Student SPHere 2008-09

I finished my final midterm this morning. Overall, I think it went well, although I'm uncertain about the script for converting dates into Stata-formats. At any rate, a lot of stress has been lifted off my shoulders, allowing me to blog.

Tuesday of last week Hillary Clinton came to town to speak at a rally for Al Franken. Although I wanted to hear her speak, I figured that there were going to be A LOT of people going. Waiting in lines and being part of a crowd rank low on how I like spending my time. Then Thuy pursuaded me to "stop by," which is how we ended up listening to the speakers out in the cold. The McNamara Alumni Center filled up quickly, but there were around two hundred other people outside.

While I ended up leaving before Clinton spoke, I was able to listen to a lot of passionate local politicians. They were able to rouse my political spirits with their great speaking abilities. Among some of them were state senator Amy Klobuchar and mayor RT Ryback. The photos below are courtesy of Michelle.

Group shot with the mayor!

Franni Franken and Amy Klobuchar.

This past weekend my parents drove from Illinois in order to have a belated birthday dinner. We went to Cafe Levain, a casual French restaurant in the Powderhorn area. Head chef Adam Vickerman is twenty-three or twenty-four, but has a solid command on cooking. Cafe Levain uses a lot of local produce and meats as well, making our dinner a little greener than usual. I recommend the local mushrooms. Dinner was followed by a much-needed walk around Lake Nokomis.

My apartment finally has a vacuum, which was rescued from the trash a few weeks ago. In preparation for my parents' visit, I tried using it. It wasn't picking up anything, even though the suction was working. When I turned it over, I saw that the brushes were clogged with hair, hair, and more hair. With fifteen minutes, a pair of scissors, and a fair amount of grit on my part, it was working like a dream again.

I am led to believe my predecessors owned a pet, maybe a wee yeti

Halloween is coming up this weekend, which is a great way to end the midterms season. I am extremely excited, as I have not one, but TWO costumes prepared. This is an improvement over my world record of zero costumes for the past five, six years. Enjoy the weekend!

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I am sure most of you on campus realize that the U smashed the word record for seasonal influenza shots in a single day, 11,538 (as of 5:30pm 10/28/08). I can think of few records more worthwhile to try to obtain. I was one of the 11,538 who go a shot or received flu mist. I don’t like influenza, nor does anyone I have met. I don’t want to get it this year, so I got a flu shot. I think its one of the best things I can do as a busy grad student to prevent influenza.

That being said, giving out 11,538 influenza shots in a single day is massive undertaking. I was fortunate enough to be able to be involved with this mass vaccination. I am a member of the U’s MRC (Medical Reserve Corp), which staffed one of the vaccination sites (the big tent in front of Northrop). This was a wonderful opportunity for the MRC to practice our training in a real life scenario, while helping the U break a world record and prevent illness. It was incredibly satisfying to see our training in action and observe how the incident command system works in live, dynamic event.

As a student, I spend a lot of time doing “book� learning. The MRC is a nice addition to the “book� learning I receive at the SPH. For one, I am part of a team of over 900 students, faculty and staff in the Academic Health Center. This allows me to meet new amazing people at the U at every MRC event. Secondly it allows me see public health in practice. Its one think to understand the theory behind a mass dispensing site for an antibiotic in response to a bioterrorist attack but you don’t really understand until you participate in drill for one of these, how theory meets practice. Lastly, it provides a place to become a better leader. During drills or events like the mass vaccination clinic, you are able observe some of best and brightest the U has making leadership decision and finding way to carry out their defined tasks in a dynamic situation.

The bottom line for me, though with the MRC is that it is designed to help people when they need it the most. That dovetails well with my vocation to public health.

If you at the U and not involved with the MRC, I would check it out. Don’t let the medical part scare you off; many of us in the MRC are not in the medical field. It takes people from a variety of backgrounds to make the MRC function. Here is a little more background on what MRC are all about.

