I was in Los Angeles last week, and stayed with two friend, Arv and Anjali. Arv is an economist working on developmental economics - so we have lots to discuss - especially the fact that after recent experiences I no longer believe non-profit work is a viable solution to address public health and poverty issues. I have become a die hard capitalist - and believe the only solutions that address issues of poverty and health crises must be self-sustaining and not grant dependent. (More about this in another post perhaps). I am also against pilots (not ones that fly planes, or medical trial pilots). Also with the mass of data available I think that we need to revamp statistics - sample sets are less important - more important is noise reduction, or rather discerning salient information (trends) from the data, rather than extrapolating trends from a sample. (Again for another post)
Anyway, in speaking with Arv I remembered the importance of ethnographic research in the implementation of any solution. Many times projects fail, not because the data collection methodology is incorrect, or because the statistical analysis is not sound, but because people collect data incorrectly.
I was reminded of the passage in "American Caesar" a brilliant book by William Manchester about Douglas MacArthur.
When visiting Japan (before WWI), the Japanese generals said that there was a problem with malaria among their men. The men had prophylaxis (pills), but were still developing malaria - obviously something was wrong with the pills. MacArthur laughed and said something like "If I gave my men pills with instructions to take them every 4 hours - they would be dumped into a ditch and forgotten." The Japanese generals were horrified - our soldiers would never do such a thing. The next week a new batch of pills arrived with a new label - the emperor wishes that you to take a pill every 4 hours. After that there was never a problem with malaria.
No need for any fancy solution involving cell phones or alerts or sharks with laser beams - just ethnography (Arv liked this story too)
Showing posts with label Malaria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Malaria. Show all posts
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Friday, September 4, 2009
Vodka prevents Malaria
I am currently at Mamma Mia for my weekly pizza. Today I also had an espresso that tasted like dirt. I hope I dont get sick.
Today I am working from old town, rather than the UNICEF office. I dont see the point in spending 2 hours in transit to stay for 4 hours - unless I have a meeting. Well, I did NOT have a meeting. I was supposed to have national level training on the new INFSSS SMS system protocol, but the Ministry of Health rescheduled. This is both good and bad. Good because it gives me more time to refine, bad because it gives me more time. Do you know what I did with that time??? I refactored by code.
After speaking with Sean who is working on a malnutrition project in Rwanda, I decided I had to make my framework super flexible. So I stripped out everything hardcoded, report formats, headers, everything - and made a class called LayoutManager. I will eventually have to refactor this class to include two classes, HeaderManager and Variable Manager.
For example, you define columns for a report, you link these columns to a function or variable (thank you getattr), and then you link these to a view and a class. (You can also do things like associate a link with the column.)
I also broke out the wasting and stunting tables to their own class -I renamed nutrition to childhealthindicators. I made an abstract class/app Person and then in childhealthindicators I have two classes ChildPatient and Healthworker. I have health status and other strings in messages.py. Here I will also define the SMS response flow. Messages should also be its own app - Probably one app called SMSFlow, and one called appconstants.
This would be a singleton - a singleton - for those of you who dont know - is a class that only has one instantiation. This is useful for keeping things that dont change - such as constants - and that are initalized at system startup.
The pagination was super simple- thanks Adam - but means that I need to rewrite my layout engine so that I dont corrupt the model objects - before I would turn the model objects into strings. It just struck me that there is something wrong with my solution -arrg.
The interesting thing about developing out here - is that all my research is done in batch. I cant be programming and think - ok what is the proper way to do that in django semantics and then google it.... instead i need to file it away until i get internet access and then do all my research all at once.
This is also making me reconsider webmail. i think I am going to start downloading all my mail into evolution and just respond off line. Then the message will go out when I sync. Ahh -living in a batch world.
So I am hoping to get my refactoring done tonight. Tomorrow I may go to Lake Malawi. If I dont - I will get started on Graphing. That is the last piece I have left - I download flot - the graphing library - so I can read up on it tonight.
Monday I go to the field. I have to rewrite the questionnaire for the local health workers. Really I want to know if they find it difficult to enter in children's ids or that sort of thing. My good friend Joelle is a questionnaire master - I will seek her advice for all future questionnaires.
Tonight I am planning to go to a local tech meetup - I am also supposed to give a demo at 4 to a local techie - but I have not heard from him - so I am not sure if that is still happening.
