I’ve seen many claims suggesting that NIH indirect costs are wasted or used to subsidize non-research activities. However, based on my experience in budget and space allocation meetings, as well as ...

What does it mean for a data analysis to fail? I’ve come to feel that this is an important question because considering the ways that data analyses can fail is a good way to prevent an analysis from ...

Russell “Taki” Shinohara was selected as 2023 Moritmer Spiegelman Award recipient. Dr. Shinohara was selected from an incredibly deep and talented pool of candidates who collectively represent the ...

I read this really interesting paper over the break, where they had multiple analyst teams analyze the same data set and fit a model to answer the same question. This is a topic we’ve thought about a ...

I’ve spent the better part of my career advocating for the increased publication of code that is used in data analysis. This effort to make data analysis more reproducible is largely focused around ...

In data analysis there is often a distinction between doing the data analysis and communicating the data analysis. The idea is to analyze the data and then come up with some sort of narrative that ...

Code is a useful representation of a data analysis for the purposes of transparency and opennness. But code alone is often insufficient for evaluating the quality of a data analysis and for ...

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has become one of the most widely used technologies in basic biology. With the rise of scRNA-seq, the use of UMAP has become ubiquitous in publications. While ...

Statisticians have been pointing out the problem with dynamite plots, also known as bar and line graphs, for years. Karl Broman lists them as one of the top ten worst graphs. The problem has even been ...

There are often discussions within the data science community about which tools are best for doing data science. The most recent iteration of this discussion is the so-called “First Notebook War”, ...

The intentional ambiguity of the R language, inherited from the S language, is one of its defining features. Is it an interactive system for data analysis or is it a sophisticated programming language ...

Roughly once a year, I read John Tukey’s paper “The Future of Data Analysis”, originally published in 1962 in the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. I’ve been doing this for the past 17 years, each ...