Posted at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh ma gosh! Is it the weekend already? My days seem to be running together. I don’t remember when I sleep let alone when I make it to class. I have assignments due left and right that before I turn in one, I’m thinking bout the next thing I have to do.
I did find time to get some roast duck soup today though! There is a delightful little Vietnamese place called the Lotus on Washington Ave. Its great to be able to walk two feet and find something to eat. Sometimes at three in the morning! And remember that you WILL be craving pizza at the oddest hours!
Now that my belly is full, I am applying for jobs, writing a paper on community organizing(mind you, I have not the slightest clue what to say… paper blank apart for my bullet headings!), and working on responding to my class discussion for an online reproductive health class. In short, I am a jack of all trades and highly a master of none right now. Fighting to keep my eyes open, but not so much because I’m tired but because my eyes get fatigued quickly.
Speaking of my eyes, I had an eye appointment a few days ago. They did the most curious thing—they dilated my eyes! The doctor wanted to check for glaucoma and any other eye complications I could have. Sounds great enuf except that for three hours after that I my vision was blurry! I ordered chicken parmesan from the Noodle Company and they gave me grilled chicken. Ordinarily, I would have caught this error BEFORE I put it in my mouth, but NO. I bit into the chicken and thought, “hmmm, this doesn’t taste right�?. And then, after three chews, it suddenly occurred to me “Ah! Its grilled chicken!�?. Needless to say, its amazing how we take our senses for granted. I was VERY grateful when I could finally see my keypad enough to text my older sister. But, the reason I brought up the eye clinic is that it is a great resource for students that I had NO idea about. They offer free eye checkups ( provided you pay your student services fee… aha! I paying that for SOMETHING) and frames and lenses at subsidized prices. I know my vision was blurry but they did have some very stylish glasses for cheap. And catch this… they even have a clearance section. This really tickled me when I saw that. My point is, that advantage of the services Boynton has to offer. Did you know they offer free massages too???
Ok, so clearly I’m procrastinating again. I think I better get back to my three word documents. Wish me luck. And just in case you are wondering why I am getting all my work done at once... I am in San Diego for the APHA annual conference

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Last week was midterms and it was so miserable, I honestly don't want to write about it. I had two assignments and three exams and it was the opposite of a good time. BUT! At the end of that painful slog, I drove home to Kansas City, surprising my sister Lydia at her baby shower. I got everything I wanted in a visit to my family-- delicious food, seasonal crafts, engaging conversation, beautiful weather, and tons of love. My family is the best; it totally revived me to spend some time with them. A few pictures are below.

Me with my two amazing sisters.

Rachel and I working on jack-o-lanterns.

The finished product!

School hasn't taken much of a break in the aftermath of exams, though professors have been generous in moving due dates to give students some room to breathe. After feeling frustrated with my performance in Probability Models, I have resolved to stop working in isolation all the time. A couple of fellow students and I are going to start meeting to review materials and work on assignments together. Discussing problems with others can be such a boon to solving them.

The Linear Models exam was a take-home and actually kind of cool. It was equal parts calculus (finding MLEs, getting gradient vectors and Hessian matrices) and computing (writing the code to implement Newton-Raphson). In the lecture, we are seeing even more ways to get around that old problem of high-dimensional integration. For generalized linear mixed models, we're discussing how to use Monte Carlo simulation via Metropolis-Hastings, rejection sampling, independence sampling, or Gibbs. It's nice because Markov Chain Monte Carlo is being covered in both Linear Models and Probability Models at the same time. I like hearing about the same material from two very different perspectives simultaneously.

