Tag Archives: Human side of statistics

Recommended: How to be more effective in your professional life

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This article starts with a nice anecdote about being dismissive about what someone else is saying ends up hurting you. It also provides a nice structure, POWER, for organizing consulting meetings. POWER stands for Prepare, Open, Work, End, and Reflect. This article was a basis for some of the content in an interesting webinar on consulting. Continue reading

PMean: What are we doing to justify all that time we’re budgeting?

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An email discussion about the appropriate percentage effort on research grants has produced a lot of interesting discussions. One person raised an interesting question. The typical data analysis, he claimed, might involve a few hours reviewing the input data set, a few hours conducting the analysis and a few hours preparing a statistical summary, but even after a generous estimate of the work at each of the time points, he could only come up with 22 hours of effort, which corresponds roughly with a 1% FTE. I wrote back describing some of the things that might occur before the data analysis that might add time to this effort. Continue reading

PMean: And the least important variable is…

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I heard a story a long time ago, and I don’t remember who told it to me and I’m probably getting all the details wrong, but I wanted to try to recreate the story from memory because it illustrates one of the perils of blind reliance on statistical models to identify “important” variables. Continue reading