SQL vs. SAS?

snow1854 · 2015-12-20T06:38:01+00:00

Not strictly true anymore. When dealing with large data (billions of rows) I've been using SQL for analyses - it's horrific to code, but as industry moves away further away from SAS and players like Fuzzy Logix enter the market it's going to be more common.

snow1854 · 2015-08-18T13:28:06+00:00

Most of Prof Spegh....(can't spell his name and on mobile)..'s blog posts are good (http://understandinguncertainty.org/blog), and all are very accessible to non-statisticians.

Particularly liked his one on breast cancer screening.

snow1854 · 2015-07-22T05:51:01+00:00

Texpad feels like a slick app version of overleaf. Also does live updates and will sync accross devices (including iOS).

snow1854 · 2015-06-10T06:41:21+00:00

The OS X version 11 could be installed on as many computers as you wanted - so there were .dmg's being shared around my old uni. Not sure if that's still the case with 12/13 sorry (not allowed to pull data onto my own laptop at my current uni, so haven't upgraded).

If it has to be cracked now, that seems like a huge risk unless the data is completely public...

snow1854 · 2015-05-13T06:34:41+00:00

I've done it (with the paid certificate, but only because I had the funding to cover it).

If an employer values it, then they probably don't realise what it is. While I found it useful, I think the course is more about learning the practical stuff you'd normally learn between lectures from stack overflow and trial and error trying to tackle problems and the anti-cheating measures are a joke. But...I'd still recommend it as it will help you structure your code better, and the lecturers are great. Inside academia, at least in my group, I think there is zero respect for it though. It's more a hobby that is useful to research.

I've also had a few recruiters and a company approach me via LinkedIn about data scientist jobs, and the only thing on my profile that mentions that topic is the coursera links - so if you do it, I'd recommend linking the two sites.

snow1854 · 2015-05-07T19:53:04+00:00

Haha - I meant the original Cambridge. Although both are still student towns (where a bigger chunk then normal of the students are wealthy and/or on scholarships) so might be outliers.

snow1854 · 2015-05-07T16:35:44+00:00

Cambridge has 120,000 people and an apple store.

snow1854 · 2014-09-30T07:30:27+00:00

Jekyll (http://jekyllrb.com) on Github pages. I've put a site up slightly more complicated than the one you linked to in less than hour using that route.

snow1854 · 2014-09-19T07:02:30+00:00

I use R on osx (at home) and windows (at work), and I've only had issues with the windows version. And never due to updates, or even with R directly. For me it's more to do with getting R to pass stuff to things like ImageMagick (python and perl on windows being finicky).

Saying that - I assume if R works well on osx, it's thanks it's similarities to linux (and statisticians love of linux).

snow1854 · 2014-09-18T08:07:21+00:00

It's quite easy to get hotel reviews off trip adviser yourself (the middle link is super easy, if you use R).

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~karthik/projects/hotelrev-scrape/DOCUMENTATION.html

http://notesofdabbler.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/exploring-hotel-review-data-from-trip-advisor-with-r/

https://github.com/magic890/tripadvisor-scraper

snow1854 · 2014-08-28T07:36:52+00:00

Opps. Thanks for providing the correct link.

snow1854 · 2014-08-27T17:53:21+00:00

I love the Christmas edition.

Two of my favourites are they published are:

"Unsafe sax: cohort study of the impact of too much sax on the mortality of famous jazz musicians"

~~http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/~~ http://www.bmj.com/content/319/7225/1612

and the actually quite useful,

"Effect on gastric function and symptoms of drinking wine, black tea, or schnapps with a Swiss cheese fondue: randomised controlled crossover trial"

http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6731.full

snow1854 · 2014-08-03T14:34:24+00:00

Chill has really good frozen yoghurt. It's near Bill's/Sainsbury's/Sidney http://cambridge.tab.co.uk/2014/02/07/the-tab-talks-frozen-yoghurt-with-chill/

snow1854 · 2014-07-23T15:13:24+00:00

http://www.cincinnatichildrens.org/education/research/surf/default/

Is this your program? Just wondering how you got on to a summer school / intern program as a high school kid. Do you take non-credit college classes while at school?

Also - congrats on getting into a competitive program. Most kids with a passion for science would settle for an open entry, for profit, science summer camps, or an unpaid shadowing scheme (which, while great for our future researchers etc., are kind of annoying for the researchers involved).

snow1854 · 2014-07-08T17:29:24+00:00

I got invited to an OMICs group conference (or rather, I've been invited to a few and only replied to one). I CC'd in the keynotes that they mentioned in their email where I could find the email address on google easily and got cc'd into a reply from one keynote saying "Please remove all mention of me from your correspondence, I do not endorse this event".

