My little space in the interwebs.
PJ Vogt has launched a new podcast last year, Search Engine. As with his other work (Reply All and Crypto Island) it is worth adding to your playlist. His episode with Ezra Klein on how to use the internet is a solid introduction. Klein reminds us that we “vote” for the content we get on…
My other post here questioned if medical students and residents should be doing serious research (i.e., expected to have an extensive record of research publications) vs doing research for pedagogical purposes. Here is an example supporting the “no” side. I’m not sure why anyone thought it would be a good idea to stalk medical students…
From NPR, a different list of words to avoid this upcoming year. Here is the list: I kind of like rizz, but I’m old so I don’t hear it that often.
I have my own list of phrases that I think have reached the end of their useful life and should be retired. Personally, I’m finding that I use the term granular too much.
I’m kind of a sucker for self-help life-hacks. Many are worthless, but one that I find helpful is “journaling”. Of course keeping a journal is not novel, but I starting taking it more seriously after learning about Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. I recommend the blog and podcast by Ryan Holiday called the…
I gave a quick internet-read to this blogpost by Andrew Gelman. The core of the idea is that to estimate an interaction effect a huge increase in sample size is needed compared to estimating a main effect. That is, if you power a study on main effects you could be very underpowered if you want…
I’ve been listening to the Editors podcast from the National Review (link here). I wanted to bring conservative podcasts into my feed, and this one seemed the most mainstream. It has been interesting to listen to more traditionally conservative (i.e., not Trump republican) view on current events. I recommend it. Episode 457 covered the Kansas…
Of the many challenges I encounter in communicating statistical concepts to collaborators, a common one is that p-values are seen as “transferable.” Here is a simple example to illustrate what I mean. Consider the following table, where the rows are sex (Male and Female) and the columns are smoking status (Current, Former, Never). We are…
To add a little more to this post, I’ve read several papers where the authors add some details regarding the statistical methods/tests used with the results rather than just reporting a p-value. I think this approach really adds clarity. Here is an example. First, what I see as a typical approach: We found that the…
Statistical interactions can be challenging to understand and interpret. This simple example illustrates a regression model with an interaction effect. First I generate some fake data, which allows us to know the underlying structure of the data. Let y be some generic response variable (e.g., weight). Corresponding to each y is a sex variable (M/F)…