Author Archives: pmean

Recommended: Conducting Clinical Research

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This is a website associated with a very nice book on the pragmatic aspects of running a clinical trial. I came across this site because I was looking for a simple example of a letter to doctors asking them to help recruit patients for a clinical trial. This was in an appendix along with other nice examples of things like case report forms, serious adverse event forms, HIPAA consent template, etc. You can download a free PDF version of this book or you can buy a paper copy. Continue reading →

PMean: Cases and cohorts and controls, oh my!

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Some asked a question about a retrospective study where you have a control cohort matched to a case cohort so the cohorts are similar on important (potentially confounding) variables. I pointed out that the two consecutive words “case cohort” are ambiguous and tried to explain  how I define a retrospective cohort design versus a (retrospective) case-control design. Continue reading →

PMean: Looking inside the brains of scientists

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I found an interesting research study that shows what happens inside the brains of  scientists as they view statistical graphs of the type commonly used in peer-reviewed research. I don’t have the citation in front of me, but it was published in a very prominent research journal. Here’s a brief summary of the research. Continue reading →

PMean: How to run your first Bayesian analysis using jags software in R

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Someone wanted to know how to run a Bayesian data analysis for a two group longitudinal study. There are several ways you can do this, but I had to confess I did not have an immediate answer. So I took some time to figure out how to do this using jags software inside of R. I’ve done a fair amount of stuff in jags, but not anything close to a longitudinal design. The general principle is to start with something easy and work your way slowly up to the final analysis. Continue reading →

Recommended: Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education College Report 2016

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As a community, we statisticians have known for a long time that we do not teach that introductory level class in Statistics as well as we should. This guideline list the things and ways we SHOULD teach as well as things that we might think about leaving out. Continue reading →