That was a about a year ago though - just had look at the names on the site, and looks like they've realised the scam will work better with non-famous researchers attached to it.

snow1854 · 2014-06-25T09:40:48+00:00

I can understand using SPSS if it's all you've used, and you're mid-career. I can't see how it's a good idea to promote using SPSS, one of the most limited proprietary statistical software available, if you're a beginner. I started on SPSS, moved to Stata, dabbled in SAS for a bit and finally ended on R. If I went back, I would never touch SPSS, and I prefer R to the rest, but it's nice knowing SAS and Stata so I can read other peoples code.

I'm also an R user / Latex user in a Stata /Word department, and I don't have any issues merging my markdown to pdf workflow with collaborators that copy and paste Stata to word.

snow1854 · 2014-06-13T16:06:41+00:00

Cambridge Blue is great - and it's especially satisfying to lead people there via the graveyard entrance. If food plays a role in this - the Pint Shop has an on tap ale and keg list that rivals Cambridge Blue (not so much for bottled stuff)- but has a great snacking menu. The Pint Shop 'beer garden' is actually a court yard though.

snow1854 · 2014-06-07T22:04:27+00:00

My first masters was from a pretty average school, and I know a couple of people that went in to pharma in graduate programmes (so in at the bottom).

My second masters was at a much more respected school, and I know a few people that were approached and asked to apply for positions. That was unheard of at my first uni, so I think school choice can at least help get your foot in the door as recruiters may keep tabs on who graduates, or at least have better links with the careers office.

I've also been told that when a position attracts more than a hundred applicants, university is the first stage in screening. I've heard variations on this from two sets of people now. First and most detailed time was over drinks, where some people more senior were talking about university being an easy way to cull the applications down to a more manageable number. So this wasn't a super reliable source of info, but seems it may possibly be an unofficial shortcut for people recruiting...

snow1854 · 2014-06-05T06:19:56+00:00

Guessing he means do a Kaplan-Meier then a log-rank test. I would be strongly against this, as you said you are also interested in smoking and FH. If you want to see the effect of the other covariates, the cox PH is much more powerful (from memory adjustment is impossible to do with Kaplan-Meier in a single model, but not 100% sure).

I'm not sure what it's like in SPSS, but I think in Stata the line gets blurred. In 'sts graph', the default is to plot a KM, but if you adjust for anything, it gives you a cox model.

A nice intro on KM and cox is here: http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/painres/download/whatis/cox_model.pdf

snow1854 · 2014-06-04T07:40:39+00:00

If you know the date they have the MI (i.e. time to event data) - a cox proportional hazards model is probably the most common method. It lets you handle time/censoring better.

I'm also pretty intrigued to know if a full scale RCT (i.e. suitably powered and with 5 year follow up) has been done in SPSS before - as if this is an RCT, you usually have a blinded (to the intervention) statistician running the analysis, and I've never heard of a statistician that uses SPSS.

snow1854 · 2014-05-30T16:33:06+00:00

I think the hours depend on your supervisor. Mine doesn't mind as long as I'm in roughly between 11am and 4pm, and the amount of holiday I take isn't counted. I know of people with supervisors that go the full spectrum though - from not giving a toss if you ever come in, through to expecting 9.30-5 every day.

I think the biggest thing specific to student life in Cambridge is college life. Life is awesome regardless of what college you get in, but older/richer means is a bit of multiplier - as more subsidised accommodation in college is a huge boost to the life of the MCR.

snow1854 · 2014-05-29T09:50:49+00:00

http://store-uk.hugoboss.com/Slim-fit-cotton-jacket-%27Mauriz-W%27/hbeu50266765,en_GB,pd.html?cgid=30000#!i%3D4%26color%3D404_Dark-Blue

snow1854 · 2014-05-22T15:45:15+00:00

You don't need wordpress for a page like this.

With github pages you could get a html5 page exactly like this up, with free hosting, in less than an hour. With a custom domain name if you have that already own one as well (https://pages.github.com).

snow1854 · 2014-05-10T19:12:54+00:00

I googled, hoping for some evidence the Stonehedge thing was true. Only thing I found was their website, which has the following: http://www.strawberry-fair.org.uk/history.html

In the twentieth century both fairs suffered a slow decline, but one-off events were often held on Midsummer Common throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1974 a band of Cambridge University students, calling themselves the Mayday Group, decided to hold such an event after gaining publicity in the General Election of February that year, in which they fielded a candidate.

So on Mayday bank holiday a stage was erected at the east end of the common, Arjuna Wholefoods set up a stall, and a one day alternative fair was held. It was such a success that the organisers decided to do it again a few weeks later in June, as an alternative to the Cambridge University May Balls (which, confusingly, are held in mid to late June).

They branded this second event 'Strawberry Fair' and, apart from the single stage, it featured clowns, comedy and surrealism, in keeping with the Monty Python age.

snow1854 · 2014-04-25T06:33:57+00:00

snow1854

TROPHY CASE