DOCSLIB.ORG

Spatial Analysis, GIS, and Remote Sensing Applications in the Health Sciences

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Spatial Analysis, GIS, and Remote Sensing Applications in the Health Sciences Spatial Analysis, GIS, and Remote Sensing Applications in the Health Sciences Editors Donald P.Albert Wilbert M.Gesler Barbara Levergood Ann Arbor Press Chelsea, Michigan This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spatial analysis, GIS and remote sensing: applications in the health sciences/ edited by Donald P.Albert, Wilbert M.Gesler, Barbara Levergood. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57504-101-4 (Print Edition) 1. Medical geography. 2. Medical geography–Research–Methodology. I. Albert, Donald Patrick. II. Gesler, Wilbert M., 1941— . III. Levergood, Barbara. RA792 .S677 2000 614.4′2—dc21 99—089917 ISBN 0-203-30524-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-34374-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 1-57504-101-4 (Print Edition) © 2000 by Sleeping Bear Press Ann Arbor Press is an imprint of Sleeping Bear Press This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources. Reprinted material is quoted with permission, and sources are indicated. A wide vari ety of references are listed. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and the publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or for the consequences of their use. Neither this book nor any part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilming, and record ing, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The consent of Sleeping Bear Press does not extend to copying for general distribution, for promotion, for creating new works, or for resale. Specific permission must be ob tained in writing from Sleeping Bear Press for such copying. Direct all inquiries to Sleeping Bear Press, 310 North Main Street, P.O. Box 20, Chelsea, MI 48118. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade marks, and are used only for identification and explanation, without intent to in fringe. To Julie, Elizabeth, and Kenny Acknowledgments The editors would like to express their appreciation to Lesa Strikland with Medical Media, VA Medical Center (Durham, North Carolina), Department of Veterans Affairs for her assistance in scanning figures and maps. About the Authors Donald P.Albert, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Geology at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. His interests include applications of geographic information systems within the context of medical geography, health services research, and law enforcement. Kelly A.Crews-Meyer, Ph.D., is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current work in population-environment interactions draws upon previous research experience in state government, consulting, and university settings in landuse/landcover change, geographic accessibility, and decision-making as applied to environmental policy and valuation. Her educational background includes a B.S. in Marine Science and a M.A. in Government and International Studies, both from the University of South Carolina, as well as a Masters Certificate in Public Policy Analysis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Charles M.Croner, Ph.D., is a geographer and survey statistician with the Office of Research and Methodology, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC). His research interests are in the use of GIS for disease prevention and health promotion planning, small area analysis, and human visualization and cognition. He is Editor of the widely circulated bimonthly report “Public Health GIS News and Information” (free by request at [email protected]). Rita Fellers, Ph.D. Student, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rita Fellers is a medical geographer with a particular interest in potentially environmentally related diseases such as cancer, and in statistical techniques that improve the quality of information that ecologic studies can produce. Wilbert Gesler, Ph.D., Dr. Wilbert Gesler is a Full Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His major research interests are in the Geography of Health, including studies of accessibility to health care in rural areas, socio-spatial knowledge networks involved in prevention of chronic diseases, and places which have achieved a reputation for healing. vi Ron D.Horner, Ph.D., Director, Epidemiologic Research and Information Center at Durham, North Carolina. His research interests are in racial/ethnic and rural/ urban variations in the patterns of care for cerebrovascular disease. Barbara Levergood, Ph.D., Electronic Document Librarian, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her interests include providing public access to Federal information products in electronic media, statistical data, and geographic information systems. Joseph Messina, Ph.D. Student, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served in the U.S. Army using battlefield GIS to support indirect fire control missions. He worked as a GIS Applications Specialist for the SPOT Image Corporation. While with SPOT, he assisted in