I’ll continue my “instairs vs outstairs office” narrative from my previous post to this blog, noting the cleverness: Upstairs Downstairs was some successful Britboxy soap, and Instairs Outstairs is how Bucky enjoined us to escape the Anglosphere.
So further in towards the planet’s center, in the basement, said pipe from our last episode just sits there, as pipes do, still dribbling with toxins and ruptured from the inside. An aneurysm. I keep going back to heart metaphors I realize. This isn’t just cuz I’m an aging Boomer, or Joneser they’re calling us now, but because I spent much of my computer programming career hanging around cardiologists and cardiac surgeons professionally, not just as an old guy patient.
I’m referring to my Visual FoxPro days, having jumped on the dBase bandwagon way back in dBase II days (the first one: Ashton-Tate was good at marketing). The Starr-Wood-Chapman practice, with offices at St. Vincent, was on board with Outcomes Research as how else were we supposed to know what works in the long term. Which procedures, which valves, which factors in general, correlate with what else? The bread and butter of statistical analysis.
My bread and butter was to harvest field data in amounts never before seen and funnel it to the back office, appropriately anonymized to conform with HIPPA. We took that seriously. It’s aggregate numbers we needed, not anecdotes about Mr. and Mrs. Smith although we did need to keep a pseudo-identity in the picture, to tie records together. Medical records lose significance when you mix people’s records across procedures and visits. Adding to the challenge is hospitals used different MRNs for the same people.
Anyway, we’re gonna let the pros deal with that pipe. “Repair or replace?” as we’d say in the heart biz, maybe talking about a prosthetic valve. This pipe instairs (in the basement) is no longer worth repairing, nor even able to be repaired (it’s not a question of cost or “worth”, it’s a matter of brute physics).
Outstairs, on the 2nd floor, I’ve been using Spyder (a Python IDE included in the Anaconda distro) to better summarize the volume ratios we’re encountering and computing using sympy and Synergetics (our reference text). I’ve added a new slide to the BEAST / BASKET desk for my army of OCN presenters.
This is not a new business for the Oregon Curriculum Network. 4D Solutions, a for profit DBA of Dawn Wicca and Associates, has since its inception (and naming) long term invested in branded curriculum development. Now that I’m not teaching data cleaning nor harvesting heart-related big data from the field, I have more time to devote to my “asynchronous andragogy” as I call it, which has synchronous aspects, nor have I forsaken pedagogy entirely. I’m just not at the level I was when working with Saturday Academy, or Coding with Kids, or teaching 8th graders at Sunshine Elite Education.
