Monthly Archives: September 2015

Recommended: PS: Power and Sample Size Calculation

Someone stopped by today with a power calculation and I asked what software they used. They showed me something I had not seen before, a program developed by the Department of Biostatistics at Vanderbilt University (more specifically, William Dupont and Walton Plummer). The Vanderbilt Biostatistics Department is run by Frank Harrell, so you can be pretty sure that anything that they develop will be high quality. Continue reading

Recommended: Research vs Quality Improvement

I ran across a one page handout in PDF format that discussed the difference between research and quality improvement. It was written from the perspective of the IRB (Institutional Review Board) at UMKC. It’s a nice summary, although the topic is a bit more complex than a single page handout might imply. This is a good starting point for deciding what type of study you want to do. Continue reading

PMean: What problems does introversion cause for a statistical consultant?

Someone posed an interesting question on the Statistics Consulting message board of the American Statistical Association. To paraphrase, her question was what sort of difficulties would an introvert have in statistical consulting and how do you teach those introverted consultants to overcome those problems. Here’s what I wrote. Continue reading