I have been watching a few movies - via paul V. Most recently, family plot and my man godfrey. I sort of OD'd on Kung Fu. Next on my list are Marnie and Vertigo (which I have never seen). I sort of prefer the old hitch. modern hitch is creepy flirty sexy. That is also an inside joke from the new 13bit movie. I may breakdown and rewatch some lynch (blue velvit)
And thank you Chris Barker for the Free Jazz (Don Cherry) It is great. I still need to download the second package!
This is probably enough - but I met a man who had Malaria 14 times. He told me the secrets of how to detect malaria carrying mosquitos (apparentl i was wrong). He also said mosquitos dont like gin or vodka - so drink up.
~
Today I am working from old town, rather than the UNICEF office. I dont see the point in spending 2 hours in transit to stay for 4 hours - unless I have a meeting. Well, I did NOT have a meeting. I was supposed to have national level training on the new INFSSS SMS system protocol, but the Ministry of Health rescheduled. This is both good and bad. Good because it gives me more time to refine, bad because it gives me more time. Do you know what I did with that time??? I refactored by code.
After speaking with Sean who is working on a malnutrition project in Rwanda, I decided I had to make my framework super flexible. So I stripped out everything hardcoded, report formats, headers, everything - and made a class called LayoutManager. I will eventually have to refactor this class to include two classes, HeaderManager and Variable Manager.
For example, you define columns for a report, you link these columns to a function or variable (thank you getattr), and then you link these to a view and a class. (You can also do things like associate a link with the column.)
I also broke out the wasting and stunting tables to their own class -I renamed nutrition to childhealthindicators. I made an abstract class/app Person and then in childhealthindicators I have two classes ChildPatient and Healthworker. I have health status and other strings in messages.py. Here I will also define the SMS response flow. Messages should also be its own app - Probably one app called SMSFlow, and one called appconstants.
This would be a singleton - a singleton - for those of you who dont know - is a class that only has one instantiation. This is useful for keeping things that dont change - such as constants - and that are initalized at system startup.
The pagination was super simple- thanks Adam - but means that I need to rewrite my layout engine so that I dont corrupt the model objects - before I would turn the model objects into strings. It just struck me that there is something wrong with my solution -arrg.
The interesting thing about developing out here - is that all my research is done in batch. I cant be programming and think - ok what is the proper way to do that in django semantics and then google it.... instead i need to file it away until i get internet access and then do all my research all at once.
This is also making me reconsider webmail. i think I am going to start downloading all my mail into evolution and just respond off line. Then the message will go out when I sync. Ahh -living in a batch world.
So I am hoping to get my refactoring done tonight. Tomorrow I may go to Lake Malawi. If I dont - I will get started on Graphing. That is the last piece I have left - I download flot - the graphing library - so I can read up on it tonight.
Monday I go to the field. I have to rewrite the questionnaire for the local health workers. Really I want to know if they find it difficult to enter in children's ids or that sort of thing. My good friend Joelle is a questionnaire master - I will seek her advice for all future questionnaires.
Tonight I am planning to go to a local tech meetup - I am also supposed to give a demo at 4 to a local techie - but I have not heard from him - so I am not sure if that is still happening.
I have been watching a few movies - via paul V. Most recently, family plot and my man godfrey. I sort of OD'd on Kung Fu. Next on my list are Marnie and Vertigo (which I have never seen). I sort of prefer the old hitch. modern hitch is creepy flirty sexy. That is also an inside joke from the new 13bit movie. I may breakdown and rewatch some lynch (blue velvit)
And thank you Chris Barker for the Free Jazz (Don Cherry) It is great. I still need to download the second package!
This is probably enough - but I met a man who had Malaria 14 times. He told me the secrets of how to detect malaria carrying mosquitos (apparentl i was wrong). He also said mosquitos dont like gin or vodka - so drink up.
~
Monday, August 24, 2009
In the data
Back at UNICEF after a relaxing weekend of lollygagging around lilongwe.
I am finally feeling myself, after a stressful morning of moving hotels, and looking for the UNICEF van.
I am moving back to the Kiboko - which seems like The Hong Kong Four Seasons after a weekend at the malarial swamp that is the Sunbird Lilongwe (servering real coffee and wifi enabled though it may be).
Today I am taking care of some administrativa - coordinating trips to the field, coordinating RapidSMS training sessions / barcamps at Mzuzu University and at Baobab. Soyapi - a local RoR developer at Baobab is going to add me to the local developer listserv! I am also specing out my interface changes to the templates.
