This week the Applied Statistics Workshop will present a talk by Nan Laird, Professor of Biostatistics in the Harvard School of Public Health, and Christoph Lang, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics in the Harvard School of Public Health.

Before joining the Department of Biostatistics, Professor Laird received her Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard and was an Assistant Prof. of Statistics at Harvard. She has published extensively in Statistics in Medicine, Biostatistics, American Journal of Human Genetics and the American Journal of Epidemiology among others. Her research...

Mike Kellermann

Here's a question (alright, a bleg) for any economist-types out there: can you recommend any articles or books that integrate the potential outcomes framework for causal inference with the type of equilibrium analysis that is usually used in microeconomic modeling? I'm not exactly looking for cases where someone says "my comparative statics say the effect should be positive and, voila, it is!", but rather an applied article in which the potential outcomes arise naturally from the structure of the model. Or, even better, something more...

Jim Greiner

Quantitative expert witnesses are essential to modern litigation. But why do they disagree so often?

An excerpt from an article by Professor Franklin Fisher appears below. It’s a tad long, but it’s really worth reading. Does it ring a familiar bell with anyone out there?

“It is not, however, always easy to avoid becoming a ‘hired gun’ . . . The danger is sometimes a subtle one, stemming from a growing involvement in the case and friendship with the attorneys. For the serious professional, concerned about preserving his or her standards...

Mike Kellermann

With the World Series about to get underway, featuring the rubber match between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals (Round 1 went to the Cardinals in 1934, Round 2 to the Tigers in 1968, but maybe this is a best of five and we won't see the end until 2076), it is worth reflecting on the influence baseball has had on statistics and vice versa. I mentioned Frederick Mosteller's analysis after the 1946 World Series in a...