the development of the GeoTIFF format, developed new products and remote sensing algorithms, and served as contributing technical editor for SPOTLight magazine. He holds degrees in Biology and Geography from George Mason University. Peggy Wittie, a medical geographer and GIS specialist, is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and GIS Coordinator for North Carolina Superfund. Her research integrates GIS techniques to study health care access, environmental health and environmental justice issues. Preface This book is an expression of the myriad ways in which the range of geospatial methods and technologies can be applied to the analysis of issues related to human and environmental health. Since the study and management of the many diverse issues related to human health is one of the most important aspects of human endeavor it is not surprising that it has been a fruitful area for application of geo- spatial analysis tools. Contributions to this book run the gamut of these diverse applications areas from more classical medical geography to the study of infectious disease to environmental health. The tools used in these studies are also diverse– ranging from GIS as a core and unifying technology to geo-spatial statistics and the computer processing of remotely-sensed imagery. This book should prove useful for practitioners and researchers in the health care and allied fields as well as geographers, epidemiologists, demographers, and other academic researchers. Today one sees a continual increase in the power and ease of use of GIS, better integration and easier availability of related technologies, such as remote sensing and global positioning systems and rapidly falling costs of platforms, peripherals, and programs. Thus, one now sees an increasingly large cadre of users of geo-spatial technology in all fields, including health related ones. The methods and examples provided in this work are a starting point for this growing group of users who will find the power of spatial analysis tools and the increasing availability of data sources to enable them to obtain answers and to arrive at solutions to a host of critical health care related issues. The tools and knowledge are readily available and the skills can be developed by any dedicated user; therefore, what direction users of GIS in health related fields choose to take this and related technologies is now primarily limited by their imaginations. Dr. Mark R.Leipnik, Ph.D. Director GIS Laboratory, Texas Research Institute for Environmental Studies, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Geology, Sam Houston State University Huntsville, Texas Contents 1. Introduction 1 D.P.Albert, W.M.Gesler, B.Levergood, R.A.Fellers, and J.P.Messina 2. How Spatial Analysis Can be Used in Medical Geography 10 W.M.Gesler and D.P.Albert 3. Geographic Information Systems: Medical Geography 38 D.P.Albert, W.M.Gesler, and P.S.Wittie 4. Geographic Information Systems in Health Services Research 55 D.P.Albert, W.M.Gesler, and R.D.Horner 5. GIS-Aided Environmental Research: Prospects and Pitfalls 77 R.A.Fellers 6. Infectious Disease and GIS 111 D.P.Albert 7. A Historical Perspective on the Development of Remotely Sensed Data as 128 Applied to Medical Geography J.P.Messina and K.A.Crews-Meyer 8. The Integration of Remote Sensing and Medical Geography: Process and 147 Application J.P.Messina and K.A.Crews-Meyer 9. Conclusions 177 D.P.Albert, W.M.Gesler, and B.Levergood Master GIS/RS Bibliographic Resource Guide 178 D.P.Albert, B.Levergood, and C.M.Croner Glossary 200 Subject Index 207 Geographical Index 218 Spatial Analysis, GIS, and Remote Sensing Applications in the Health Sciences Chapter One Introduction Medical geography is a very active subdiscipline of geography which has traditionally focused on the spatial aspects of disease ecology and health care delivery. Until fairly recently, as was the case with most other geographic fields of study, medical geographers collected and analyzed their data using methods such as making on-the- ground observations (e.g., of malarial mosquito habitats) and drawing maps (e.g., of hospital catchment areas) by hand. With the advent of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) technologies, computers which could handle large amounts of data, and sophisticated spatial analytic software programs, medical geography has been transformed. It is now possible, for example, to make many measurements from far above the earth’s surface and produce dozens of maps of disease and health phenomena in a relatively short time.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Statistics Making an Impact
