Blog
Predicting appendicitis using machine learning in Mathematica
I note more and more published papers on machine learning. As a clinician, I find it a fascinating way of looking at patient data. In case you are not familiar with machine learning, the definition given over at Wikipedia is: Machine learning is the...
Teaching statistics and data science in medical school
Understanding statistical analysis and interpreting the results of research papers are just as important as the ability to correctly diagnose the cause of acute abdominal pain. Medical knowledge is expanding at a rapid pace. This is evident by the number...
The creation of online teaching material as a crisis solution
In an effort to complete the 2016 academic year, the University of Cape Town leadership have called upon the body of lecturers to make use of online and blended teaching material. The University, as others in the country, are reopening their doors under...
Julia for scientific computing, my second Coursera MOOC
October 2016 has seen the launch of my second course on the Coursera massive open online course (MOOC) platform. Whereas my first course dealt with the statistics used in healthcare research, this one teaches the new Julia language for scientific...
Calculus in the plane
Just to show off what Jupyter notebooks can do, this post will render part 1 of lesson 1 of my lecture series on complex variables. Have a look.
My Coursera MOOC now live!
After many months of preparation, my massive open online course (MOOC) on healthcare statistics has gone live on Coursera today, December 01, 2015. To sign up follow this link: Coursera. This course build an intuitive understanding of statistics, without...
Our road to patient-centred, competency-based education
So, how can an academic surgical unit benefit from the computer code development skills of people such as Wes McKinney of pandas fame or the educational skills of an engineering professor such as Lorena Barba of Numerical MOOC (numerical massive open...
The Julia programming language
So, I've started a new playlist on my YouTube® channel called The Julia Computer Language. For now, lessons 1 and 2 are up and as (limited) time allows, I'll add some more. Julia is a rather new programming language for technical or scientific computing....
Review of research paper on medical education
A brief report was publish in the Canadian Medical Education Journal titled Re-thinking clinical research training in residency. The authors were struggling with the same questions we have in our department. Perhaps the two most important points relate to...
Irritating problems in medical education
This is a bird's eye view of the most irritating problems in my opinion. There are certainly much bigger and important issues, but these just get me down! They are nothing new, but the more they are mentioned, the better. My biggest peeve? The use of...
Most Popular Posts
R tutorial: Testing assumptions for parametric tests
In this post, written as an R-markdown file and posted on RPubs, I discuss the assumptions for the use of parametric tests in R. Parametric tests such as the various t tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and correlations are only valid if certain...
Rpubs markdown files and YouTube videos on R
R is a programming language designed by statisticians for statistical analysis. It is a free programming language and is available for download (Windows, Mac, and Linux). Bar a few eccentricities, it is quite easy to learn R. We make extensive use of it in the Klopper...
Understanding binomial logistic regression using R
Logistic regression is a statistical test that uses independent variables (categorical or numerical) to predict a categorical dependent variable. It is based on the principles of linear regression. As the outcome (dependent) variable is categorical, though, logistic...