December 2011
25 posts
4 tags
Grad students in (bio)statistics - do a postdoc!
Up until about 20 years ago, postdocs were scarce in Statistics. In contrast, during the same time period, it was rare for a Biology PhD to go straight into a tenure track position.
Driven mostly by the availability of research funding for those working in applied areas, postdocs are becoming much more common in our field and I think this is great. It is great for PhD students to expand their...
4 tags
An R function to map your Twitter Followers
I wrote a little function to make a personalized map of who follows you or who you follow on Twitter. The idea for this function was inspired by some plots I discussed in a previous post. I also found a lot of really useful code over at flowing data here.
The function uses the packages twitteR, maps, geosphere, and RColorBrewer. If you don’t have the packages installed, when you source the...
On Hard and Soft Money
As the academic job hunting season goes into effect many will be applying to a variety of different types of departments. In statistics, there is a pretty big separation between statistics departments, which tend to be in arts & sciences colleges, and biostatistics departments, which tend to be in medical or public health institutions. A key difference between these two types of departments is...
1 tag
New features on Simply Statistics
Check out our Editor’s Picks and Interviews pages.
In Greece, a statistician faces life in prison for...
In a recent post I described the importance of government statisticians. Well, apparently in Greece it is a dangerous job, as Andreas Georgiou, the person in charge of the Greek statistics office, found out.
So far, though, his efforts have been met with resistance, strikes and a criminal investigation that could lead to life in prison for Georgiou.
What are his efforts ?
His first...
4 tags
Interview with Nathan Yau of FlowingData
Nathan Yau
Nathan Yau is a graduate student in statistics at UCLA and the author of the extremely popular data visualization blog flowingdata.com. He recently published a book Visualize This - a really nice guide to modern data visualization using R, Illustrator and Javascript - which should be on the bookshelf of any statistician working on data visualization.
Do you consider yourself a...
2 tags
Dear editors/associate editors/referees, Please...
The review times for most journals in our field are ridiculous. Check out Figure 1 here. A careful review takes time, but not six months. Let’s be honest, those papers are sitting on desks for the great majority of those six months. But here is what really kills me: waiting six months for a review basically saying the paper is not of sufficient interest to the readership of the journal....
4 tags
Smoking is a choice, breathing is not.
Over the last week or so I’ve been posting about the air pollution levels in Beijing, China. The twitter feed from the US Embassy there makes it easy to track the hourly levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and you can use this R code to make a graph of the data.
One problem with talking about particulate matter levels is that the units are a bit abstract. We usually talk in terms of...
4 tags
The Supreme Court's interpretation of statistical...
Summary/Background
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in the case Mayo Collaborative Services vs. Prometheus Laboratories (No 10-1150). At issue is a patent Prometheus Laboratories holds for making decisions about the treatment of disease on the basis of a measurement of a specific, naturally occurring molecule and a corresponding calculation. The specific language at issue is a...
Interview w/ Mario Marazzi, Puerto Rico Institute...
[Desplace hacia abajo para traducción al español]
In my opinion, the importance of government statisticians is underappreciated. In the US, agencies such as the CDC, the Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics employ statisticians to help collect and analyze data that contribute to important policy decisions. How many students will enroll in public schools this year? Is there a type II...
4 tags
Plotting BeijingAir Data
Here’s a bit of R code for scraping the BejingAir Twitter feed and plotting the hourly PM2.5 values for the past 24 hours. The script defaults to the past 24 hours but you can modify that by simply changing the value for the variable ‘n’.
You can just grab the code from this R script. Note that you need to use the latest version of the ‘twitteR’ package because the...
Clean Air A 'Luxury' In Beijing's Pollution Zone →
In case you thought it was safe to stay indoors and avoid all the air pollution out there, NPR correspondent Louisa Lim had her Beijing apartment tested for particulate matter (PM) levels.
Inside the living room, where the kids construct dens out of sofa cushions, the level of air pollution — or, more specifically, fine particulate matter — was an estimated 208 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic...
Outrage Grows Over Air Pollution and China’s... →
The disruptions the haze causes to daily life are raising questions about the economic cost, and the government’s ability to ensure the safety of the population.
One consequence of the pollution is delays at the airport. But
An announcement at the airport made no mention of pollution, attributing the cancellations and delays to “the weather condition.” That has long been the government line:...
Beijing Air (cont'd)
Following up a bit on my previous post on air pollution in Beijing, China, my brother forwarded me a link to some work conducted by Steven Q. Andrews on comparing particulate matter (PM) air pollution in China versus Europe and the US. China does not officially release fine PM measurements (PM2.5) and furthermore does not have an official standard for that metric. In the US, PM standards are...
Who can resist Biostatistics Ryan Gosling? →
I do wonder what life would be like without the central limit theorem.
1 tag
Preventing Errors through Reproducibility
Checklist mania has hit clinical medicine thanks to people like Peter Pronovost and many others. The basic idea is that simple and short checklists along with changes to clinical culture can prevent major errors from occurring in medical practice. One particular success story is Pronovost’s central line checklist which dramatically reduced bloodstream infections in hospital intensive care...
Online Learning, Personalized →
At least 36 schools nationwide are combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises using a software program based on Salman Khan’s popular YouTube lessons.
Two quotes from this article intrigued me. First
Mr. Khan’s critics say that his model is really a return to rote learning under a high-tech facade, and that it would be far better to help children puzzle through a...
5 tags
Citizen science makes statistical literacy...
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Amy Marcus has a piece on the Citizen Science movement, focusing on citizen science in health in particular. I am fully in support of this enthusiasm and a big fan of citizen science - if done properly. There have already been some pretty big success stories. As more companies like Fitbit and 23andMe spring up, it is really easy to collect data about yourself...
The worlds has changed from analogue to digital... →
2 tags
Reverse scooping
I would like to define a new term: reverse scooping is when someone publishes your idea after you, and doesn’t cite you. It has happened to me a few times. What does one do? I usually send a polite message to the authors with a link to my related paper(s). These emails are usually ignored, but not always. Most times I don’t think it is malicious though. In fact, I almost reverse...
New S.E.C. Tactics Yield Actions Against Hedge... →
A new “analytics” division of the Securities and Exchange Commission tasked with mining hedge fund data announced actions against six individuals and three hedge fund firms for alleged fraud.
3 tags
Reproducible Research in Computational Science
First of all, thanks to Rafa for scooping me with my own article. Not sure if that’s reverse scooping or recursive scooping or….
The latest issue of Science has a special section on Data Replication and Reproducibility. As part of the section I wrote a brief commentary on the need for reproducible research in computational science. Science has a pretty tight word limit for it’s...
Roger's perspective on reproducible research... →
Beijing Air
If you’re interested in know what the air quality looks like in Beijing China, the US Embassy there has a particulate matter monitor on its roof that tweets the level of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) every hour (see @BeijingAir). In case you’re not used to staring at PM2.5 values all the time, let me provide some context.
The US National Ambient Air Quality Standard for the 24-hour...
DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data →
DNA sequencing is becoming faster and cheaper, outrunning the ability to store, transmit and analyze the data.
From the article:
But the data challenges are also creating opportunities. There is demand for people trained in bioinformatics, the convergence of biology and computing. Numerous bioinformatics companies, like SoftGenetics, DNAStar, DNAnexus and NextBio, have sprung up to offer...