    John Pullinger J. R. Statist. Soc. A (2013) 176, Part 4, pp. 819–839 Statistics making an impact John Pullinger House of Commons Library, London, UK [The address of the President, delivered to The Royal Statistical Society on Wednesday, June 26th, 2013] Summary. Statistics provides a special kind of understanding that enables well-informed deci- sions. As citizens and consumers we are faced with an array of choices. Statistics can help us to choose well. Our statistical brains need to be nurtured: we can all learn and practise some simple rules of statistical thinking. To understand how statistics can play a bigger part in our lives today we can draw inspiration from the founders of the Royal Statistical Society. Although in today’s world the information landscape is confused, there is an opportunity for statistics that is there to be seized.This calls for us to celebrate the discipline of statistics, to show confidence in our profession, to use statistics in the public interest and to champion statistical education. The Royal Statistical Society has a vital role to play. Keywords: Chartered Statistician; Citizenship; Economic growth; Evidence; ‘getstats’; Justice; Open data; Public good; The state; Wise choices 1. Introduction Dictionaries trace the source of the word statistics from the Latin ‘status’, the state, to the Italian ‘statista’, one skilled in statecraft, and on to the German ‘Statistik’, the science dealing with data about the condition of a state or community. The Oxford English Dictionary brings ‘statistics’ into English in 1787. Florence Nightingale held that ‘the thoughts and purpose of the Deity are only to be discovered by the statistical study of natural phenomena:::the application of the results of such study [is] the religious duty of man’ (Pearson, 1924).
    [Show full text]
  • The Contrasting Strategies of Almroth Wright and Bradford Hill to Capture the Nomenclature of Controlled Trials
    6 Whose Words are they Anyway? The Contrasting Strategies of Almroth Wright and Bradford Hill to Capture the Nomenclature of Controlled Trials When Almroth Wright (1861–1947) began to endure the experience common to many new fathers, of sleepless nights caused by his crying infant, he characteristically applied his physiological knowledge to the problem in a deductive fashion. Reasoning that the child’s distress was the result of milk clotting in its stomach, he added citric acid to the baby’s bottle to prevent the formation of clots. The intervention appeared to succeed; Wright published his conclusions,1 and citrated milk was eventually advocated by many paediatricians in the management of crying babies.2 By contrast, Austin Bradford Hill (1897–1991) approached his wife’s insomnia in an empirical, inductive manner. He proposed persuading his wife to take hot milk before retiring, on randomly determined nights, and recording her subsequent sleeping patterns. Fortunately for domestic harmony, he described this experiment merely as an example – actually to perform it would, he considered, be ‘exceedingly rash’.3 These anecdotes serve to illustrate the very different approaches to therapeutic experiment maintained by the two men. Hill has widely been credited as the main progenitor of the modern randomised controlled trial (RCT).4 He was principally responsible for the design of the first two published British RCTs, to assess the efficacy of streptomycin in tuberculosis5 and the effectiveness of whooping cough vaccine6 and, in particular, was responsible for the introduction of randomisation into their design.7 Almroth Wright remained, throughout his life, an implacable opponent of this ‘statistical method’, preferring what he perceived as the greater certainty of a ‘crucial experiment’ performed in the laboratory.
    [Show full text]
  • Major Greenwood and Clinical Trials
    From the James Lind Library Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine; 2017, Vol. 110(11) 452–457 DOI: 10.1177/0141076817736028 Major Greenwood and clinical trials Vern Farewell1 and Tony Johnson2 1MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 0SR, UK 2MRC Clinical Trials Unit, Aviation House, London WC2B 6NH, UK Corresponding author: Vern Farewell. Email: [email protected] Introduction References to Greenwood’s work in clinical trials Major Greenwood (1880–1949) was the foremost medical statistician in the UK during the first Greenwood was a renowned epidemiologist who is not half of the 20th century.1 The son of a general usually associated with randomised clinical trials. At medical practitioner, he obtained a medical degree the time of his retirement, randomised clinical trials from the London Hospital in 1904 and then stu- were still under development and Peter Armitage has died statistics under Karl Pearson at University no recollection of Greenwood commenting on trials College London. Instead of general practice, he when Greenwood visited the London School of opted to pursue a career in medical research, first Hygiene and Tropical Medicine during his retirement under the physiologist Leonard Hill at the London (personal communication). Indeed, randomised clin- Hospital, where, in 1908, he set up the first depart- ical trials were a major component of the work of ment of medical statistics and gave the first lecture Austin Bradford Hill,5 who began his employment in course in the subject in 1909. He established the Greenwood’s department in 1923 and succeeded him second department of medical statistics in 1910 at as professor at the London School of Hygiene and the Lister Institute and established the second Tropical Medicine and director of the Medical course of lectures there.
