JHU Biostat

Note: the Fall event will be student and post doc only while the Spring event will be open to the whole department. This is to smooth the integration process for the new students.

For the past year and a half I have been a teaching assistant (TA) for the Statistical Methods in Public Health I to IV (140.621 to 140.624) courses. As part of being a TA for these courses, we have to grade between 30 and 50 homeworks every two weeks or so: four problem sets per eight week terms.

In recent weeks, I have met with a group of students @jhubiostat interested in blogging about their research, tutorials, pieces of R code, among plenty of other subjects. Within this group we had the idea to aggregate our blogs so it would be easier for others to follow us and to easily promote our own blogs to a much larger audience.

This past Saturday the Epi and Biostat troops met for another fun kickball match. Obviously Biostat beat Epi, yup I know: again! This time the score was 15-8 (according to our bookkeeper and captain John) or 12-8 (according to some in Epi).

It was great to have a little break, Spring break, although the weather didn’t feel like spring at all! During the early part of the break I worked on my final project for Jeff Leek’s data analysis class, which we call 140.

Recently we had to analyze the data of the number of visits per day to SimplyStatistics.org. There were two goals: Estimate the fraction of visitors retained after a spike in the number of visitors Identify (if any) any factors that influence the fraction estimated in 1.

This semester I’m taking the live version of the Data Analysis class by Jeff Leek. His more popular version of the course is available through Coursera. One of the things that Jeff promotes is reproducibility and sharing code.

During the last pre-happy hour seminar, Karl Broman talked about Why aren’t all of our graphs interactive? I didn’t know, but a few years ago Karl worked in the department and clearly promoted beer-drinking and is the heart of the department.

Have you heard of online education? If you are in the US or Mexico I’m sure that you have seen some ads about online universities. Well, that’s not the type of education I’m talking about.