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Okay, so apparently the insanely frigid weather I predicted in my previous blog was significantly closer than predicted. I have to say, I have never experienced snow before Thanksgiving, and I have to add that I’m definitely not a fan. I think it is safe to assert that whatever pioneers decided to first settle in what is now Minnesota didn’t do so between the months of October and April.
Despite the unfortunate manifestation of winter’s beginning, I managed to have a fantastic weekend because my father and stepmother were visiting from Missouri. One of the highlights for my super do-it-yourselfer dad was when I took him to the huge Menard’s on University. There is no such thing as a Menard’s in Missouri (thank God, or my father would probably live there, gleefully wandering the aisles and subsisting off of wood chips and beef jerky). As a reward for spending my morning in a hardware store debating the relative merits of stainless steel vs. brushed nickel, I received a large gift of Bobbi Brown makeup and sweaters from J.Crew on a shopping trip later that day. All in all, it was a lovely weekend (despite the weather’s best efforts) of just lounging around and catching up with family (and ignoring the Steelers’ loss to New York).
Of course, I also worked on my Plan B project this weekend. I finally have all of my outcome variables cleaned up, and so I’m ready to start some factor analysis. I had a really productive meeting with my advisor on Monday, and things just generally seem to be falling into place quite well. Hopefully I’ll be able to slug through quite a bit of the preliminary class analysis and exploratory factor analyses this weekend (thanks to the updated version of M-Plus that I just installed on my computer).
On the RA front, this Saturday was the silent all-day retreat for the experimental mindfulness group in the insomnia pilot study. We had 75% of the participants show up, which is a very high rate of attendance for the retreat, so I feel pretty good about that. We are finishing up the papers for the transplant study, and working on developing some posters on the devices that we used to monitor treatment adherence.
Other than that, I’m just trying to get enough done this week so that I can enjoy Halloween. I am very excited about my costume: Sarah Palin. My husband will be going as a moose (well, technically we have reindeer antlers).

Posted at 8:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There was a definite snowflake sighting this morning, which makes me extremely glad that YESTERDAY was the Monster Dash 5K.

A group of us community health education ladies decided to run it and although it was a little (OK, a lot) chilly at the start, the costumes, trick-or-treating pit stops, decked out dogs and good cause totally made it worth it.

Team CHE at the start

Yes, we know we weren't exactly coordinated, and yes, we're already brainstorming nerdy public health costumes for next year (veggies, 2X2 table, etc.). Just wait.

Also, yes, I am a bottle of mustard (and got no fewer than 10 "Go, Mustard!" cheers during the run from perfect stragers. Was especially popular with kids.) My cheering section? A bottle of ketchup (The Boyfriend) and a hot dog (The Dog, duh)...of course.

Wouldn't you be motivated to finish a race if these guys were waiting for you at the finish line? Ha.

Posted at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The past two weekends, I groggily dragged myself out of bed when it was still dark to take a one-credit Saturday course in the SPH: Sexuality Education: Criteria, Curricula and Controversy.

Yes, it was weekend. And yes, I was there from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. And yes, don't remind me, it was beautiful outside both Saturdays. But if I had to sacrifice sleeping in on beautiful Saturdays for any class, I'm glad it was this one.

While I think the issue of sex ed in schools is super interesting, I would never have considered it an area of great focus for me. And I think one sign of a fantastic class is that it makes you think you just might be able to really get into a topic you never thought much about. This class definitely nailed that for me.

We spent the first Saturday exploring the background stuff, where teens are developmentally and sexually, what behaviors they take part in with and without certain types of sex ed and how common terms such as "abstinence" are used all over policy and practice without a clear definition. It was a great mix of lecture, discussion and activities--I especially enjoyed an activity where, in small groups, we acted as a local school board and had to decide at which grade levels to introduce certain sex ed topics into the curriculum. Fascinating, as it was hard to step out of the public health role (where we all wanted to teach everything in like, kindergarten) and into the real world, where parents are often hesitant to let their kids "grow up too fast."

The next weekend was centered around policy and curricula themselves. I always find policy interesting--especially policies and funding such as those surrounding sex ed, which more or less ignore all evidence that strongly points to comprehensive programs in favor of abstinence-only education. And as we paged through actual curricula, the differences were obvious. My group was assigned an extremely conservative, abstinence-only curriculum that made no allowances for kids who are already sexually active, who identify as GLBT or who, for whatever reason, will choose not to marry. It used negative words and scare tactics to freak kids out and make them feel as if sex is only acceptable and enjoyable in a heterosexual marriage--which will of course be happy and healthy if you follow all the rules. Wow.

The instructors, adjunct SPH faculty who work in the field, were great and really brought the material to life. They teach only this course, once in the fall and once in the spring, and it fills fast--so I highly recommend registering early if you want to take it. And I highly recommend taking it!

Even if you're like me, who had no particular interest in working with teens and sex, you'll walk out of there ready to sign up for a job at a school-based clinic, volunteer at Planned Parenthood on the weekends and go visit your legislators on your lunch break.