    [Show full text]
  • The Development of the MRC Statistical Unit, 1911-1948
    Medical History, 2000, 44: 323-340 Medical Statistics, Patronage and the State: The Development of the MRC Statistical Unit, 1911-1948 EDWARD HIGGS* The development of medical statistics based on the concepts of probability and error-theory developed by Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, George Udny Yule, R A Fisher, and their colleagues, has had a profound impact on medical science in the present century. This has been associated especially with the activities of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Statistical Unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). It was here in 1946 that the world's first statistically rigorous clinical trial was undertaken, and where in the 1950s Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll revealed a statistical relationship between smoking and lung- cancer. But how and why was this key institution founded, and why were its methods probabilistic?' One might assume that the sheer brilliance of the work produced by Pearson and his statistical followers was sufficient to win over the medical profession, and to attract funding for the MRC Unit. However, one might question the extent to which an association with Pearson, and with the mathematical technicalities of his statistics, immediately endeared the fledgling discipline of biostatistics to the medical com- munity. As J Rosser Matthews has shown recently, Pearsonian statistics were only haltingly accepted by medical scientists in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, and were little understood by medical practitioners.2 How then was such a university-based infrastructure for medical statistics established? Ultimately, of course, the Statistical * Edward Higgs, DPhil, Department of History, the statistical work on smoking, see V Berridge, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, 'Science and policy: the case of postwar British C04 3SQ.
    [Show full text]
  • The Economist
    Statisticians in World War II: They also served | The Economist http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21636589-how-statis... More from The Economist My Subscription Subscribe Log in or register World politics Business & finance Economics Science & technology Culture Blogs Debate Multimedia Print edition Statisticians in World War II Comment (3) Timekeeper reading list They also served E-mail Reprints & permissions Print How statisticians changed the war, and the war changed statistics Dec 20th 2014 | From the print edition Like 3.6k Tweet 337 Advertisement “I BECAME a statistician because I was put in prison,” says Claus Moser. Aged 92, he can look back on a distinguished career in academia and civil service: he was head of the British government statistical service in 1967-78 and made a life peer in 2001. But Follow The Economist statistics had never been his plan. He had dreamed of being a pianist and when he realised that was unrealistic, accepted his father’s advice that he should study commerce and manage hotels. (“He thought I would like the music in the lobby.”) War threw these plans into disarray. In 1936, aged 13, he fled Germany with his family; four years later the prime minister, Winston Churchill, decided that because some of the refugees might be spies, he would “collar the lot”. Lord Moser was interned in Huyton, Latest updates » near Liverpool (pictured above). “If you lock up 5,000 Jews we will find something to do,” The Economist explains : Where Islamic he says now. Someone set up a café; there were lectures and concerts—and a statistical State gets its money office run by a mathematician named Landau.
