What's new (created 2012-04-09)

This page has moved to a new website.

I've made a lot of updates to my website. Here are some of the recent highlights:

I gave a talk at the University of Iowa on April 5. You can see the handout that I used for this talk. I tossed in my classic placebo cartoon

just for kicks and also shed a graph of accrual.

I got burned yet again by the tab character, so I thought I'd highlight my woes with those pesky tab characters.

Someone asked a colleague why they were insisting on co-authorship when they were providing the statistical consulting for free. This is a new one on me, so I took some time to outline when and why statisticians should be included as co-authors.

Someon asked about making predictions based on just the correlation. It's not possible, unless you have additional information.

10. P.Mean: Why use a Bayesian adaptive trial? (created 2012-03-07). The Bayesian adaptive trial controls the probability of randomizing a patient to each of the proposed dose groups. As data emerges during the study, the probabilities are updated so that you are less likely to randomize a patient to a dose level that has far too much toxicity, far too little efficacy, or which does not contribute much information about the dose-response curve. The Bayesian adaptive trial also allows you to close certain arms of the trial if the dose is clearly inappropriate for further study.

February 2012

9. P.Mean: How sample size calculations are reported in the literature (created 2012-02-23). I am preparing a webinar on sample size calculations and wanted to examine some examples in the published literature. There were lots of interesting examples in an open source journal called Trials. I only included a few examples in my webinar, but I wanted to save the examples I found here in case I want to expand the talk.

9. P.Mean: Questions for a panel on statistical consulting (created 2012-02-08). I am participating on a panel discussion about statistical consulting. The organizer suggested several questions that we might want to tackle if there are not that many questions from the audience. I thought they were pretty interesting questions.

8. P.Mean: Percentage of care that does not have a medical basis (created 2012-02-06). At a meeting I was attending, a statistic came up that has a controversial heritage "at least 50% of medical care has no valid scientific basis." The number cited is not always 50%, but it is almost always a number that is low enough to be alarming. Here are some resources on the basis of this statistic.