P.Mean: Main page for the Professor Mean Website (created 2008-06-21)

P.Mean Website (created 1997-12-22, reborn at this location 2008-06-21)

Welcome to the P.Mean website. Here are the most important links:

Updates

2008-11-05. The first issue of the Monthly Mean newsletter was released today. I hope you like it. If you haven't signed up yet, it is easy. I am using a professional service, iContact, so you can be sure that your privacy will be respected and that you will be able to unsubscribe without a lot of hassles.
2008-11-03. Children's Mercy Hospital has shut down the StATS website, at least temporarily. If you try to go to any page on my old website, you will get the following message "We're sorry, but the Stats site is currently being revamped! Please check back soon." I will start negotiating with Children's Mercy to post the old material at my new website, but I am unsure how these negotiations will go. The copyright statement that was originally posted on the website before I tried to change these webpages to open source stated that individual educational use of these webpages is acceptable. If anyone has an individual educational need for any particular webpage at my old site, send me an email and I will get you a copy. If there is a favorite topic that you want covered at my new site, let me know and I will develop some new content on that topic that does not infringe on the copyright of the original page. Many of the links on this website to the content of the old website are now broken, and I will try to fix these as soon as possible.
2008-11-01. My last day at Children's Mercy Hospital was Friday, October 31. It has been a wonderful twelve years. I am looking forward to my new career as an independent statistical consultant, but I will miss many friendships that I have developed with the people I have worked with.
2008-10-09. I am starting an email letter about Statistics, called the Monthly Mean. Although the first newsletter is not yet written, I have a main newsletter page, an archive page, and a very very early draft of the November newsletter.
2008-07-09. To avoid any controversy, I am re-organizing this site to avoid duplicating material at the StATS website. Once the issues of the open source license are resolved, I will add back the appropriate links. The main page which feeds into the duplicated material is the archive. I've disabled this link. A few select categories, associated with new material are available instead.

View all updates for 2008.

The most recent website entries

P.Mean: Ethics of research into unscientific therapies (created 2008-11-15). What is a responsible ethical position on research on complementary or alternative medicine that is not based on "generally accepted" principles of science? For example, redirecting energy fields in the body; or demonstrating the positive effects of intercessory prayer (prayer on behalf of another person). It is one thing for a scientist member to say "I don't think the proposed statistical methodology is adequate to the task." It's quite another thing to say "I don't believe that there is any scientific basis for the proposed research." What then?
P.Mean: IRB approval of studies with less than adequate research integrity (created 2008-11-14). How should an IRB view its job with respect to research approval if the study design is "less than adequate" to provide valid results? Is the IRBs job only to assess for patient risk? If a study's design is poor and will not yield useful results should the IRB approve the study if there is minimal risk? Does it matter if the study is minimal risk vs greater than minimal risk?
P.Mean: Explaining CART models in simple terms (created 2008-11-05). I need some help understanding and explaining Classification and Regression Trees (CART). I am personally not familiar with this technique. When would someone select this over linear/logistic regression model?
P.Mean: Reading abstracts instead of the full article (created 2008-11-05). An interesting inquiry on the Evidence-Based Health email discussion group generated a lot of responses. A busy clinician has a limited amount of time to answer a clinical question. They carry out a quick search and find 5 decent abstracts. They have two options: 1) Look at one full-text article. 2) Look at 5 abstracts. Which do people think is preferable? It's a tricky question because both approaches have problems. Here are my thoughts on this issue.
P.Mean: Statisticians are not gatekeepers (created 2008-11-04). A discussion of the proper role of statisticians when presented with questionable data is raging in the MedStats discussion group. I added some comments recently about the dangerous tendency for us statisticians to view our roles as "gatekeepers". Here's the gist of my comments.

View all website entries for 2008.

Interesting articles, books, quotes, or websites added to this site recently.

Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics. Gerd Gigerenzer Wolfgang Gaissmaier Elke Kurz-Milcke Lisa M. Schwartz Steven Woloshin. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 2008: 8(2); 53-96. [Abstract] [PDF]. Excerpt: Many doctors, patients, journalists, and politicians alike do not understand what health statistics mean or draw wrong conclusions without noticing. Collective statistical illiteracy refers to the widespread inability to understand the meaning of numbers. For instance, many citizens are unaware that higher survival rates with cancer screening do not imply longer life, or that the statement that mammography screening reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer by 25% in fact means that 1 less woman out of 1,000 will die of the disease. We provide evidence that statistical illiteracy (a) is common to patients, journalists, and physicians; (b) is created by nontransparent framing of information that is sometimes an unintentional result of lack of understanding but can also be a result of intentional efforts to manipulate or persuade people; and (c) can have serious consequences for health.
Components of placebo effect: randomised controlled trial in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. T. J. Kaptchuk, J. M. Kelley, L. A. Conboy, R. B. Davis, C. E. Kerr, E. E. Jacobson, I. Kirsch, R. N. Schyner, B. H. Nam, L. T. Nguyen, M. Park, A. L. Rivers, C. McManus, E. Kokkotou, D. A. Drossman, P. Goldman, A. J. Lembo. Bmj 2008: 336(7651); 999-1003. [Medline] [Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]. Description: The authors suggest that the placebo affect can be separated into three components: the process of observation itself (the Hawthorne effect), the therapeutic ritual associated with a placebo, and the patient-practitioner interactions. They then test this empirically in a three arm single blind study. There were significant differences between the arms of the study, and the effect of the patient-practitioner interactions was the strongest effect.
The Myth of Equipoise in Phase 1 Clinical Trials. Adil E. Shamoo, PhD. Posted 11/05/2008 at Medscape J Med. 2008;10(11):254. Note that a free registriation may be required. Excerpt: Phase 1 clinical research trials using healthy volunteers are conducted for the sole purpose of serving the public good (a utilitarian concept). The literature on equipoise analysis does not exclude phase 1 trials with controls or healthy volunteers from the claim of being in "equipoise." The continued perpetuation of this ethically and scientifically invalid concept undermines the ethics of research with human subjects. URL: www.medscape.com/viewarticle/582554
Interesting quote: The statistician who supposes that his main contribution to the planning of an experiment will involve statistical theory, finds repeatedly that he makes his most valuable contribution simply by persuading the investigator to explain why he wishes to do the experiment, by persuading him to justify the experimental treatments, and to explain why it is that the experiment, when completed, will assist him in his research. -- Gertrude M. Cox. (I can't recall the original source where I found this quote. Sorry!)
Development of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (CPGs): comparing approaches. Tari Turner, Marie Misso, Claire Harris, and Sally Green. Implementation Science 2008, 3:45doi:10.1186/1748-5908-3-45. [Abstract] [PDF] Description: This article identified publications on developing clinical practice guidelines. The review found six relevant publications. All these publications stressed the need for a multidisciplinary panel, consumer involvement, identification of clinical questions, systematic searches for evidence, consultation beyond the development group, and regular reviews and updates.

View all interesting articles, books, quotes, and websites.

The most recent personal entries

Steve, Cathy, and Nicholas -- My niece is a blogger (created 2008-11-17). My niece, Kathleen Gier, is writing a blog about varsity sports for the Kansas City Star. You can view it at varsity.kansascity.com/user/blogs/3242. She writes about high school sports with a special emphasis on her high school, Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Overland Park. She's been doing this for about a month, but today is the first day I have had time to check it out. She has nine blog entries, so far. I think she writes quite well, but I may be biased.
Steve, Cathy, and Nicholas -- Nicholas loses his first baby tooth (created 2008-09-18). For a couple of weeks, Nicholas has had a loose tooth. He would show everyone how he could push it forward until it was almost horizontal. On Sunday, on the way into church Nicholas shouted out "The wind blew away my tooth." He opened his mouth and there was a big gap where his loose tooth was.
Steve, Cathy, and Nicholas -- Nicholas the swimmer (created 2008-08-08). Nicholas has always enjoyed summers at the swimming pool, but in 2008, he developed some really amazing swimming skills. He is mostly self-taught, though he has gotten some informal instruction from Cathy and at the Bright Horizons summer day care program. What's truly amazing to me is how easily he glides under the water. Here are some pictures.

The most popular pages, excluding home page and various archive pages (last checked 2008-11-17)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 2008-11-18.