Posted at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The past week was admittedly stressful. I managed to get seventy percent of my tasks completed, but also encountered several major stumbling blocks. I've gotten over the most embarrassing of them so I'll share that with you.

For my Master's thesis seminar this past Wednesday, we had to present five minute speeches on our research projects. Public speaking is not my strong point, although I no longer fantasize about tripping and knocking myself out as I walk to the front of the classroom. As they say, baby steps. In my mind, five minutes of public speaking is not a lot of time so it didn't seem like a big deal. However, I did not give myself enough time to practice my presentation, which became evident as soon as I opened my mouth. I gave people the wrong impression about my project; for some reason they thought I was doing a program evaluation as opposed to a data analysis of the survey. That's hideously far off the mark. Ironically, I was feeling relatively calm right before this fiasco. Typically my nerves are in tangle, so I suppose that was one positive note about the whole affair. Note to self: practice in front of the bathroom mirror, even if it's just a short speech.

The progress on my thesis is going more slowly than desired, but there are more pressing issues that require immediate attention: midterms! I have my midterms this week, so I'm feeling rather tense. My STATA exam was pushed back one week, so that's one welcome relief. Even though it's only Tuesday, the upcoming weekend is already showing up in my dreams.

This past Saturday I celebrated my birthday with a road trip to Duluth. Duluth is located on Lake Superior, which is probably my favorite lake. A friend had taken me up to Bayfield, Wisconsin a few years back, introducing me to its awesomeness. Lake Michigan can't compare. I had also read somewhere last year that the autumn is beautiful in Duluth and driving up there has always been on my mind. The previous weekend was rainy and postponed my plans until now. The internet was showing good weather on the 18th all last week, so my boyfriend Severin and I took it as a sign to get out of Minneapolis. Aside from planning to bring snacks, we didn't organize this too much. My main goal was to see the fall foliage; it's not hard to entertain me.

Driving there is easy; you can take I-35W all the way north until you hit Duluth. If you want to go further north and drive along the lakeshore, you take get onto Minnesota State Highway 61. There are plenty of natural diversions along the way. We ourselves were headed to Gooseberry Falls, which we randomly chose on the map after wandering briefly through the touristy district in Duluth.

On the coast of Lake Superior

Severin walking on the rocks

Gooseberry Falls was an excellent choice. There were plenty of waterfalls and hiking trails. The area provided an excellent view of the season.

A view at Gooseberry Falls

We finished the day with a delicious dinner at Nokomis. Overall, it was a great birthday!

We returned Saturday night because Sunday was the day of our playoffs. The Confounders were at the very bottom of the bracket but we played an amazing first game and won! Unfortunately our next game was scheduled right afterwards. In addition to our fatigue, we had a few people not show up. We lost that game, but I felt relatively happy. We're coming together as a team and playing more as a team, rather than some random SPH students playing together. I hope we can organize regular practices through the winter and perform even better next spring!

Peter shutting it down

Lizz making a great catch!

Final group shot of the season

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Things are certainly busy this time of year. As my fellow bloggers have pointed out midterms are in full swing. I have three tests down and one more to go. My group for Risk Analysis also started our group project last week that is a big chunk of our grade. I am actually looking forward to this group project, which is kind weird. Normally they are stressful, as you try to make sure everyone pulls their own weight. This one is different, as our professor required us to outline the project in detail (with due dates and names of who is completing what), so my stress level for it is much lower. I am kind of excited though, as we are using a new tool for completing this project, Google Docs. Well its not exactly a new tool, I have used it for personal projects before, but never a group project. Its going to be nice to not have a word document emailed back and forth and to be able to see the project progress in “real time�.

Sometime in the midst of crazy busy school life its nice to drop everything and get out of town. I almost did this over the weekend. We took off a little early on Friday to head back to my wife’s hometown in Iowa in time to catch the last home football game. Can you guess what we were sitting in the bleachers to watch? Well if you guess the band you would be right. It was brothers last home marching band performance (he is a senior). I love watching marching bands. My family and I used to go to marching band competitions as spectators and I marched in the band in high school (I played the baritone). We also got to watch the UNI vs NDSU football game on Saturday night. I do enjoy watching football and cant wait to watch the Gophers next year in the TCF Stadium. There is just something magical about being outdoors in the fall watching your team.

