Monthly Archives: December 2016

PMean: A personal biography

I got in touch with a colleague from my days at Bowling Green State University. That was in the 1980s and my life had changed substantially since those days. While I have many professional biographies (such as this one from 2016), none of them covered the more personal aspects of my life. So here’s a brief biography for anyone who is interested in more than just where I worked. Continue reading

Why secondary data analysis takes a lot longer

Someone posted a question noting that most of the statistical consulting projects that they worked on finished in a reasonable time frame, a few were outliers. They took a lot longer and required a lot more effort by the statisticians. Were there any common features to these outliers they wondered. So they asked if anyone else had identified methodological features of projects that went overtime. I only had a subjective impression, but thought it was still worth sharing. Continue reading

Recommended: Defining Urban and Rural Areas in U.S. Epidemiologic Studies

I’m somewhat new to geocoding. One of the first things you might be interested in, if you have geographic data, is an indicator as to whether a certain address, zip code, or county is urban or rural. This is actually quite a complex topic. This paper outlines some of the basic systems to classifying a location as urban, rural, or something in between (e.g., suburban). Continue reading