    [Show full text]
  • Epidemiology and Biostatistics: Fundamentals of Research Methodology
    ISSN 2394 - 2053 (Print) ISSN 2394 - 2061 (Online) www.ojpas.org COMPENDIUM Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences Epidemiology and biostatistics: fundamentals of research methodology Dhrubajyoti Bhuyan1, Neha Dua2, Abstract Tejal Kothari3 Epidemiology and statistics is an essential modern science whose understanding now 1Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, forms a base of any research in any form. Epidemiology deals with the distribution Assam Medical College & Hospital, Dibrugarh, and determinants of health-related states, while biostatistics is considered to be Assam, India, 2Post Graduate Trainee, important in implementing statistical knowledge into the biomedical sciences. We Department of Psychiatry, Assam Medical have tried to capture the basics and essence of epidemiology and biostatistics. College & Hospital, Dibrugarh, Assam, India, 3Post Graduate Trainee, Department of Keywords: Medical Sciences. Sampling. Diagnostic and Therapeutic Materials. Psychiatry, Assam Medical College & Hospital, Dibrugarh, Assam, India Corresponding author: Dr. Dhrubajyoti Bhuyan, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Assam Medical College & Hospital, Barbari, Dibrugarh-786002, Assam, India. [email protected] Received: 05 August 2015 Revised: 04 November 2015 Accepted: 05 November 2015 Epub: 11 November 2015 DOI: 10.5958/2394-2061.2015.00022.1 Introduction began to be collected in western countries. John Graunt’s ‘bills of mortality’[3] and Williams Farr’s ‘systematic compilation Basics of epidemiology and biostatistics are of utmost of causes of death’ done in Registrar General’s Office in importance in understanding and formulating a research England[4-6] were noteworthy studies. They became project. The term epidemiology is derived from the Greek word landmark studies for data collection and vital statistics. Work ‘epidemic’ (epi=among, and demos=people; logos=study).
    [Show full text]
  • Primer: the Use of Statistics in Legal Proceedings
    THE USE OF STATISTICS IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS: A PRIMER FOR COURTS 1 The use of statistics in legal proceedings A PRIMER FOR COURTS 2 THE USE OF STATISTICS IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS: A PRIMER FOR COURTS The use of statistics in legal proceedings: a primer for courts Issued: November 2020 DES6439 ISBN: 978-1-78252-486-1 The text of this work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use provided the original author and source are credited. The licence is available at: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Images are not covered by this licence. To request additional copies of this document please contact: The Royal Society 6 – 9 Carlton House Terrace London SW1Y 5AG T +44 20 7451 2571 E [email protected] W royalsociety.org/science-and-law This primer can be viewed online at royalsociety.org/science-and-law THE USE OF STATISTICS IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS: A PRIMER FOR COURTS 3 Contents Summary, introduction and scope 5 1. What is statistical science? 6 1.1 Use of statistical science and types of evidence 8 1.2 Communication of the probative value when statistical science is used 10 2. Probability and the principles of evaluating scientific evidence 13 2.1 What probability is not 13 2.2 Personal probabilities 14 2.3 Datasets containing relevant past observations 16 2.4 Probative value expressed as a likelihood ratio 17 2.5 Bayes’ theorem and the likelihood ratio 20 3. Issues with the potential for misunderstanding 22 3.1 Prosecutor’s fallacy 22 3.2 Defence attorney’s fallacy 22 3.3 Combining evidence 22 3.4 Coincidences and rare events 24 3.5 Interpretation of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ and ‘balance of probabilities’ 24 4.
    [Show full text]
  • Austin Bradford Hill (1897-1991) [1]
    Published on The Embryo Project Encyclopedia (https://embryo.asu.edu) Austin Bradford Hill (1897-1991) [1] By: Abboud, Carolina Keywords: Environment [2] During the twentieth century, Austin Bradford Hill researched diseases and their causes in England and developed the Bradford Hill criteria, which comprise the minimal requirements that must be met for a causal relationship to be established between a factor and a disease. Hill also suggested that researchers should randomize clinical trials to evaluate the effects of a drug or treatment by monitoring large groups of people. In addition, Hill advocated for case-control studies, in which researchers compare a group of people with a medical condition to a group without that condition to investigate the condition's possible causes. Hill's own work with clinical trials and case-control studies helped him prove that smoking caused lung cancer. The Bradford Hill criteria have also been used to establish causal links between factors and cancer, including reproductive cancers such as human papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer. Hill was born on 8 July 1897 as the third of six children to Janet Alexander and Leonard Erskine Hill in London, England. Hill's father worked as a professor of physiology at the London Hospital [3] Medical College in London, England. The previous four generations of the Hill family featured at least one member noted in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, an ongoing collection of notable figures in British history. Hill's father also received the title of Fellow of the Royal Society for his research on the circulation of blood in the brain.
