Bob O'Hara › Comments

Dear PLS researchers and users, I am pleased to inform that the PLS Path Modeling module of XLSTAT software (XLSTAT-PLSPM, version 2009.6) is now fully compatible with Excel 2007. Excel 2007 users can also enjoy a new ribbon together with other new features of the XLSTAT environment. A detailed description of the XLSTAT-PLSPM product is available at: http://www.xlstat.com/en... A 30-days free trial version can be downloaded from the XLSTAT website: http://www.xlstat.com/en... Several tutorials are available at: http://www.xlstat.com/en... For any further information, please refer to Mr. Thierry Fahmy (fahmy@xlstat.com). With my best wishes for a Healthy, Prosperous and Scientifically Profitable 2010! Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk, leaving the subject line blank. - Bob O'Hara from email

Hi Wishing you all a very happy X-Mas and a lovely New Year - Bob O'Hara from email

Interesting article about a new way to run SAS... via a web browser or an API: http://www.sasnetwork.com Check the posting "Analytics 3.0. What is it? What are the risks and opportunities?". You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk, leaving the subject line blank. - Bob O'Hara from email

Merry Christmas from Stelfox Please find below a selection of our current biometric vacancies Senior Statistician - Basel (Switzerland) - CW122183 - CONTRACT An exciting position within a new team at a top 10 pharmaceutical organisation. Statistical Programmer France (Paris) - CW 91822426 CHF - €70,000 - €90,000 Statistician required for a growing Pharmaceutical organisation. Global Head Statistical Programming Germany - CW 899987 £Negotiable My client, a leading consultancy require a open minded experienced leader SAS Programmer - Holland - CW - 97798701 €60,000 Great chance to join a top 15 Pharma in Holland, previous Pharma experience essential Senior Statistician - London - CW 0941548 - £40 - £58 ph (Contract) Expanding Pharmaceutical organisation require safety statisticians to join their PD unit. Senior Statistician - Germany - CW 9989450 €90,000 Growing Biotech in Switzerland require a statistician. Oncology experience preferred. Senior SAS Programmer - UK (South East)-... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

Dear Allstat If you've been thinking about the New Year and new beginnings, SRG Clinical can help. Why not check out our list of Biostatistics and Programming vacancies that could kick start your 2010. For a confidential discussion please call + 44(0) 207 562 1792 or email helena@srgclinical.com. If you are happy in your role but can recommend a friend or colleague who may be interested, please feel free to pass on these details - we offer referral incentives . Associate Biostatistics Director <http://cxgmail.net/t...> Permanent, Netherlands Up to 95,000€ + car + bonus, relocation & benefits Biostatistician <http://cxgmail.net/t...> Permanent, Cambridge Up to £45,000 per annum & benefits Expert Statistician <http://cxgmail.net/t...> x 2 Permanent, Switzerland Excellent salary, bonus & relocation SAS Programmer <http://cxgmail.net/t...> Contract, Belgium Excellent hourly... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

With apologies, details of the post were not on the website when I sent this message last Fri. For anyone interested they are now posted. - Bob O'Hara from email

Dear Sir/Madam, Pursuant to my query on advantage of KL vs. LRT, GOF KS, ...., I would like to share the responses that I have obtained from ANZStat and AllStat. Acknowledging all members replied to me, but my question is still unanswered! Below you can find all the replies I received so far. Regards, Ali ================1====================== I think from the principal of KL distance, we get AIC and Likelihood ratio test statistic. So it is not justified to compare KL with AIC or LRT. However, BIC is totally different than these KL/AIC/LRT. I personally prefer BIC, because if there are more than good model then BIC selects the model with less parameters. However, AIC and other method does not certify this. However AIC is efficient than BIC. But concept of efficiency is totally driven; so may be fraudulent idea. =============2====================== we found it useful for a dynamic model selection issue in "Semi-parametric dynamic time series modelling with applications to detecting... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

Sorry to have misspelled the link. The correct, as already pointed out, is http://MedicalBiostatistics.synthasite.com. My apology. ~Abhaya Indrayan - Bob O'Hara from email

