I received an email recently with a question about using R in the common gateway interface (CGI) framework to create and pass image data to the web browser. I posted to stackoverflow about this some time ago, but had forgotten the details. The trouble is that R's graphics devices only write image data to file, […]
I frequently use lattice and ggplot2 to create trellis/faceted graphics. But, I gave up using these packages in a recent application, where I had initially constructed a complex graphic using the base R plotting functions. When I later decided that I wanted a faceted version, there was a dilema: re-create the complex graphic using lattice […]
There was an R-help thread in January regarding text in the righthand margin of an R graphic, where the text should be rendered in reading order from top to bottom. The base R function mtext is used to plot text in the margin. But, mtext is only able to render text from left to right […]
A new Annals of Internal Medicine article describes a study that compares two employer-sponsored financial incentive programs for promoting weight loss among obese employees. I first read about the article at the Pacific Standard. The study design is a randomized controlled prospective trial. The two programs are as follows: Program 1. Obese employees are given […]
JW Emerson, WA Green, B Schloerke, J Crowley, D Cook, H Hofmann, H Wickham (2013) The Generalized Pairs Plot. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 22(1). Here's a free preprint version. Until this new paper and implementation by Emerson et al., there were no widely available pairs plots that accommodated both numerical and categorical fields. […]
I cringe when I see research proposals that describe a sophisticated statistical approach, yet do not evaluate this approach in their power/precision/sample size planning. It's often the case that a simplified version of the proposed statistical approach is used instead. Presumably, this is due to the limited availability of power/precision/sample size planning software for sophisticated […]
The ASA recently sent out an email asking its members to contact their representatives in congress to urge them to avoid the 8.2% cuts to NIH, NSF, and federal statistical agencies. I had been meaning to do this, but felt that the ASA letter template was too long. Here is the edited version that I […]
Due largely to the work of Clint Cummins, the sas7bdat file format has become a bit less shrouded. In particular, we now know the following: how to detect files with compressed data (and fail graciously) more details about the platform that generated the file (e.g., endianess, OS details) how to read files that were generated […]
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service0 made news1 when a report the service had prepared was withdrawn due to pressure from Republican leaders. The report - titled Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 19452,3 - addressed some of the evidence for the association between tax rates and economic growth, […]
I have sometimes heard complaints from collaborators that it will be impossible to have their work published in the mainstream literature unless a p-value is reported. This post is to report yet another counterexample that was recently published; a meta-analysis for the odds of perioperative bleeding complications in patients taking one of several anticoagulant/antiplatelet drugs. […]
