Do standing and treadmill desks benefit workers or improve productivity?
A systematic review was recently published in the journal Preventive Medicine. The authors looked at 23 studies involving a standing or treadmill walking intervention compared to regular seated desk work. Included studies examined a wide range of physiological (resting heart rate, blood pressure, total fasting cholesterol, fasting glucose, weight loss, etc) and psychological (work performance, mood states, ...
Pearson vs Spearman: Which should I use to test correlations?
The most commonly used method of assessing correlation is the Pearson Product Moment Correlation, more commonly (and easily) called Pearson’s r. It tests the degree to which two variables are linearly dependent on each other (i.e, correlated). Pearson’s r can take on a value from -1 to +1. An r = 0 means the two variables ...
Oral cancer screening
Today I was walking along a major street in Toronto and noticed a billboard advertising for a free oral cancer screening. In the ad they also point to estimates by the Canadian Cancer Society that about 4300 Canadians were diagnosed with oral cancer in 2014. So should one be advised to take the dentist up ...
What Apple’s ResearchKit means for research
This past Monday, amid the excitement surrounding the introduction of Apple’s new watch and an impossibly thin and light new MacBook computer, what got me most excited was the introduction of something called ResearchKit. The blandness of the name obscures the immense possibilities it makes possible. ResearchKit is Apple’s new software framework for developing health research ...
National Center for Health Statistics
The NCHS is a veritable goldmine of health related information and statistics. Their stated mission is to, “is to provide statistical information that will guide actions and policies to improve the health of the American people.” Here is an overview of the NCHS. Here are some of the topics they cover: NCHS produces data on ...
StatCrunch: Web-based statistics
StatCrunch is a web-based statistics system that provides the full workflow including data collection, analyses and presentation of results. It was developed by Webster West, a statistics professor at North Carolina State University. The software has been designed for educational purposes and in fact access is typically via textbook purchase although six months of access can be ...
Time off means enhanced worker productivity
An Oxford Economic report published in February 2014 presents the findings of a survey of 971 employees focusing on how paid time off is perceived and used in the United States. Although their report contains less information regarding their sampling strategy, which does raise questions of validity and generalizability, the results are consistent with a growing body of ...
When it comes to exercise, faster is not necessarily better
A recent study by researchers in Denmark examined data from 1098 healthy joggers and 3950 healthy non-joggers. These data were collected as part of the prospective Copenhagen City Heart Study. Adjusting for age, sex, smoking, alcohol intake, education, and diabetes, compared to people who were sedentary, 1 to 2.5 hours of jogging per week was associated ...
Cannabis (Marijuana) is the lowest risk of several drugs
A recent study examined the risks of toxicity associated with several drugs. The way they did this was to create a margin of exposure (MOE) by comparing the dose at which each substance is lethal (“toxicological threshold”) with the dose that is typically taken. The lower the MOE, the larger the risk. For individual exposure ...
Recruiting participants
When it comes time to recruit participants, there are 2 main goals: That a representative sample is chosen That a sufficient sample size is selected Just because someone has been selected does not mean that he/she will be willing or able to participate. This is the problem of nonresponse. There is no problem if the people ...
Information Intelligence 