Dear Team - Would you please advertise the course below on your mail listings. Thank you Kathy Welcome - NEW COURSE - 10th 11th February 2010 Multivariable model-building A pragmatic approach to regression analysis based on fractional polynomials for modelling continuous variables A two-day course by Prof Patrick Royston (London) & Prof Willi Sauerbrei (Freiburg) Course aims * To appreciate the issues surrounding the development of a multivariable model in observational studies * To learn about strategies for selecting variables in such a model * To learn about the fractional polynomials method for modelling continuous predictors * To be introduced to multivariable model-building using the multivariable fractional polynomials (MFP) method * To understand methods for modelling interactions in randomized trials and observational studies * To understand issues around model (in)stability * On issues in spline modeling and comparison to MFP in examples * To learn how to work in a practical... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

The link has a typo - just change it to http://medicalbiostatistics.synthasite.com/ and it works fine. - Bob O'Hara from email

There is no issue here of junk or spam or a link being otherwise broken. The only small issue is a typo, which statistically-minded people should all be able to spot. http://MedicalBiostatisitcs.synthasite.com should be http://MedicalBiostatistics.synthasite.com Nick n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk Martin Holt Abhaya Indrayan is a member of MedStats, and I, for one, am looking forward to seeing his book. I think we can wait until the link is restored, rather than complain more than once when the problem has already been raised. I daresay that Abhaya will notify the list when this has been done. - Bob O'Hara from email

The courses confirmed so far for 2010 are as follows. Higher Certificate Module 1 - Revision Day 19 April 2010 Higher Certificate Module 2 - Revision Day 20 April 2010 Developing your career as a statistician - making CPD work for you 23 April 2010 Multilevel Modelling 6-7 May 2010 Presenting Data 13 May 2010 Consultancy Skills 1 June 2010 Inspirational Leadership within a statistical organisation 14-15 October 2010 Presenting Data 11 November 2010 Multilevel Modelling 25-26 November 2010 Please visit www.rss.org.uk/courses for full details and registration forms. For all enquiries relating to RSS PDC courses in 2010, please contact Sarah Barker at the Society - s.barker@rss.org.uk or +44 (0) 20 7614 3915. You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk, leaving the subject line blank. - Bob O'Hara from email

Hi David, Indeed I had read that post, but hadn't connected the two. You are right and your post below highlights the point exactly. To think, the poster to whom your later message was replying was ready to change an opinion with neither subject matter knowledge nor statistical expertise. Wide availability of software and data is both exciting and frightening! - Bob O'Hara from email

Abhaya Indrayan is a member of MedStats, and I, for one, am looking forward to seeing his book. I think we can wait until the link is restored, rather than complain more than once when the problem has already been raised. I daresay that Abhaya will notify the list when this has been done. - Bob O'Hara from email

Quite disappointment when the link is not working. Looks like it is a SPAM or JUNK? With regards, Venkata Putcha - Bob O'Hara from email

ANNOUNCEMENT Second Edition of my book Medical Biostatistics, published by Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, appeared some time ago. In keeping with its promise of (medical+bio)>statistics, the book is heavily biased toward medical issues.The book tries to provide a new perspective to the subject by focusing on medical uncertainties and emphasizing how some of these can be managed by biostatistics methods. The book discusses almost all routinely used statistical methods in medicine and health, such as CIs, tests, regression, multivariate methods and survival analysis but also contains discussion on normal ranges in medical practice, evidence-based medicine, clinimetrics, epidemiological measurement of health and disease, sensitivity-specificity/predictivities, ROC curve, statistical CIs vs. tests of significance, quality control in health care, and statistical fallacies. One review called it "probably the most complete book on biostatistics". For more details, see... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

Dear Colleagues You are warmly invited to the following S3RI special seminar at the University of Southampton in the New Year. Directions and a map can be found on: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/about... The University of Southampton Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI) SPECIAL SEMINAR Thursday 21st January at 4pm in the Maths Building (Highfield Campus, building 54) room 4A, followed by a drinks reception Professor David Firth (University of Warwick) "Getting it right on election night" ABSTRACT On the day of the UK General Election in May 2005, broadcasters were able to predict the Labour majority of 66 seats, even before any votes had been counted. In this talk some of the statistical methods behind that prediction will be described. You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk, leaving the subject line blank. - Bob O'Hara from email