Fun fact of the week: We recently completed a week-long exposure assessment in our risk analysis class where we kept track of our time in 7 different microenvironments. I managed to spend 52% of October 7th in Moos/Mayo working and going to class.

Posted at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fall in Minnesota is like getting a really nice piece of jewelry from your boyfriend right before he dumps you. It is stunningly beautiful, and then, out of nowhere, you are left “out in the cold.� Only at least you get a nice gift out of the ex-boyfriend situation; Minnesota just gives you frostbite. That’s one of the reasons it is so hard for me to enjoy the Minnesotan fall; it’s like a really funny preview right before a movie that you know is going to be total crap. But, I tried to make the best of it this week. I tried to take in all of the fall colors without thinking about the fact that the reason those leaves are turning those pretty colors is because they are dying. I tried to enjoy watching the squirrels scurry around campus, their cute chubby cheeks loaded with food without thinking about the fact that all of that labor is necessary because in a couple of weeks, no squirrel in his right mind is going to be outside looking for food. That’s right; even the squirrels are smart enough to avoid Minnesota winters, while we insist on trudging around outside like packs of human popsicles with the snot frozen inside our heads. But let’s be optimistic. Maybe this winter won’t be so bad. And maybe the Detroit Lions will win the Super Bowl and OJ Simpson will admit he killed Nicole and Jack Black will make a movie that’s actually funny.
Aside from the fall foliage signaling the impending months of agonizing cold, this week was pretty much business as usual. I took an exam in my stat theory class, and finished the take-home portion on Friday. We’ve started discussing bivariate transformations. In survival analysis, we’ve been learning about testing for differences in survival rates between groups (for example, between men and women). We’ve got a midterm on Tuesday, but I’m feeling pretty confident about it, AND I already have the homework finished for that class that is also due this week. Finally, in my latent variables class, we’re looking at latent class analysis which is done to determine whether the patterns of responses to an instrument can be attributed to the fact that the respondents are from a series of latent “classes� or groups. For example, for our homework this week we examined a questionnaire administered to women living in Bangladesh that pertained to their ability to go certain places in their village or outside of their village such as a hospital or a club. Using this method of latent class analysis, there appeared to be a group of conservative women who were not permitted to really go anywhere, a more moderate group, and a more “free� group that reported that they were able to go anywhere they pleased. I’m particularly exited about learning this analysis method because I think that I can use it in my plan B project.
Speaking of Plan B, I have made quite a bit of progress with that in the past couple of weeks. I have a data set that consists of the responses to the SSAGA (Semi-Structured Assessment for the Genetics of Alcoholism) from a large sample of African Americans. The data set is actually from a research project I worked on as an undergraduate, and the PI from that project is letting me use the data set for my plan B. A huge portion of this semi-structured interview is a family history interview that contains several questions that I feel could be measuring various latent variables (such as maternal attachment or paternal strictness). I will be hopefully creating a latent variables model of family structures that will be used to predict various alcohol use outcomes (also to be derived from the SSAGA). I’m excited about the latent class analysis, because there are a series of questions in the SSAGA that address personality traits of both the study participant’s mother and father figures, and I hope to parse out some distinct “parental personalities�—or classes—from these items.
I’ve also been working with the Department of Psychiatry as an RA on a project that is looking for genetic associations among various genes and ADHD and illicit drug and alcohol dependence. I’ve been researching which genes, and which SNPs in particular—would be most prudent for us to examine. I’m really excited about the amount of recent research that has been done with genetics and our phenotypes of interest, and it looks like I have a pretty good list of candidate SNPs to be examined.
Finally, no Sunday night blog would be complete without an update on my beloved Steelers. In short, they continue to rock. This week, they defeated the Cincinnati Bengals in a crushing and decisive victory without the aid of either their starting running back or his backup who were both out due to injury. We will ignore the fact that the Bengals are 0 and 7, and merely savor the victory and try to forget that next week my poor Steelers must face last year’s Super Bowl champs, much like I am savoring the crisp fall weather and attempting to forget that winter is just around the corner.

Posted at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I feel like I spent most of this week (stressing out about) preparing for my first epi exam, (stressing while) taking it and (stressing even more) thinking about how I did--and trying not to get to the point of breathing into a paper bag.

