Blog Category
Epi 101: Indirect Age Adjustment by Hand and in R
Posted on April 18, 2019
Sometimes, age-specific death counts are hard to come by. Something happened that doesn’t allow you to know how many people died in each age group, but you know the total number of people who died. So how do you account for differences in the age distribution of the population? Glad you asked!
Epi 101: Direct Age Adjustment by Hand and With R
Posted on April 16, 2019 1 Comment
When comparing two populations, it is essential that you know if the differences are due to different age distributions. Age can confound a lot of findings, especially if the outcome is strongly influenced by age.
What if Vaccines Are Harmful?
Posted on April 13, 2019 2 Comments
If vaccines are as bad as anti-vaccine people and groups claim that they are, where is the evidence? We’ve seen other diseases and conditions be identified and dealt with. Why not these bad vaccine outcomes? Could it be that it’s not as bad as antivaxxers say it is?
Analysis of Public Health Inequities Using R Programming
Posted on April 8, 2019
R programming can help with a lot of tasks. In this blog post, I show you how it can help understand and visualize inequities in Baltimore with regards to poverty and violence.
The Canaries in the Coalmine
Posted on April 5, 2019 3 Comments
Anecdotes are not data, but they could be canaries in the coal mine that are still worth looking into. If we don’t do due diligence and look into them, what could happen? What could we delay or even miss out on doing?
Don’t Get Rid of Your Outliers Just Because
Posted on March 31, 2019 5 Comments
What happens when you get rid of your outliers? Depending on which outliers and how you chose to get rid of them, nothing might happen… Or you can royally screw things up.
Poopooing the P-Value
Posted on March 24, 2019
Have we become too dependent on the p-value being greater than or less than 0.05 in order to make our decisions? Yes. Probably. Maybe. I’m 95% confident we have…
The Student-As-a-Customer Model Will Be the End of Academia
Posted on March 20, 2019
More and more colleges and universities are treating students as customers, showing them how to push a button or fill in a formula without teaching them how to think and solve problems. I might be old school, but I’d rather train and mentor my future colleagues instead of just showing students how to push a button.
One-Way ANOVA Analyses, by Hand and in R
Posted on March 17, 2019 1 Comment
A student asked for help with a statistical analysis the other night, and I was happy to help. However, he threw me a curveball when he told me he needed to conduct an ANOVA test using only summary data. That is, all he had was the table of results (from a publication) and not the […]
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