Monthly Archives: January 2014

Recommended: Statistics Attitude Survey scale

Dennis Roberts has a webpage with several attitude scales that have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. The fifth one on the list is a Statistics Attitude Scale, first published in 1980. It has questions like “1. Statistics will be useful to me in my profession when I evaluate other people. 2. It takes me a long time to understand a statistical concept.” but Dennis especially highlighted question 18: “The thought of taking another statistics course makes me sick.” Hah! Continue reading

Recommended: What’s so good about “early” anyway.

This blog entry notes how easy it is to fool yourself into thinking that a screening program is doing well because it finds problems “early while you still have a chance.” It outlines problems with non-randomized studies that are prone to selection bias, length bias, and lead-time bias. It also explains what these biases mean in non-technical language. Continue reading

Resolutions for this blog for 2014

I took a couple of weeks off from everything work related, including this blog. I’m back today. My goal in 2014 is to try to post about 6 entries per week on this blog, with roughly 1/3 being original content and 2/3 being recommended resources. I may lower the average number of blog entries as the year progresses, but I want to be consistent in the number of entries from week to week (exlcuding vacations, of course).

I also have an email newsletter and I plan to send out monthly issues, except possibly in December, which is always way too busy. If you haven’t done so already, here’s the page you can go to so that you can subscribe to the newsletter.

I’ll be posting less on my web page, but might still put some longer items there or items that require regular updates. I plan to eventually (it may take several years) move all my content to this blog.