Well, the hyperventilation is over: 98%! Aaaand now I feel like a total idiot for being so spastic about it. But you know the feeling of taking the first test in a hard class when you don't know how the professor grades. So yes, it was dumb in retrospect, but it all turned out OK.

Between periods of freaking out, I managed to cram about a month's worth of stuff into the week. On top of everything else going on, I'm taking a one-credit class last Saturday and this Saturday (8:30am-4pm -- woo!), and I've had an out-of-town friend staying with me for a few days--a friend who recently got engaged and is in the midst of wedding planning, so I managed to put off a LOT of homework helping her flag the pages of bridal magazines and going dress shopping.

I'm also trying to arrange a personal training internship at a holistic training studio and went in for an "interview," went to the SPH Mentor Program kick-off this morning and am trying to motivate myself to write (um, start) a paper that's due tomorrow morning.

I will be so happy on Sunday at noon when I'm still asleep.

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I have to admit, finding the balance is hard. When you have a job, school, homework and everything else in between that is commonly referred to as a social life…its hard! And the thing is, I can’t really complain because I don’t even have any kids! So a standing ovation for all public health students, NO students in general who have children and jobs and go to school full time- you are AMAZING! And ESPECIALLY if you are a woman at the same time, an ESPECIALLY long ovation for you.

Ok, so now that that has been accomplished, you should know that I have been swamped! The last two weeks have been filled with quizzes, 3 papers and a midterm. And not to mention my first day at the PNC (awesomeness by the way!), a career fair and a Christian convention (I sing). So yea as you can imagine my days have been filled with reading for assignments, writing, re writing, occasionally getting crazy on my roommates, looking a mess and I daresay forgetting to breathe! Of course, the rest of my life continued as usual, and I still showed up for work, although this past Monday I had to beg on my bosses compassion to let me stay home and finish up a quiz for my reproductive health class. Sometimes, the balancing act I call my life sways dangerously but I am proud to say I am a pretty good acrobat.

So two things stood out to me in all the madness and they both happened this week—being a clerk at the PNC and a midterm I took last night.
Monday was my first day as a volunteer as at the Phillips Neighborhood Clinic. This night I was training in as a clerk which is going to be one of my duties as a volunteer. What a clerk does basically is to organize teams to see each patient and manage the flow of teams between consulting rooms. Now considering that there are only three consulting rooms, a spare room—the “red room�? (where patient vitals can be taken) and another room for physical therapy, you can imagine that there was a significant amount of juggling going on. Also, there are only so many clinicians, pharm care volunteers and preceptors so the pressure was on. For my first day, I give myself a pat on the back for not folding under the pressure but I must admit there were times when I felt as if I was in the middle of a jungle and it was my job to keep order! But I got through the night, reported at 430PM and did not leave till 1045PM. Needless to say, I was snoring as soon as my feet touched my bed.

Now yesterday was the worst night of my life! For those of you who have taken Working in Global Health, you may know what I mean. I have only once back in college, had multiple, multiple choice exams in which you have a list of options and any number of them could be correct! The nerve wracking this about it was that we not only needed to know everything there was to know from the beginning of the term till now, but then being used to only one correct answer in multiple choice, you had to think twice even though you may already have one correct answer. It was a hectic 25 questions and in 30 minutes I had bitten my finger nails off and I stopped biting my nails years ago! Oh well, now we wait. I(and you) will know how I did in 2 weeks.

Assuming that someone is reading this, any suggestions on classes to take in global health? I have a 3 credit elective to take and I am shopping around for potential spring courses that have a global health focus. I would love to hear from you!!! d.

Posted at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Entering the seventh week - about halfway into the semester - I am finally beginning to feel the demands of graduate school. So far, I've managed to keep on top of my studies and work, but I always feel that there is so much more I can do. The progress I'm making on my master's project is coming along more slowly than I like. Still working on formulating that question!

Student Senate is starting to get busy too; our new committee co-chairs are finally beginning to plan events for the school year. I'm excited for the quality and quantity of student-run programming that will enrich other students' experience at the School of Public Health.

