Several times I’ve tried to resolve conflicts and otherwise edit “My Bibliography” on NIH National Library of Medicine’s NCBI system (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) using Firefox on Debian linux. It has never worked. It just sits there, indicating that it is doing something, but never proceeding, confirming, or finishing.
Today I tried it on on Chromium from Debian’s repository and it worked quickly without a problem. I wish web programmers, especially those in public institutions would not use browser specific features, locking users into particular platforms.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Import ancient Quattro Pro files on linux
I had occasion to need to open a Quattro Pro spreadsheet file from 1999 today. OpenOffice did not know what to do with it, but then I remembered Gnumeric. It worked like a charm! This file was so old, the extension is *.wb3. Now I can get the old data into R!
FYI, this was on current Debian stable.
Significance testing, p-values, and confidence intervals
You have to enjoy the introduction of Sander Greenland, et al.’s article in the supplemental material posted with the American Statistical Association’s statement on p-values (full text here):
“Misinterpretation and abuse of statistical tests, confidence intervals, and statistical power have been decried for decades, yet remain rampant. A key problem is that there are no interpretations of these concepts that are at once simple, intuitive, correct, and foolproof. Instead, correct use and interpretation of these statistics requires an attention to detail which seems to tax the patience of working scientists. This high cognitive demand has led to an epidemic of shortcut definitions and interpretations that are simply wrong, sometimes disastrously so—and yet these misinterpretations dominate much of the scientific literature.” (p. 1, emphasis mine)
Working scientists should be able to handle this.
Darroch, 1962 quote about contingency tables and ANOVA
…” ‘interaction’ in contingency tables enjoys only a few of the fortuitously simple properties of interactions in the analysis of variance.” (from Gohkalke and Kullback, The Information in Contingency Tables)