I teach an undergraduate statistics course that covers some of the fundamentals of classical statistical inference. This includes confidence intervals and their calculation. One of the things I stress when teaching confidence intervals is that the confidence level is a … Continue reading Why your 95% confidence interval doesn’t necessarily include the true parameter 95% of the time

I recently was given the opportunity to chair my first trial steering committee so now I’m an expert in it. Read on if you too want to be a pre-eminent expert in chairing trial steering committees. I will be presenting … Continue reading Chairing your first trial steering committee

My phone has recently been reminding me that this time last year I was in the University of Namibia conducting a scoping review of the statistics support required there (more pictures than you would ever need are at the end of this … Continue reading Phoenix revisited

Today for the first time in 14 years I head to work in a new place. I have left Cardiff University to join the University of Exeter as a senior lecturer in data analytics. While I’ve been more than satisfied … Continue reading Principles

What are you doing Sept 11-18th in 2018? Because if you are interested in physical activity research you need to go on this course. Run by the people who brought you the PA guidelines we all know and love, this course is … Continue reading Physical activity and public health course 2016

In this past week we at the Centre for Trials Research and the department of Primary Care and Public Health at Cardiff University held a journal club to discuss Daniel Lakens excellent blog post “One-sided tests: Efficient and Underused”. I … Continue reading One-sided versus two-sided tests

When I was about 14 I remember having a discussion with my dad about the merits of learning mathematical theorems. My dad, a secondary school Maths teacher his entire career, felt that a strong foundation in mathematical reasoning and logic … Continue reading The Phoenix Project

I spend a lot of time doing statistical consultancy.  When I talk to people about consultancy (and I do frequently – I’m incredibly unpopular at parties) I tell them that a consultation in my field (medical research) is like getting a mini-documentary on a … Continue reading Statistical Consultancy

I was recently involved in a randomised controlled trial targeting weight loss maintenance, illustrated here with a ridge walk, which is i think quite apposite (Image copyright steynard on flickr). The intervention was a type of counselling (motivational interviewing) which … Continue reading Weight loss maintenance

I recently analysed the results of a clinical trial. It was a small study, but i had been involved in from the beginning and so i was looking forward to it. Receiving a new dataset is an exciting time for a statistician … Continue reading The significance of statistical significance