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Category: Website details. These pages explain new developments at this website. These articles are presented in alphabetical order. You can find the theme and closely related categories and other resources at the bottom of this page.
Stats: How wide can you make a line of your web page? (May 27, 2008). When you are writing a web page, you do not have much control over how it is displayed at a remote site. If you really wanted this level of control, you should use a more rigid format, such as Adobe PDF files. But there are some serious advantages to the reader to let him/her control the display of a web page. As a web author, you should strive to make your web pages look good under a reasonable set of alternatives, such as differing screen sizes or differing font sizes.
Stats: A simple math error (April 6, 2008). People write in once in a while to correct errors on my webpages. God bless them! I had an error on my "What is a P-value?" page.
Stats: Moving content to a private site (March 12, 2008). I may be setting up a private website to complement the material on this website that Children's Mercy Hospital has been so grateful to provide for me. This would include content that is inappropriate for a hospital site (such as personal news and updates), but I might move some of the other material to that site as well.
Stats: Losing web pages in the mass of information (March 5, 2008). Part of the personal value I get from these web pages is making note of something important that I may need six months down the road. But there are now so many webpages that even when I write it down, I still may lose track of it.
Stats: My page names are too long (November 17, 2007). About three years ago, I started using longer names for my webpages. It makes it easier for me to maintain and upgrade these pages. So instead of a short name like bimodality.asp, that used a single word, or a name that used an abbreviation like mle.asp, I used two or more words strung together, such as AmbiguousDefinition.asp or AccountForDropouts.asp.
Stats: Revising my definition section (October 18, 2007). I have a section on definitions and it is an odd mix of things. I want to simplify these pages by separating examples of how to calculate a particular statistic from the formal definition of the statistic. This would make the definition shorter and sweeter in most cases. Here's a list of proposed "how to calculate" pages.
Stats: New categories needed (October 18, 2007). I need to develop some new categories. The first will discuss report cards, league tables, and other measures of hospital and individual performance. The pages I have on this topic already are scattered among various categories.
Stats: Html debris copied from other websites (September 27, 2007). When I use cut-and-paste to get information from other webpages copied to other pages (respecting copyright, of course), I get some stray html code that clutters up my web pages. I also seem to get some of this clutter just by cutting-and-pasting from Microsoft Word or even from within Frontpage itself. One of the most common of these stray codes is <span>.
Stats: Alphabetical bookmark list (September 7, 2007). As part of my reorganization efforts, I am including bookmarks in some of my longer pages. Here's an example of an alphabetical list of bookmarks.
Stats: May has been a slow month (May 29, 2007). After a burst of activity, my work on the weblog has slowed down quite a bit this month. There are three reasons (excuses).
Stats: Topic list is complete! (April 17, 2006). It took a while, but I produced a topic list for every entry in my weblog. I may change some of these topics from time to time. The biggest advantage of placing a topic on each weblog entry is that I can produce a web page that shows all of the entries associated with a particular topic.
Stats: Special section for quotations (April 11, 2007). I've just created a special section for quotations, Category: Quotations, on my topic list page for the weblog. Some of the quotes that were parts of other pages have now been pulled into their own files.
Stats: Thanks to all my proofreaders! (March 14, 2007). Someone emailed me with a suggestion that I have said "increase" when I meant to say "decrease" and "decrease" when I meant to say "increase." I looked at the page in question and she was right. That's one of the wonderful thing about the web. People will email me with suggestions and corrections, and they do it for free!
Stats: Obsolete images (January 11, 2007) Here is a list of images that used to be in my web pages, but which now appear not to have a home.
Stats: The danger of using humor on a web page (November 14, 2006). I got a nice email yesterday from someone who had read my web page with a definition of a retrospective study (Definition: Retrospective Study). I had made a humorous comment about the difficulties with prospective studies. The person who read that page suggested that the comment was insensitive and possibly hurtful for someone who was researching their own child's illness.
Stats: Additions and improvements to my web pages (November 2, 2006). I've been busy adding new pages and improving old pages. Here's a summary of my activity.
Stats: Improvements to weblog categories (September 25, 2006). With over a thousand web pages, I need a good way of letting people find related topics on my website. I've added categories to my weblog entries, and now I want to link those categories to the appropriate location on my topiclist page. That way, if you are on a page discussing early stopping of clinical trials, you can jump to another page that lists all of the other pages on my website with the same topic.
Stats: More than one thousand web pages now available on my site (August 16, 2006). When you do a global search and replace in Frontpage, it offers a page count of all the pages that it searches. Sometime in the past month, I exceeded one thousand pages.
