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(originally posted in February, 2019. Reposted November, 2020) It is not hard to find examples of pundits who have publicly declared that the forty-some year-old War on Cancer has been lost. “Losing the War on Cancer” was the subtitle of a well-received book (1). Scientific American called it a “bust” (2). It’s not just bloggers and reporters:Continue reading “Winning the war on cancer, imperceptibly”

Over my career, the most common type of map I’ve had to make is a simple choropleth map of the United States. There are a number of packages that can do this in R, but I haven’t found any of them quite satisfactory. That’s mainly because the map I want to make is a cartoonContinue reading “Cartoonish maps using R”

The National Cancer Institute’s SEER program has also computed the Yost index at the census tract level (link), and researchers there asked if I could check to see how well my values agreed with theirs. The good news is that they are virtually identical. There were a few minor things we did differently: My valuesContinue reading “Yost index validated”

Here is a shortened version of a lecture I gave in my introductory statistics class the other day, which I thought could be of interest to a wider audience. My first job after college was working for a company that cleaned up hazardous waste sites. One day I was asked to calculate how many soilContinue reading “A tale of power and sample size calculation”

I have now produced eight years of Yost indexes at the census tract level to complement the indexes at the block group level published on September 30, 2020. Refer to my post of that date for an explanation of the variables that comprise the index and various technical notes. As a reminder, census tracts averageContinue reading “Eight years of Yost indexes now available at the census tract level”