Thanks for these last two emails, Nigel. When I worked as a troubleshooter in clinical diagnostics, it was almost a rule of thumb that if you needed to use statistics to prove a cause, either the effect was not really that great, or you hadn't really identified the correct cause (assuming that the effect was "great".) I don't think there can be any doubt in anyone's mind that the climate has shifted. This leads to 2 questions: Will it continue to shift ? What are the possible cause(s). Over relatively recent years, changes are small and it is tempting to bring in statisticians because of that. Similarly, changes in emissions. But really, it is generally agreed that meaningful research has to be done over large periods of time, to maximize potential changes. So are statisticians required ? It does not take a statistician to understand that if Vikings were farming Greenland during the Mediaeval Warm Period, our climate change has been less than must have occurred at that time. We are in... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

Assessment Analyst/Psychometrician Grade 6, £27,183 - £29,704 The Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry is seeking to appoint a second assessment analyst to support the programmes of assessment across all academic areas. You will provide a high quality analysis and psychometric service for all Schools of the College. You will have a good honours degree with a high statistical content and ideally a higher degree in a relevant area. You will be able to use IT systems and statistical packages efficiently and effectively and will have demonstrated experience of data analysis. This position requires excellent team working and the ability to work independently and manage your own deadlines. For an informal discussion about this post please contact Dr Chris Ricketts on 01752 586884 or email chris.ricketts@pms.ac.uk however applications must be made in accordance with the details below. For an application pack please email jobs@pms.ac.uk or request via the job vacancies section of the... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

Moreover David, I would be appalled if even statisticians attempted such an analysis with no subject matter knowledge or intelligent colleagues with such knowledge to provide advice. A doubly compounded error, I should say. Of course, I wouldn't leave it to "intelligent" software to make decisions either, however. - Bob O'Hara from email

=============================================================== CALL FOR PAPERS AI Space Odyssey, Special Issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems Submissions due for review: 19 February 2010 Publication date: September/October 2010 http://www.computer.org/portal... ============================================================== IEEE Intelligent Systems seeks original papers describing research on AI in Space. This topic has been the focus of earlier special issues, but this call is interested in a glimpse of the future from our standpoint in 2010, and hence the theme AI Space Odyssey. In anticipation of long-duration space exploration missions to the Moon and Mars, likely by many nations, we are looking for papers describing how AI has made missions possible and will help make missions a success. Whereas in the 1980s and 1990s, researchers saw AI as a panacea for intelligent autonomous systems, the AI technology used today in space applications is often regarded... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

Dear Colleagues, The full program and associated abstracts for the Statistical Modelling and Inference Conference, being held to celebrate Murray Aitkin's 70th birthday, is now available at; http://www.aitkinconference.sc... You are also reminded that early bird registration for this event closes on January 15th, 2010. Kind Regards, Clair. Dr Clair Alston School of Mathematical Sciences Queensland University of Technology GPO Box 2434 Brisbane, QLD, 4001 Telephone: (07) 31381287 Fax: (07) 31382310 You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk, leaving the subject line blank. - Bob O'Hara from email

Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics Queensland Clinical Trials & Biostatistics Centre School of Population Health, University of Queensland This position is being readvertised. Dynamic Biostatistician needed to contribute to Clinical Trials Research, Consulting and Teaching in the area of Biostatistics. The Queensland Clinical Trials & Biostatistics Centre (QCTBC) was established by the University of Queensland within the School of Population Health in recognition of the need for a specialised centre to promote clinical trials and biostatistical research and services within the region and beyond. QCTBC provides expertise and infrastructure to design, conduct and facilitate high quality clinical trials and biostatistical research with academic and industry collaborators to improve human health outcomes. The School of Population Health of the University of Queensland has an international reputation for research and teaching excellence in epidemiology, biostatistics, tropical and... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

I am shocked and stunned at the notion that you feel comfortable with changing your beliefs as a result of " Just simple regression, no sophisticated ARIMA" . Are you not aware that the significance tests you report REQUIRE that the errors from the model have a mean of "near zero" for all subsets of time and that the errors have to be proven to not have any autoprojective structure and that the parameters for the model are invariant over time and that the errors have constant variance. (apologies for a run-on sentence ! ) I don't practice heart surgery and non-statisticians shouldn't attempt to practice statistics unless they are accompanied by intelligent colleagues or intelligent software acting on behalf of the absent intelligent colleagues. Dave Reilly Senior Vice President Automatic Forecasting Systems www.autobox.com 215-675-0652 (office) 215-353-7087 (cell) - Bob O'Hara from email