In terms of rapidsms development - I am planning to make all the changes to django/rapidsms templates and then, time permitting, I'll move some functionality over to apps. I want to add a basic stats app, a graphing app, and a email app (does one exist), a scheduler app - in that order. I also have to check something on my cron job that builds the rapidsms documentation. It threw an error this morning - good thing no one is checking in documentation - or is it.
I am also backpopulating the malnutrition data from the Ministry of Health. This goes back to 2003. The idea is to make the RapidSMS Malnutrition - a one stop hub for Malawi Malnutrition data. This is one way to ensure that the system is continually referenced, used, monitored, updated, not abandoned - etc.. I am having some problems copying the data - I think the disk drive has a virus.
We are going to do fun stuff with data - scatterplot, bargraph,correlate, regress - Where is my Tufte book? We are also going to integrate the website with documentation about the project - oh another app - perhaps a document manager app. These are all simple apps - but you need to break them out so that other people can use them and integrate them into their own projects. There should also be a RapidSMS tag based template library for rendering responses on sms or other devices.
I am also thinking about looking at jython integration with RapidSMS. This might be a useful way to interface with Java libaries like OpenMRS and FrontlineSMS. I know that django supports jython. It has been a while since I did jython development - the last time was in 06 when I wrote a jython soduku app.
But enough shop talk - tonight I will return to my beloved Kiboko. I will resume the ancient practice of drinking alcoholic beverages and the modern practice of pulling code from adam's github rapidsms fork. Then perhaps some RapidSMS coding, some coding on DohRaeTweet perhaps some coding on my IB options strategy, some reading, tai chi and my malaria pill.
I am convinced I have malaria, although I am taking prophylaxis (malarone). It is grossing me out as I envision little parasites in my blood - a worm in the blood - did Spinoza have malaria. A scottish nurse that I met over the weekend, told me about her parasite. It was diagonosed by the local healthcare center as a sunburn. Apparently she is going to megadose on malarone and some anti parasite drug when she returns to UK.
I am finally feeling myself, after a stressful morning of moving hotels, and looking for the UNICEF van.
I am moving back to the Kiboko - which seems like The Hong Kong Four Seasons after a weekend at the malarial swamp that is the Sunbird Lilongwe (servering real coffee and wifi enabled though it may be).
Today I am taking care of some administrativa - coordinating trips to the field, coordinating RapidSMS training sessions / barcamps at Mzuzu University and at Baobab. Soyapi - a local RoR developer at Baobab is going to add me to the local developer listserv! I am also specing out my interface changes to the templates.
In terms of rapidsms development - I am planning to make all the changes to django/rapidsms templates and then, time permitting, I'll move some functionality over to apps. I want to add a basic stats app, a graphing app, and a email app (does one exist), a scheduler app - in that order. I also have to check something on my cron job that builds the rapidsms documentation. It threw an error this morning - good thing no one is checking in documentation - or is it.
I am also backpopulating the malnutrition data from the Ministry of Health. This goes back to 2003. The idea is to make the RapidSMS Malnutrition - a one stop hub for Malawi Malnutrition data. This is one way to ensure that the system is continually referenced, used, monitored, updated, not abandoned - etc.. I am having some problems copying the data - I think the disk drive has a virus.
We are going to do fun stuff with data - scatterplot, bargraph,correlate, regress - Where is my Tufte book? We are also going to integrate the website with documentation about the project - oh another app - perhaps a document manager app. These are all simple apps - but you need to break them out so that other people can use them and integrate them into their own projects. There should also be a RapidSMS tag based template library for rendering responses on sms or other devices.
I am also thinking about looking at jython integration with RapidSMS. This might be a useful way to interface with Java libaries like OpenMRS and FrontlineSMS. I know that django supports jython. It has been a while since I did jython development - the last time was in 06 when I wrote a jython soduku app.
But enough shop talk - tonight I will return to my beloved Kiboko. I will resume the ancient practice of drinking alcoholic beverages and the modern practice of pulling code from adam's github rapidsms fork. Then perhaps some RapidSMS coding, some coding on DohRaeTweet perhaps some coding on my IB options strategy, some reading, tai chi and my malaria pill.
I am convinced I have malaria, although I am taking prophylaxis (malarone). It is grossing me out as I envision little parasites in my blood - a worm in the blood - did Spinoza have malaria. A scottish nurse that I met over the weekend, told me about her parasite. It was diagonosed by the local healthcare center as a sunburn. Apparently she is going to megadose on malarone and some anti parasite drug when she returns to UK.
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