've met a unique professor in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health (SHDH) who is truly passionate about tobacco and how it is killing everyone. We have also attended conferences, had question answer sessions, been working on homework for our Biostatistics Class, and continued developing and working on our research projects.
In addition to all of this we've done various social things, this weekend we had a Duck Tour and then went out to eat at Bob's Bistro, which attempts to reproduce cajun cusine. I, being a lover of jambalya, had to try it. I must say it wasn't as promising as I had hoped it to be. These social events never happen without opportunities. Graduate students almost always join us, which gives us a unique time to ask them questions about applying to school and what they looked for in a school. Professors join us on these outings as well giving us other networking and q/a opportunities. Sunday was a free day, and I took some time to tour Harvard University's Cambridge Campus and MIT.
Today, the main focus of the day was a diversity workshop that the Biostatistics Department sponsors. Several professors, lecturers, professionals, and officials in the field of environment protection, research, and remediation joined together to address the question of Brownfields or Environmentally polluted areas in Underprivledged Communities. The workshop attempted to go through the process of identifying a polluted site, reporting it, making sure it was looked into, making sure it was cleaned properly, and so on. Overall it attempted to develop a step by step and broad overview for all. The program went from 8:3o this morning until 5:30 tonight.
The weather has been wonderful the past two days, and I'm hoping it won't rain for a few more. After the workshop today a few of us took a walk up to Northeastern University and went to their Qdoba for some really good burritos. No one around here has or have heard of a fish burrito, I miss them! After dinner we walked back and I worked on homework for a while. We have a reading assignment with questions due tomorrow (which I finished after dinner tonight) and we are continually working on our research projects.
The reading assinment was a series of news articles and scientific papers that followed a couple scientists working in the realm of bioinformatics. They were using mass spectrometry (google it!) to identify various proteins in the serum of peoples blood and use that as a diagnosis for various diseases. This field is called proteomics and seems to be promising as a way to kind of barcode scan diseases with character protein production. The results presented in this collection of papers was very promising initially. The scientists were working on Ovarian Cancer and attempting to detect it very early on. They used a set of known set of females with and without the diesase and ran their blood serum through the machine. One group presented very good results while the other presented 100% correct diagnosis, perfect results. However, later, another public health official reviewed the paper and recognized the use of poor standards or procedures. The group with 100% correct results had run all of the negative tests in one block and all of the positive tests afterwards. The testing was not radomized and the calibration didn't occour throughout the test. Usually, blind radomization is standard for such testing, and when things are shuffeled around, it is typical to see very good results, or at least similar results among the positive blood serums, since they were all tested together.
After the reading, I feel asleep and woke back up to blog. After doing this for an hour now, I hope to return to bed and fall asleep quickly! I've posted some photos taken over the past few days with brief summaries. I hope you enjoy them. Tomorrow we are back to class and various lectures. I hope to give you good information about each specific part tomorrow, and in the future, up date you about the specific lectures and events I summarized in this first paragraph.
Blind & Random!
1 comment:
to much for me to keep up with but sure is nice to keep day by day progress with you mom
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