Hopkins Biostatistics Student Journal Club

2007-2008 Season

Every other Friday 12:15-1:15, E2133 (Note room change)

Schedule:

Date	Articles	Student Presenter
14 Sep	James R. Murphy (1997) “How to Read the Statistical Literature: A Guide for Students” The American Statistician Thomas P. Ryan and William H. Woodall (2005) “The Most Cited Statistical Papers” Journal of Applied Statistics	Sandrah ECKEL
28 Sep	Yoav Benjamini and Yosef Hochberg (1995) “Controlling the False Discovery Rate: a Practical and Powerful Approach to Muliple testing” JRSS- B, 57( 1): 289-300	Hao WU
12 Oct	Robert E. Kass, Bradley P. Carlin, Andrew Gelman, and Radford M. Neal (1998) *“Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Practice: A Roundtable Discussion”* The American Statistician	Howard CHANG
26 Oct	Break!
9 Nov	Break!
30 Nov	Dempster A. P., Laird N.M., and Rubin D. B. (1977) *“Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data via the EM Algorithm”* JRSS-B, 39(1): 1-38	Ming AN
14 Dec	Bradley Efron (2005) “Bayesians, Frequentists, and Scientists” JASA, March 2005, Vol. 100, No. 467	Jessica MYERS
25 Jan	Douglas Adams “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” Chapter 9	Matthew MCCALL
15 Feb	Visitors’ Day Break!
29 Feb	No JC Meeting!
14 Mar	John W. Tukey “Sunset Salvo” The American Statistician, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp.72-76	Kenny SHUM
4 Apr	Paul Cisek “The Currency of Guessing” & Tianming Yang, Michael N. Shadlen “Probabilistic Reasoning By Neurons”	Bruce SWIHART
18 Apr	Break!
2 May	Kaplan, E.L. & Meier, P “Nonparametric estimation from incomplete observations” JASA, June 1958, Vol.53, No. 282, pp. 457-481	Hong ZHU

Articles:

Copies of articles will be provided to all biostatistics students with Department mailboxes. For those without Department mailboxes, articles may be viewed and printed via the links above.
The selection of article is subject to change and open to suggestion through collaboration between student and faculty presenters.

Goals:

to read critically
to present informally
to become more familiar with the seminal papers in statistics
to develop the habit of staying in touch with the literature
SZ: The student who spends the time to read these papers will get a first rate education.

Contact:

Marco CARONE
Jessica MYERS
Hong ZHU

Participants:

All SPH students are welcome to attend journal club.
Faculties are welcome to attend on the dates they are facilitating.

Guidelines (from Steve Goodman):

The paper should obviously be presented by one of the students with the main purpose being to try to summarize the paper, and not to be shy about what you might find confusing or impenetrable. You will undoubtedly not be alone.
The most important service that each student presenting can perform, aside from exploring a paper's content, is to "position" the paper for the group. This means giving the group a sense of what the conceptual or technical landscape was like before the paper appeared, what problems it solves, whether or not it helped people see things in a different way, and what were its most important assumptions, what issues did it leave unresolved, and what areas of inquiry did it open up.
An incredibly valuable insight to get from these papers is how the author came to tackle this particular problem. One of the most important challenges you will be facing throughout your career is how to pick the right questions, and one thing that all of these papers represent is not just a question that was answered properly, but asked properly. Finding solutions to important questions is typically less difficult than figuring out which of many questions are important.
It can be useful for a presenter to come up with a set of a few key discussion questions about each paper that s/he poses to the group, which could be along any of the lines above, as well as technical aspects.
Avoid the tendency to treat these presentations as lectures and to act passively.

**On alternate Fridays, join us for Computing Club.

E-mail comments & suggestions.

Last updated: Oct07