Stats: Giving credit where credit is due (April 19, 2006). A lot of the material that I present on these web pages comes from reading various email discussion groups. I normally try to put in a plug for the groups when I can, but I realized that I should also give credit to the individuals who regularly contribute to these groups.
Stats: New koan page (March 29, 2006). I have consolidated the four statistical koans on a new page.
Stats: Categorizing my weblog entries (January 18, 2006). It's probably a sign of lack of discipline on my part, but this research methodology weblog seems to cover just about anything and everything. To help people sort through all the comments, I am creating categories for each weblog entry
Stats: The past year in my weblog (January 4, 2006). I just cleaned up the weblog and put all the old entries in separate files in the archive. It was a busy year (though I did slow down a lot in November and December).
Stats: Slow progress on my weblog (November 25, 2005). You may have noticed how few entries there are in the month of November. That's just a reflection of the extraordinary surge in work here at Children's Mercy Hospital.
Stats: Preserving spacing in html code (May 6, 2005). I am starting to write a lot of web pages that show program code for R. I use the <code> and <pre> tags most of the time, because this produces a fixed width font and preserves spacing. The default font on a web page is a proportional width font, which makes much of the indenting and spacing in a program look terrible.
Stats: Fair Use of copyrighted material (April 15, 2005). I get many requests to link to my web pages, and I always grant these requests. Other people ask if they can use portions of my material on their web pages or in their publications. If these people don't charge others for this material, I usually agree, but I like to know a few more details. If there is money involved, I tend to be more cautious. Of course, the copyright law allows you some rights to reproduce materials on my web site (or any other copyrighted source) under the "Fair Use" provisions of the copyright law.
Stats: Coming soon (March 22, 2005). Under the details section of these web pages, I have a page talking about future plans. After months of neglect, I took the time to update that page. I also need to keep better track of my unfinished weblog entries, and work needed on the final draft of my book on Statistical Evidence. Here's a running list of things that I want to talk about.
Stats: Printer friendly versions of web pages (September 13, 2004). I use Microsoft FrontPage, and their newsletter listed a resources for creating printer friendly web pages. I dislike the idea of having a separate set of pages for printing, and try instead to find a good balance so that the page looks good both on the screen and on paper. This is not always easy, but writing for the web has always been filled with difficult compromises.
Stats: Weblog entries from the 2004 JSM (August 7-11, 2004). I just returned from Toronto and the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM). I brought along my laptop and tried to take notes during some of the talks and classes. I will clean up these notes and turn them into entries on my weblog or other web pages. One change which I have already incorporated is an update to my bootstrap page.
Stats: Recent updates (July 8, 2004). I've updated a few of my pages (see below for the links). I got two nice compliment recently by email. I'm working furiously on microarray data analysis, and I added a simple example for computing sample size in a study of a diagnostic test. I also revised my How to Read a Journal main page to create the eight major sections of the book I hope to get published.
Stats: Compliments (June 14, 2004). Every once in a while someone writes in with some nice things to say about my web pages. I want to record some of those comments here so I have some documentation about my web pages to help during my annual performance evaluation.
Stats: Future plans for these web pages (February 7, 2000). Here's where I start up some initial ideas for web pages. It is rambling and disorganized, but that's the way that I think.
Stats: Important disclaimer (January 28, 2000). Although I work in a hospital, my profession is Statistics. I help the doctors and nurses here plan research studies and make sense of the numbers after the research is done. I am totally unqualified to provide medical advice.
Stats: Links from other sites (February 2, 2000). It's flattering when someone recommends my site, so I keep track of this here. I also want to keep tabs on these links so when I change a page name, I am sure that it doesn't break a link.
Stats: Software used in the creation of these web pages (August 24, 2000). Here are a few details about the software I use to create these pages and some tricks I have learned over time.
Stats: Copyright notice (January 28, 2000). When these pages were originally developed, the lawyers suggested that I copyright these pages. In January of 2008 I asked for and got permission to place these pages under an open access license. What this means is that you can use these pages however you like, including a derivative work as long as you acknowledge the original source. A link back to the original page or a listing of the URL of the page would be sufficient acknowledgement.
Stats: Acknowledgments (January 28, 2000). Personal thanks to the many people who have sent comments and corrections.
Stats: Overview of the STATS web pages (January 21, 2000). The STATS pages are a collection of handouts that I use in my job as a statistical consultant. The web provides a nice home for these handouts, because as I update my material, the newest version is immediately available to anyone who is interested.
Theme and closely related categories:
[Return to full topic list] [Read current weblog entries]
This webpage was written by Steve Simon on 2007-10-01, edited by Steve Simon, and was last modified on 2008-07-14. Send feedback to ssimon at cmh dot edu or click on the email link at the top of the page.