Weekend Post

This weekend was a half interesting, and half not so interesting. Saturday I went out to all the familiar haunts- I took a boda boda (moped) out to Lugogo Mall, where I picked up 4 glasses for drinking port/wine with (I got one last time I was out, and broke it about a month before I left for Uganda, and they’re only about a dollar each). I got a boda back home, and dropped off my purchases for the day, then went across the street to get some water. 

After that I took a matatu down into town (prices are similar, but a bit higher because of the gas crisis- apparently Kenya’s instability is affecting Uganda’s access to fuel) to Sam’s restaurant (where I had alligator tail last trip) and had ostrich this time. Ostrich (the meat, not the bird) looks just like beef actually, and was described as such on the menu. It was a good piece of ostrich- like eating the best parts of a steak (not stringy, very flavorful and well done). They also have wildebeest and some other antelope-like animal meat available, which I’ll probably try if/when I come back to Uganda to do work. Too bad I don't have my camera cable, or I could post a picture to complement the alligator tail posting.

After getting my first good lunch in a while (clif and luna bars are ok, but not the best thing to have every day) I went to garden city, the biggest? mall in the area. I decided to kill the rest of the afternoon by watching “I Am Legend” in the theater there- interestingly enough, they don’t open the doors till 15 min before the show, mainly because they book the theater back to back with very short windows. The showing right before mine had some very disgruntled customers (especially a family of muzungus/white people/foreigners) that complained that the sound system was terrible for this movie… I was a bit nervous, but all the complaining got the showing fixed in time for my showing, so that was a plus. The movie ticket prices are comparable to the States, at around 7 dollars. The theater itself was actually very nice, smaller than the big theaters at home, but larger than some of the independent cinema complexes.

Sunday was not as eventful- I stayed in most of the day, tried unsuccessfully to work, and basically waited out the weekend till today.

 

Today was great actually- I finished reading the 9^th or 10^th of 10 or so documents on time series analysis, and played around with the data that I have (still waiting on Ruth to finish her independent recreation of the dataset- she said she’d have it done by today, but looks like we’ll have to wait till tomorrow to present the dataset to Grant (via email) and Hasifa (in person). That ended up being ok with me, because I got to play around with fitting time series models in STATA, and got some really nice fitting models going on. I still have to figure out some of the details behind the best way to get rid of autocorrelation (I’m just differencing or lagging or both to see if I can get a stationary time series, I’m sure there’s some sort of guideline to which is more appropriate when- I’ll have to read this website by Duke University to clear that up). Playing around with time series and real data is actually rather satisfying, especially when you have something real to explain.

This past March 2007, the area that we have data for had a big drop in malaria cases showing up at the county hospital- before then had been erratic but on average, pretty high. After March there was a nice steep drop in cases, and the average dropped to a pretty low level- this was right around the time of the spraying campaign in the region, so that seemed like a no brainer, at least by eyeballing the data. So before this time point, there was no spraying, but high numbers of cases reporting in, and after that time point there was spraying and lower numbers of cases reporting in. The timeframe looked roughly realistic too, with spraying happening a week to two weeks or so (I still need the exact dates of the spraying campaign) before the precipitous decline. All was well, but I also had dates for a drug efficacy study that they were doing in the area at the time… which was being done since the beginning of surveillance data collection, and which also ended in March 2007! That is a potentially big snafu- if cases were reporting in because a big study was happening, and cases stopped showing up once the study was done, then maybe spraying didn’t cause the decrease in malaria cases. Getting the exact dates of the spraying will be important, and the amount of time needed to do the campaign as well (if the spraying got done very quickly, the entire region in a week, then that might well explain a precipitous decline in malaria cases, but if they took their time and needed a full month, it seems more likely that the study end was the cause of the decline in cases). Likely, it’s a combination of the two, one that may or may not be possible to tease apart. I’ll get input from the rest of the people on the project, and we’ll see what happens.

On a related note, I’ve thought of a good potential paper that I might be able to work on- it seems to be very promising, at least to me. I’ve run the idea by Grant, and if possible, it’ll be a great paper (hopefully I can get a first author off of it). I might be constrained by lack of data though. All in all, a good day at work, and a decent weekend.