Category Archives: Recommended

Recommended: The history of Hadoop

This page is moving to a new website.

If you want to understand big data, you need to understand Hadoop. Hadoop is the technology underlying many big data efforts. But most of the descriptions of Hadoop are jargon laden and impenetrable to newcomers. Well, maybe just impenetrable to this newcomer. But one great revelation to me was a historical note as to WHY there was a need to develop Hadoop. It was all those pages that had to be indexed by search engines at Google and Yahoo. So I went out to try to find more details. This article, with a ton of references throughout, is an excellent introduction to the precursors to Hadoop, the development of Hadoop itself, and the explosion of systems that used Hadoop as their foundation. Continue reading →

Recommended: Adherence to Methodological Standards in Research Using the National Inpatient Sample

This page is moving to a new website.

I normally don’t recommend articles that are stuck behind pay walls, but this is an important article. It shows how 85% of a sample of research studies using the National Inpatient Sample database failed to follow at least one of seven well documented practice recommendations of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Continue reading →

Recommended: An introduction to implementation science for the non-specialist

This page is moving to a new website.

I’ve done a lot of work with Evidence-Based Health, but one big and largely unsolved problem is how to get health care professionals to change their practices once the evidence for these changes becomes obvious. If no one changes in the face of evidence, then all the effort to produce and critically appraise the evidence becomes worthless. A new field, implementation science, has been developed to get at methods to encourage the adoption of new evidence-based practices. This paper outlines how implementation science is supposed to work and offers two real world examples of implementation science studies. Continue reading →

Recommended: Hi, I’m Mike Bostock.

This page is moving to a new website.

This is an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with Mike Bostock, a former graphics editor for the New York Times and creator of the d3.js data visualization package. I’ll be writing a few things about d3.js once I figure things out. Mike is someone worth watching, because he is working on high visibility, high impact stuff. Continue reading →

Recommended: How to be more effective in your professional life

This page is moving to a new website.

Doug Zahn has done a tremendous amount of work on what I like to call the human factors in statistical consulting. He summarizes some key ideas in this article. His humorous anecdote about his prized Mustang car illustrates the tendency of all of us to be poor listeners. Pay special atention to Table 1 where he outlines the five steps you should always follow in any consulting interaction. Continue reading →

Recommended: Philosophy News Network: Postmodernism Special Report

This page is moving to a new website.

I generally shy away from Philosophical debates, but I did discuss a Postmodern critique of Evidence Based Medicine a while back. When one of my more intellectual friends posted a link to a commentary on Postmodernism on the Existential Comics web site, I had to take a look. I think I did a pretty good job of summarizing Postmodernism without stereotyping it, but maybe I’m setting my standards too low if I try to compete with a comic strip. You can judge for yourself. Continue reading →

Recommended: The Origins of ‘Big Data’

This page is moving to a new website.

I’m not a big fan of the term “big data” but I’ve been applying for a couple of jobs that ask for expertise in big data instead of expertise in Statistics. So in one of the cover letters, I wrote that I was doing big data analysis before the term was even coined. That forced me to do a quick fact check, and it looks like the term first came into wide use in the late 1990s. Here’s an article on the person who first coined the term “big data.” Continue reading →

Recommended: Designing and conducting semi-structured interviews for research

This page is moving to a new website.

This is a very helpful guide on collecting qualitative data through a semi-structured interview. It emphasizes the need for probe questions and on behaviors that you should adopt to put your subject at ease and get the best information possible. This handout was developed for a college course on Organizational Communication, and the syllabus for this class has other valuable resources. Continue reading →