How common is a particular disease or condition? It depends on what you mean by common. Do you mean how many people have a condition, or do you mean how many new cases of it are there each year? In other words, are you asking about the probability of you HAVING a disease or of you GETTING…
Even though Rick Wicklin (buzzkill!) disabused me of the concern that SAS was communicating with aliens through the obscure coding in its sashelp data sets, I still wanted to roll my own. If you, too, feel more comfortable with a data set you have produced yourself, let me give you a few tips. There is…
I was going to write about prevalence and incidence, and how so-called simple statistics can be much more important than people think and are vastly under-rated. It was going to be cool. Trust me. In the process, I ran across two things even more important or cooler (I know, hard to believe, right?) Here’s what…
I’ll be teaching a graduate course in epidemiology in the spring and giving a talk on biostatistics at SAS Global Forum in April, so I thought I’d jump ahead and start rambling on about it now. When I tell people that I teach epidemiology, the first question I usually get is, What’s epidemiology? In short,…
This is something that has bothered me for a long time. When I read tables and reports from the National Center of Education Statistics (yes, I do, don’t judge me!), it makes it sound as if all is well with rural education. According to this table, for example, 100% of rural schools have at least…
When I first taught multivariate statistics, I was nervous. The material is more difficult than Statistics 101 so I assumed teaching the course would be more difficult as well. Over 25 years of teaching, I’ve found the opposite. The more advanced you get in a field, the easier the courses are to teach. You might…
Seven years ago, when I founded The Julia Group, I submitted a grant proposal to develop an online algebra course. After 18 years of writing grant proposals for universities, tribal councils and other organizations, I wrote one just for me, for something that was near and dear to my heart. I know that developing educational…
Twice in the last week, I’ve had people say to me, expecting agreement, Winners never quit. You know that, right? You’ve won a world championships, founded several companies, earned a Ph.D. You never would have done that if you quit. I would like to go on record with my opinion. That idea that winners never…
I try not to be a hypocrite, so after a long talk this week with someone about the importance of admitting mistakes and not continuing to go down the wrong path, I sat down and asked myself, Self? What mistakes have I made? Certainly, if you can’t see any mistakes you have made, you are…