I am contributing a chapter to a book (proposed title: Randomized controlled trials in medical research – gold standard or unhealthy fixation) and the book editor wanted a brief biography that emphasized “any relevant teaching experience within Medicine or allied health sciences.” So I adapted an earlier short biography to put in some of my teaching experience. Here it is. Continue reading
PMean: Finding those weird characters
When you take a text file from one system and use it in a different system, some of the more “exotic” characters can change on you. An example are the “smart quotes” in Microsoft Word. Here’s a brief explanation of why they occur and what you can do about it. Continue reading
Recommended: Create Awesome HTML Table with knitr::kable and kableExtra
I use R Markdown for a lot of things, but the one thing that never seems to come out the way I like is the tables. This vignette highlights some of the ways you can customize the appearance of your tables with a new pacakge, kableExtra. Continue reading
Recommended: An overview of randomization techniques
This is a nice overview of why you want to randomize. It also talks about block randomization and covariate adaptive randomization. Continue reading
Recommended: HEDIS and Performance Measurement
This is another resource that came up during a talk. HEDIS is a series of performance measures in six clinical areas that is coordinated by the NCQA. Continue reading
Recommended: The Learning Health Care System in America
This document was recommended at a talk I attended. I have not read it yet, but the stated goal of the document to “drive the process of discovery as a natural outgrowth of patient care” is something I support whole heartedly. Continue reading
Quote: The most challenging thing in the world…
“The most challenging thing in the world is not to learn fancy technologies, but control your own wild heart.” Yihui Xie, as quoted in Appendix C of Authoring Books wtih R Markdown.
Recommended: A Systematic Examination of the Citation of Prior Research
This was a nice study, and shows a very easy model to adapt to other research problems. The authors were concerned that many reports of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) seemed to miss out on citing previous RCTs on the same topic. So they dug out a bunch of meta-analysis and looked at the bibliographies of the individual RCTs in those trials. The meta-analysis gives you a reasonably comprehensive history of the RCTs done on a particular topic, and you would think that any RCTs in the meta-analysis should have cited any other RCT in that same meta-analysis that preceded it by at least one year. But that happened very rarely. Continue reading
Recommended: Competing commtments in clinical trials
The title is a bit misleading. It does not involve financial or non-financial conflicts of interest, but rather when clinical researchers violate the rules of a clinical trial for the perceived benefits of an individual patient. An anonymous survey reveals that this practice is quite common. Continue reading
Recommended: Should you blow the whistle?
This article offers some practical advice about when, how, and whether to become a whistle blower. Continue reading