Tracy Allison Altman

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Dentists will slow down on antibiotics if you show them a chart of their prescribing numbers.  Antimicrobial resistance is a serious public health concern. PLOS Medicine has published findings from an RCT studying whether quantitative feedback and intervention about prescribing patterns will reduce dentists’ antibiotic RXs. An intervention group prescribed substantially fewer antibiotics per 100...
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1. Panning for gold in the evidence stream. Patrick Lester introduces his new SSIR article by saying “With evidence-based policy, we need to acknowledge that some evidence is more valid than others. Pretending all evidence is equal will only preserve the status quo.” In Defining Evidence Down, the director of the Social Innovation Research Center...
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PepperSlice data-driven presentation
1. SPOTLIGHT: Warby Parker data scientist on creating data-driven organizations. What does it take to become a data-driven organization? “Far more than having big data or a crack team of unicorn data scientists, it requires establishing an effective, deeply ingrained data culture,” says Carl Anderson. In his recent O’Reilly book Creating a Data-Driven Organization, he...
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earthquake map manmade
Photo by Fightfor15.org 1. SPOTLIGHT: Will $15 wages destroy California jobs? California is moving toward a $15/hour minimum wage (slowly, stepping up through 2023). Will employers be forced to eliminate jobs under the added financial pressure? As with all things economic, it depends who you ask. Lots of numbers have been thrown around during the...
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Digital Health Network
1. #rapidisthenewblack The need for speed is paramount, so it’s crucial that we test ideas and synthesize evidence quickly without losing necessary rigor. Examples of people working hard to get it right: The Digital Health Breakthrough Network is a very cool idea, supported by an A-list team. They (@AskDHBN) seek New York City-based startups who...
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1. Management research: Alchemy → Chemistry? McKinsey’s Michael Birshan and Thomas Meakin set out to “take a data-driven look” at the strategic moves of newly appointed CEOs, and how those moves influenced company returns. The accompanying podcast (with transcript), CEO transitions: The science of success, says “A lot of the existing literature is quite qualitative,...
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1. Behavioral economics → Healthcare innovation. Jaan Sidorov (@DisMgtCareBlog) writes on the @Health_Affairs blog about roadblocks to healthcare innovation. Behavioral economics can help us truly understand resistance to change, including unconscious bias, so valuable improvements will gain more traction. Sidoro offers concise explanations of hyperbolic discounting, experience weighting, social utility, predictive value, and other relevant...
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1. Systematic review: Does business coaching make a difference? In PLOSOne, Grover and Furnham present findings of their systematic review of coaching impacts within organizations. They found glimmers of hope for positive results from coaching, but also spotted numerous holes in research designs and data quality. Over the years, outcome measures have included job satisfaction,...
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1. What new analytics are fueling baseball decisions? [I spoke at Nerd Nite SF about recent developments in baseball analytics. -Tracy Allison Altman, Ed.] Highlights from my talk: – Data science and baseball analytics are following similar trajectories. There’s more and more data, but people struggle to find predictive value. Oftentimes, executives are less familiar...
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monitor showing code
1. Confusing correlation with causation is not the Cardinal Sin of data science, say Gregory Piatetsky (@kdnuggets) and Anmol Rajpurohit (@hey_anmol): It’s overfitting. Oftentimes, researchers “test numerous hypotheses without proper statistical control, until they happen to find something interesting and report it. Not surprisingly, next time the effect, which was (at least partly) due to...
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Museum musings.

Pondering the places where people interact with artificial intelligence: Collaboration on evidence-based decision-making, automation of data-driven processes, machine learning, things like that.

Recent Articles

muscle car by bing/create
20 June 2023
Stolen cars and AI ‘moral self-correction’
person in silhouette with orange background, pondering AI input for an evidence based decision
9 May 2023
Can you trust AI with your next decision? Part 3 in a series on fact-checking/citation
image generated by bing image creator bottle on apothecary shelf
25 April 2023
How is generative AI referencing sources? Part 2 in our series
22 April 2023
Sneaky STEM: Inspire learning with immersive experiences
15 March 2023
Can AI replace your CEO?