    [Show full text]
  • The Environment and Disease: Association Or Causation?
    Observational Studies 6 (2020) 1-9 Submitted 1965; Published reprinted, 1/20 The environment and disease: association or causation? Sir Austin Bradford Hill Editor's Note: Sir Austin Bradford Hill was Professor of Medical Statistics, University of London, United Kingdom. This article was originally published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, May 1965, 58, 295-300. This paper is reprinted with permission of the copyright holder, Sage Publications. New comments by the following researchers follow: Peter Armitage; Mike Baiocchi; Samantha Kleinberg; James O'Malley; Chris Phillips and Joel Greenhouse; Kenneth Rothman; Herb Smith; Tyler VanderWeele; Noel Weiss; and William Yeaton. Among the objects of this newly founded Section of Occupational Medicine are: first, `to provide a means, not readily afforded elsewhere, whereby physicians and surgeons with a special knowledge of the relationship between sickness and injury and conditions of work may discuss their problems, not only with each other, but also with colleagues in other fields, by holding joint meetings with other Sections of the Society'; and second, `to make available information about the physical, chemical and psychological hazards of occupation, and in particular about those that are rare or not easily recognized'. At this first meeting of the Section and before, with however laudable intentions, we set about instructing our colleagues in other fields, it will be proper to consider a problem fundamental to our own. How in the first place do we detect these relationships between sickness, injury and conditions of work? How do we determine what are physical, chemical and psychological hazards of occupation, and in particular those that are rare and not easily recognised? There are, of course, instances in which we can reasonably answer these questions from the general body of medical knowledge.
    [Show full text]
  • Hill's Criteria for Causality
    relation between cigarette smoking and cardiovascu- Hill’s Criteria for lar disease. Causality Counterexamples of strong but noncausal associ- ations are also not hard to find; any study with Despite philosophic criticisms of inductive inference, strong confounding illustrates the phenomenon. For inductively oriented causal criteria have commonly example, consider the strong but noncausal relation been used to make such inferences. If a set of ne- between Down syndrome and birth rank, which is cessary and sufficient causal criteria could be used confounded by the relation between Down syndrome to distinguish causal from noncausal associations and maternal age. Of course, once the confounding in observational studies, the job of the scientist factor is identified, the association is diminished by would be eased considerably. With such criteria, adjustment for the factor. These examples remind all the concerns about the logic or lack thereof in us that a strong association is neither necessary nor causal inference could be forgotten: it would only be sufficient for causality, nor is weakness necessary nor necessary to consult the checklist of criteria to see if sufficient for absence of causality. In addition to these a relation were causal. We know from philosophy counterexamples, we have to remember that neither that a set of sufficient criteria does not exist [3, relative risk nor any other measure of association is 6]. Nevertheless, lists of causal criteria have become a biologically consistent feature of an association; as popular, possibly because they seem to provide a road described by many authors [4, 7], it is a characteristic map through complicated territory.
