Physicians say that once a patient hears the word “cancer”, their brain shuts down and they don’t hear anything else. To be fair to the patients, understanding survival statistics isn’t always simple. Let’s take just one example: The three-year survival rate is different from the third-year survival rate. If you have been told that the…
It is unnecessarily cold at 6 a.m. in Minneapolis in the middle of February, just in case you were wondering. If you know me at all, you know that two of the things I hate most in this world are getting up early and cold weather. Despite that, I’m pretty satisfied this morning. I have…
Kappa is a useful measure of agreement between two raters. Say you have two radiologists looking at X-rays, rating them as normal or abnormal and you want to get a quantitative measure of how well they agree. Kappa is your go-to coefficient. How do you compute it? Well, personally, I use SAS because this is…
As you have no doubt cleverly deduced from the title, this is the second installment in my series, “Mama AnnMaria’s Advice on How Not to Get Your Ass Fired.” In Part 1, I explained why employees who (in their view) never make mistakes end up getting their asses fired. Today’s lesson is: Understand that your boss…
Listen my dears and you will learn the difference between incidence and prevalence and why effective treatment for a disease may mean that more people have it. Prevalence is the number of people in the population who have a disease. It is computed as Number of people with disease X 1,000 Number in population…
You’d think the ultimate example of simplicity in measurement would be mortality rate. Count up the dead people – they aren’t hard to catch. Divide by the total number of people you had when you started. Done. It’s not super complicated but it is slightly more complicated than that. First of all, how do you…
What’s it like starting a company with your spouse? I get this question fairly often. Several times now, I’ve heard investors say they don’t like to invest in couples, while in the same breath saying that they like to invest in companies with co-founders who have known each other a long time. So … starting…
Our Project Manager, Jessica, made the very insightful comment at lunch the other day, No one cares how hard it was for you to make. When people are looking to buy your product, all they want to know is what it will do for them. That young woman has a bright future in marketing. Unfortunately…
I think descriptive statistics are under-rated. One reason I like Leon Gordis’ Epidemiology book is that he agrees with me. He says that sometimes statistics pass the “inter-ocular test”. That is, they hit you right between the eyes. I’m a big fan of eye-balling statistics and SAS/GRAPH is good for that. Let’s take this example….
After I recommended a business incubator to an acquaintance, one of my co-founders protested, “But I thought you said incubators were useless.” I told her no, I didn’t say incubators were useless. I said they were useless for US at this stage in our company. There are times when the right incubator can be extremely…