Feeling overwhelmed is a common happenstance. I admit that time management is not my strong suite. However, getting things done get much more easily when I take the time to break down what I need to do into smaller tasks. Writing them down is important too. Aside from reminding me what needs to be done, it pumps me up and makes my projects seem less daunting. There's quite a feeling of satisfaction in being able to cross off a completed task on the list.

Went with fellow SPH-er Casey to take photos of the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center(HERC) for a class project. It's located near the Farmer's Market underneath I-94. What they do is burn garbage to produce energy that is then sold to XCel. I had never been, much less heard of it, so this was new for me.

Casey being delinquent

Shortly after this photo was taken, we were approached by an employee and asked to leave. Apparently HERC is not open to the public, although we did not see any signs noting this. We gladly complied anyway, as he was operating a huge bulldozer.

This past weekend was full of excitement. On Saturday, I got to experience homebrewing beer! It's a popular enough activity that one can buy a kit. Kits are wonderful learning tools great because everything you need is included, so all you need to do is invest some money and invest some effort into following the directions. The photos below illustrate a couple steps of the process. It was surprisingly less difficult that I had conceived, yet at the same time, one has to be conscious of making sure everything that the wort - the solution of grains and hops and yeast before it ferments and becomes beer - stays sterile and doesn't become affected by anything that would spoil it.

Hops, grains, and some dry yeast

Letting the grains steep

Letting the wort ferment five to seven days. Stay tuned!

Regarding the Confounders: GREAT NEWS. We won our fourth and final game, which allows us to play next Sunday in the playoffs. That consists of three games over the course of five hours, so I am looking forward to the friendly competition and exercise.

We were running short this past Sunday - many people have midterms coming up and had to cancel at the last moment - so I was not able to take any photos. However, I finally processed the photos from our second to last game:

Good defense

Noel making a nice pass

Wish me luck this week in getting things done!

Posted at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My mother and step-father flew in from Pennsylvania for the weekend, and I was able to spend a good deal of time catching up with them and showing them a little bit of the flavor of the Twin Cities (cheese curd). We enjoyed a good deal of the fall foliage and the very un-Minnesotan nice weather that graced most of the weekend. Saturday, we had a mock-Thanksgiving since we won’t be together for the actual holiday. They are both professors at Allegheny College in Meadville, and get a tiny Thanksgiving holiday (as does the University of Minnesota as far as I’m concerned), so unfortunately my husband and I will be dining a deux come Thanksgiving. For the meal, I prepared fresh pumpkin soup with cinnamon crèma, a red cabbage and jicama slaw with lime dressing, sweet potato tamales with orange pecan butter, chayote succotash, and a spiced-rubbed pork tenderloin and sun-dried cranberry roulade. For dessert, we had mini pumpkin and pecan pies. It was nice to be able to sit and relax with family and catch up. My mom has always been a big inspiration to me when it comes to the pursuit of career and education, and I have always looked at her position in academia as somewhat of a goal for myself someday. I love that she is able to continue to learn and constantly apply what she learns by conducting research, but also as a professor, pass on her knowledge to those who will be continuing that research in the future. It also helps that she’s a total math geek like me.
For Sunday we attended the Lions/ Vikings game, which could quite possibly have been the most stressful game I have ever witnessed. It does not seem possible that either team could have tried harder to lose. The only bright spot (besides the fantastic Bernard Berrien touchdown) was the fact that my personal favorite Viking—Kevin Williams—had four sacks. Sitting in the Metrodome, though, I did realize that the Minnesota winters have clearly scrambled the brains of whoever decided to make TCF stadium and the new Twins stadium outdoors. I don’t care if you think the sport was “meant to be played� outside—if I wanted to freeze my butt off for hours and hours while being surrounded by obnoxious, smelly men guzzling overpriced beer, I’d take up ice fishing. I also don’t think that we should have outdoor stadium for the sake of “tradition.� You know, the Aztecs had a tradition that was thousands of years old—ritual human sacrifice—and despite the fact that it was a tradition, it was still a bad idea.
Today I had to take my first stat theory exam. It was stressful, but having had a wonderful weekend with my parents and husband helped me to stay relaxed and focused. I, of course, wore my lucky math shirt. A good friend from high school made me a t-shirt for my 18th birthday that says “I’m statistically significant.� I have worn this shirt to every important exam I have taken since that date, and it has hence become my lucky math shirt. And no, I don’t wash it, and yes, that is disgusting.
I finished entering all of the data for the first wave of our insomnia study. We’ve also collected all of the baseline data for our second wave, so that got entered as well. I got to do a test run on some of the reports I created in Access, and they are all running smoothly, which makes me very happy. Since this is a pilot study, a big concern of the PI is why people got excluded at different stages of the study so that areas of concern such as overly rigorous exclusion criteria can be addressed before a larger study would be conducted, so we’ve been analyzing that information in order to prepare another grant proposal. The main outcomes paper for the transplant study is coming along. Dr. Thomas in the Biostats department has been super helpful with those analyses; he also showed me how to make interaction plots in R.
I’ve really come to like R, and I think that I should definitely take the time to learn it. I have done the online tutorial, but I still really know nothing about it. That is one thing that I wish the University would offer; courses on how to use the different statistical packages. I have taken an e-learning course on SAS, and that has been really helpful, and I have found some online tutorial for SSPS and SAS and M-plus on the UCLA website, and I just wish something like that existed here for us to use. Even a little summer class or something. I’d take it anyways.