    [Show full text]
  • Statisticians of the Centuries
    STATISTICIANS OF THE CENTURIES •*-•• C.C. HEYDE • E. SENETA Editors P. CREPEL • S.E. FlENBERG • J. GANI Associate Editors Springer CONTENTS PREFACE V ALPHABETICAL LISTING OF STATISTICIANS xi 16TH CENTURY PROBABILITY PRIOR TO PASCAL • David Bellhouse 3 17TH CENTURY PIERRE DE PERM AT • E. Seneta 11 JOHN GRAUNT • C.C. Heyde 14 BLAISE PASCAL • A.W.F. Edwards 17 CHRISTIAAN HlJYGENS • Ivo Schneider 23 CASPAR NEUMANN • Peter Koch 29 JAKOB BERNOULLI • Ivo Schneider 33 JOHN ARBUTHNOT • David Bellhouse 39 18TH CENTURY ABRAHAM DE MoiVRE • Ivo Schneider 45 PIERRE REMOND DE MONTMORT • E. Seneta 52 NICOLAUS BERNOULLI • SdndorCsorgd 55 Co n tents ^^ DANIEL BERNOULLI • /. Gani 64 THOMAS BAYES • D.V.lindley 68 JOHANN PETER SUSSMILCH • Jean-MarcRohrbasser 72 GEORGES-LOUIS LECLERC, COMTE DE BUFFON • Yves Ducel& Thierry Martin 77 ROGERIUS JoSEPHUS BoSCOVICH • R.W. Farebrother 82 D'ALEMBERT • P. Crepel 86 MARQUIS DE CONDORCET • P. Crepel 90 19TH CENTURY PIERRE-SIMON MARQUIS DE LAPLACE • Hans Fischer 95 ADRIEN-MARIE LEGENDRE • R.W. Farebrother 101 WILLIAM PLAYFAIR • IanSpence& Howard Wainer 105 THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS • I. Castles 111 SIR FREDERICK MORTON EDEN • Mervyn Stone 115 CARL FRIEDRICH GAUSS • O.B. Sheynin 119 SIMEON-DENIS POISSON • BernardBru 123 ADOLPHE QUETELET • Jean-Jacques Droesbeke & Francois Jongmans 127 IRENEE-JULES BlENAYME • E. Seneta 132 STEFANO FRAI-ISCINI • Carlo Malaguerra 137 GUSTAV THEODOR FECHNER • Michael Fleidelberger 142 ANTON MEYER • M.F. Jozeau 148 ANTOINE AUGUSTIN COURNOT • Th. Martin 152 AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN • Adrian Rice 157 WILLIAM FARR » Michel Dupaquier 163 GEORGE BOOLE • Peter Heath & Eugene Seneta 167 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE • M. Stone 171 PAFNUTII LVOVICH CHEBYSHEV (OR TCHEBICHEF)• E.
    [Show full text]
  • Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn't Believe Smoking Caused Cancer
    Why the Father of Modern Statistics Didn’t Believe Smoking Caused Cancer By Ben Christopher · 49,340 views · More stats Ronald A. Fisher, father of modern statistics, enjoying his pipe. *** In the summer of 1957, Ronald Fisher, one of the fathers of modern statistics, sat down to write a strongly worded letter in defense of tobacco. The letter was addressed to the British Medical Journal, which, just a few weeks earlier, had taken the editorial position that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. According to the journal's editorial board, the time for amassing evidence and analyzing data was over. Now, they wrote, “all the modern devices of publicity” should be used to inform the public about the perils of tobacco. According to Fisher, this was nothing short of statistically illiterate fear mongering. Surely the danger posed to the smoking masses was “not the mild and soothing weed,” he wrote, “but the organized creation of states of frantic alarm.” 2016-Christopher-Fisher-Smoking-Cancer.docx Page 1 Fisher was a well-known hothead (and an inveterate pipe smoker), but the letter and the resulting debate, which lasted until his death in 1962, was taken as a serious critique by the scientific community. After all, Ronald A. Fisher had spent much of his career devising ways to mathematically evaluate causal claims—claims exactly like the one that the British Medical Journal was making about smoking and cancer. Along the way, he had revolutionized the way that biological scientists conduct experiments and analyze data. And yet we know how this debate ends. On one of the most significant public health questions of the 20th century, Fisher got it wrong.
    [Show full text]