If you did not go to SAS Global Forum this week, here are some things you missed: Me, rambling on about the 13 techniques all biostatisticians should know, including the answer to: If McNemar and Kappa are both statistics for handling correlated, categorical data, how can they give you completely different results? The answer is…
Whenever you find yourself overworked or tired out, it’s easy to get upset out of all proportion when something goes wrong. The usual advice to avoiding stress – “Be sure you get enough sleep. Work-life balance is important.” – can be like telling runners at a track meet to run faster. It is correct but…
It’s almost 6 am here on the east coast, and after flying all day during which I worked on a final report for a grant to develop our latest educational game and make bug fixes on same, I landed and wrote a report for a client, because that pays the bills. In the meantime, over on…
Esteemed statistics guru, Dr. Nathaniel Golden has some sobering news for Democrats. His latest models predict a Republican blow out. As can be seen by the map below, the Republican front-runner has tapped into the mood of resentment in the country’s non-elites. When the dust has settled, only the two highest earning states in the…
There are some things in life that I just have difficulty wrapping my brain around, and one of those is how some people can be so incompetent that they don’t know they’re incompetent. Let’s take the example of people earning doctorates. You’d think that would be a pretty select crowd, right? From 1960 – 69,…
I can’t believe I haven’t written about this before – I’m going to tell you an easy (yes, easy) way to find and communicate to a non-technical audience standardized mortality rates and relative risk by strata. It all starts with PROC STDRATE . No, I take that back. It starts with this post I wrote…
SENSITIVITY AND SPECIFICITY – TWO ANSWERS TO “DO YOU HAVE A DISEASE?” Both sensitivity and specificity address the same question – how accurate is a test for disease – but from opposite perspectives. Sensitivity is defined as the proportion of those who have the disease that are correctly identified as positive. Specificity is the proportion…
In the early part of any epidemiology course, few things throw students as much as computing age-adjusted mortality. It seems really counter-intuitive that two populations could have the exact same mortality rate and yet one is significantly less healthy than the other. Thinking about it for a moment, though, before diving into computation, makes it…
This is part 3 of the series inspired by Cindy Gallop’s brilliant talk on finding talented women or minorities. Not only is your company not hiring female or minority employees, not investing in female or minority-led companies, but YOU ARE LITERALLY ADDING INSULT TO INJURY. The tech workforce is disproportionately white and Asian male, and…
Yesterday, I wrote about Cindy Gallop’s talk on finding diverse talent The Rest of the Story … There were two additional points in her presentation I want to address, but first … You can take a look at our latest prototype under development, Aztech, here and play it in Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer. Play…