So, many of you will know that the first rule is that the Doctor lies. The last post might have given you the impression that that was the whole of statistics … but there is a bit more. The first idea that goes beyond the simple question is ‘how are these two continuous variables related […]
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A picture is worth a thousand words
We all really already know this. After all, we get taught from day one at medical school that we need to step back and look at the patient, and if anyone’s done any telephone triage, you’re probably aware of the uncomfortable itch that says “I actually want to see this child … not hear about […]
Ray Bradbury’s Grandma
I’ve learnt a lot of things from a lot of people, living and dead. But I often feel that it was in the (fictional) death of Ray Bradbury‘s Grandma that I learnt some of the most important. Ray Bradbury was often characterised as a Science Fiction writer, and I don’t think this bothered him […]
July’s #ADC_JC our twitter journal club – 17th July 8-9pm.
The first Archives of Disease in Childhood twitter journal club was last month and it was a great success. We had around 40 people involved in the hour-long twitter chat (#ADC_JC) – it was engaging and exciting to be involved in an online discussion with so many paediatric health professionals. For July’s #ADC_JC we are […]
Can you actually believe the abstract?
There is a guilty thing that I have to admit doing. Frequently. And that’s just reading the abstract, not the full paper. (Generally this is in scooting through tangential stuff. Honest.) Well in the Journal of Evidence based Medicine, behind our BMJ paywall, is a lovely piece of primary research examining exactly how guilty we […]
StatsMiniBlog: Significance tests. Step two.
Now last time we examined the core question of ‘what is a statistical test asking’ with the answer ‘what’s the likelihood that the results I’ve got from these two groups are different only because of the play of chance?’ Now depending on what sort of data you have will depend on what ‘the results from these […]
StatsMiniBlog: Significance tests. Step one.
Moving through from estimating how the mean of a sample might reflect the mean of the population at large, we want to see if there are differences between two (or more) groups. This is usually done by ‘doing a statistical test’. What we won’t be dealing with here is the maths that derives these, the […]
Engineering irrelevance
I have a favourite consultation. Actually, I have a lot of favourite consultations, but this one is pretty high up there. It happens every 18 to 24 months on average. I will have met with a family, and we’ll have got to know each other on a journey (naff word, but can’t find one […]
Flying the nest
So, on a tangent from statistics and not relating to names, management or critical appraisal, I was wondering about transition of adolescents from paediatric care to adult specialities, and was filled with a sense of loss. There have been lots of people tell stories of how the move away from the managed care of community […]
StatsMiniBlog: Standard Error
This is it – a leap from the descriptive to the inferential. We are leaving the comfort of the sample we have collected data on and we’re about to make a statement that relates to the world beyond: we are inferring stuff. Annoyingly, this first step is a phrase disturbingly close to another. The ‘standard error […]