Posted at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Its sure been an interesting week with the economy. I have been following the economy pretty closely, as I am sure many of you have. I have a few reason for following it so closely. One of the main reason I am following it closely, is that I want to better understand why predicted crises are not adverted more often. We have had a lot of warning signs and direct warnings about the current financial crisis. I am not an economist, nor am I an expert in anything financial, so I sought out some experts to explain things to me. I typically turn to the CRS (Congressional Research Service) to understand the big picture behind things. I had no idea this existed before researching stuff for work and school project, when I thankfully stumbled across OPEN CRS. CRS report, while written by staff at the Library of Congress are for Congress, thus not released to the public unless someone in Congress makes them public. OPEN CRS is the best place to find reports that have been made public. As one might imagine they have been churning out report on financial issues, relatively frequently lately. I found this explanation of the crisis and these three profiles (Chile, Sweden, Japan) of recent national financial crises helpful. If you want to dig a little deeper I would recommend these reports: sub-prime mortgages interventions, on the liquidity crisis of 2007, FAQ of the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae crisis, the history of governmental financial interventions and an overview of the Community Reinvestment Act. One thing that became very clear to me is that financial crisis happen, markets recovery and in a few years this will just be a memory. That does not mean its not going to be painful these next few years as our economy crawls back to speed.

I am disappointed that we are having this crisis, which lead me to think about Governmentium. Its a new element recently discovered: Govermentium (Gv) has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2-6 years; It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass. When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

One thing I think many folks in public health share is a vision for the future. I think we tend to think a little more forward than most as we try to do our best to ensure the health of the public is protected. I love doing this, as it requires a multidisciplinary approach. What value is there in developing a preparedness plan for a environmental exposure, if the plan does not take into the realities of the politics, economics, social, biological, engineering, etc aspects of the exposure. This is typically refereed to as risk management. As our world continues to become more interconnected via global trade and travel the threat of emerging infectious diseases increases. Since emerging infectious disease are a huge interest for me, I try to keep a grasp on what is going on in the world. Given that the US dominates a lot of the world issues, I thought you all might enjoy learning a little more about the global issue the next president is going to have to deal with.

We just finished the CVD (Cardiovascular Disease) unit in my pathophysiology of human disease class. It was very interesting to learn more about the mechanism behind the disease and the epidemiology. We are going to be seeing more and more CVD, as the baby boomer's age and the obesity epidemic grows. This likely means that many of us will or have already encountered CVD in our personal lives. Do you know how to respond if someone is having a heart attack or just collapses? I just completed a BLS (basic life support) as part of my training for the MRC (Medical Reserve Corp) and would encourage you all to do so. There is training right here on campus frequently. Something else to remember, is that AED (automated external defibrillator) that are around campus are there for a reason. Never be afraid to use one, you cant hurt a patient with it and it walk you through the steps on how to use it. I hope I never have to use the training I got yesterday but am glad I got it. I just hope if something happens to those I love, some near by is trained to respond.

Posted at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)