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  • Decipher my Data, Flu! Final evaluation report

    After two years, we have written an evaluation report to find out what worked and what didn’t work with “Decipher my Data: Flu!” The project wasn’t successful in terms of the number of schools involved or the amount of interactions.  However, Dr Rob was able to complete his analysis of the data provided by twenty-seven…

  • The End of Data Collection – so what happens next?

    Now that we’ve entered the summer term it’s time to stop collecting the weekly school absence data. Did I just hear a sigh of relief? The national data suggest that whilst there is still small amounts of flu circulating, levels are low, so it’s a good time to end this part of the project. To…

  • Investigating the epidemiology of flu, Big Brother style

    In these LabLogs I’ve talked endlessly about how we can’t predict the start of an influenza outbreak. Despite this, you might be surprised to learn that there are many things still to learn about how influenza is transmitted from one person to another. When someone with influenza sneezes they produce big bits of snot that…

  • The Bigger Picture

    The flu season has been as unpredictable as ever this year; in this blog Dr Rob looks at data from the UK and across Europe to try and understand the bigger. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but flu seasons are unpredictable. This year has been no exception: there was…

  • The week four blip

    In week four there was an increase in the number of school absences, similar to a peak just before the Christmas holiday. Was this due to flu, or are there other possible explanations? It would be fair to say that Shane and I had a fairly nervous but exciting telephone conversation last week. Our absence…

  • Interesting things happening over on the X-Y scattergraph

    There seem to be some interesting things happening over on the X-Y scattergraph with a good correlation appearing in the school size graph. Whilst there seems to be little correlation occurring between any of the other variables and illness rates, there does seem to be a positive correlation with school size – it’s possible that…

  • Missing data from one of the most important weeks of the year

    Last flu season the project might have observed historic low levels of ‘flu but on the up side, I got a whole season free of illness. This time around it seems as if I’ve been ill with one thing or another since the start of December and I’m still trying to shake the remnants of…

  • Drawing DecipherMyData graphs – proceed with caution.

    The way a graph is drawn can have a big influence on how the results are interpreted. In this lab log Dr Rob discusses some of the dangers in drawing graphs with DecipherMyData . Most of the analyses we’ll be doing in DecipherMyData involves drawing graphs as there aren’t many statistical tests we can perform to…

  • Deciphering the data – influences of other viruses on absence levels

    Infections other than flu could influence the school absence data. In this post, Dr Rob looks at whether two other common viruses influence DecipherMyData’s results. As some of you highlighted in the LabLogs, a big limitation with our school absence data is that we don’t collect information on the reason for school absence. So an…

  • The big news this month..

    The Flu season has officially started. We’ve noticed that over the past three weeks there has been a reported increase in the number of people visiting their GP with flu like symptoms. The greatest number of those visiting has been children aged 1-4, followed by 5-14 year olds, which shows that there’s almost certainly flu in…