Hi Nigel Thanks for this very interesting summary and the links I¹m the airhead who changed her mind. Regret to tell you I¹ve now changed it back again. Why? Analyzed the 800k data from BBC. Separated into 50 consecutive EONs of 16k years each. Then regressed temperature on CO2. Just simple regression, no sophisticated ARIMA Results at 95% CL: 38 significant positive, 7 ns positive, 4 ns negative, 1 negative p = .051 So there is 12/50 = 24% chance that we are living in a 16k yr period where there is no association between temperature and CO2. The graphs are a mess too, [email me if you would like to see] So I am a sceptic about limiting carbon emissions, BUT The most serious issue, that needs addressing right now is DEFORESTATION ­ and human action can influence events Its most serious, because its most IRREVERSIBLE. We can clean the smoke stacks this year or next. If we over fish this year, we can under fish next. If we substitute bio-fuel for food this year, we can abut face next.... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

Dear Allstatters, As promised here is my summary of the responses I received. The original email I sent is attached at the bottom. In total I only received 6 responses (7 if you include me) to the questions I posed. In addition, there were 6 other responders who sent comments but who did not answer the questions. I have also decided to include the 3 responses to Anatoly Zhigljavsky's query on temperature records that went to the ALLSTAT list instead of direct to Anatoly himself. My main reason for posting this query was to find out the level of involvement & interest of statisticians in the climate debate. Although no meaningful conclusions can be drawn from the responses to my questions, I am going to contrast the total number of responses (12 or 15 if you include Anatoly) I received with other questions I have posed in the past. Looking through my email folders, I received 6 responses to an SPC query, 11 responses to a classification analysis query and 8 responses to a variant of... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

Dear Allstatters, As promised in my summary email, here is a list of all the links sent to me by respondents. First up, a reminder of the 3 links I included in my original query. . The people at the centre of the ClimateGate storm include authors of a famous paper published in 1999 which has since become known as the hockey stick. It is a central piece of the IPCC report. You can find a link to an updated version published in 2008 this near the bottom of this BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1... . The authors are Mann, Zhang, Hughes et al but as you can see, links to a number of other sources are given as well. . The original hockey stick paper was criticised by Steve McIntyre as explained in this essay written by Chris Monckton http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images... at_hockey_stick.pdf . I have not found any paper directly written in response to McIntyre's criticisms but this blog on the real... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

PhD studentship in Biostatistics / Epidemiology Long-term antiretroviral therapy of HIV / AIDS: comparative studies in low-income and high-income countries Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Bern (Switzerland), www.ispm.ch An opening for a PhD student in biostatistics / epidemiology is available from 1st February 2010 in the research group on HIV/AIDS/Tb. The is collaborating closely with HIV treatment sites in Southern Africa and other research groups in Cape Town, Bristol and London. The Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) employs over 100 staff and provides undergraduate and post-graduate education and carries out research in a range of disciplines relevant to Public Health. ISPM offers a lively, interdisciplinary environment with excellent computing and library facilities. The position will be within the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and is financed by a scholarship from the Swiss School of Public Health SSPH+ which assures an... more... - Bob O'Hara from email

http://www.linkedin.com/groups... <http://www.linkedin.com/groups...> &trk=hb_side_g Tom Reilly Vice President of Sales Automatic Forecasting Systems 215-675-0652 http://www.autobox.com tomreilly@autobox.com skype:tomreilly@autobox.com You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk, leaving the subject line blank. - Bob O'Hara from email

PhD Projects for October 2010 Three and four year programmes on offer The MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University School of Medicine is recruiting for both 3 and 4 year PhD programmes. We currently have 23 registered PhD students and have an excellent track record of successful postgraduate researchers. The Centre's research is organised around the following major themes: - Psychosis and Major Affective Disorders - schizophrenia, mood disorder; - Neurodegenerative Disorders - Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, PSP, Parkinson's Disease, neuromuscular disorders; - Developmental Disorders - dyslexia, ADHD, childhood depression, pre-natal environmental influences on behaviour and Mouse Behavioural Genetics - X chromosome genes and behaviour, sexually dimorphic behaviours and behavioural epigenetics. Research in all these areas is underpinned by the Bioinformatics Biostatistics Unit and by work on functional genomics. The four year programme... more... - Bob O'Hara from email