Database Number Crunching
When I first started out in my career. I spent several years that I like to think of as my apprenticeship in web design. I was a student web worker at the Department of Family and Community Medicine. Being an apprentice meant that I didn’t get many of the glamorous projects but usually I got the ones that were tedious and no one wanted to do them.
One such project was working on a grant-funded project we called Youth Zyban. The actual clinical study was done years before I came on board. Data was collected in giant binders, 312 of them to be exact (I counted and recounted), one for each human subject involved in the study. The data contained in the binders was needed in a form that could be run through a statistical package (SPSS).
The first attempt at data entry was made shortly before I worked for the department. Due to multiple people entering data and no client or server side validation, the data set was filled with duplicates.
My job, being the only student and a total web newb was to A) learn this thing called SQL and B) learn some tricks and create some queries to root out the duplicates and make sure we were analyzing a data set of 312 unique subjects.
Once that was complete, we realized that not all information was entered, so my next job was to complete the data entry.
Lastly, there was a last bit of additional data entry needed to be in a position to create reports that could be fed into SPSS.
One note on research involving human subjects, the binders needed to be stored behind two (2) locks. That meant a locked door down the hall and a locked cabinet. Binders couldn’t be left out for the casual observer. So that meant taking a couple of binders out at a time, locking up, doing any necessary data entry, then get some new binders and locking up the ones I was finished with.
My last task was to take every bit of SQL knowledge I had to generate some reports on the data set I built.
Finally done, I turned in my reports and locked up those baby blue binders for the last time, hoping to never have to decipher another physician’s handwriting again.
Years later while “googling” my name to see what the interwebs had to say about me. I discovered that an article had been submitted to a medical journal by the department I worked for.
[ Article Link ]
So does this mean I can tell people that I’ve been published?
