I live (and work!) near one of the most beautiful vantage points for sunsets in possibly the entire US. However almost every beautiful sunset I have seen from there has come from either 1) me walking out of work and noticing that the sky is bright pink, or 2) seeing someone post a sunset photo More
As I have worked on various projects at Etsy, I have accumulated a suite of functions that help me quickly produce tables and charts that I find useful. Because of the nature of iterative development, it often happens that I reuse the functions many times, mostly through the shameful method of copying the functions into More
AND NOW I HAVE THE BEST DOPPELGANGER OF ALL TIME!!! The name Hilary continues to do me proud. More
I came across this R package on GitHub, and it made me so excited that I decided to write a post about it. It s a compilation by Karl Broman of various R functions that he s found helpful to write throughout the years. Wouldn t it be great if incoming graduate students in Biostatistics/Statistics were taught to More
Stemming from the p-value discussion yesterday and today, I thought it d be a good time to share my favorite TED talk, given by Art Benjamin. The world has changed from analog to digital, and it s time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital. More
Last night on twitter there was a bit of a firestorm over this New York Times snippet about p-values (here is my favorite twitter-snark response). While the article has a surprising number of controversial sentences for only 180 words, the most offending sentence is: By convention, a p-value higher than 0.05 usually indicates that the results More
Just a quick post to say that my blog piece about the name Hilary got picked up by The Cut a part of New York Magazine! Go check it out! More
I ve always had a special fondness for my name, which according to Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl is a scientific fact for most people (Ryan Gosling constitutes scientific proof in my book). Plus, the root word for Hilary is the Latin word hilarius meaning cheerful and merry, which is the More
Sometimes this is my life. But it s so satisfying when you write a program that saves you time! Here is an example. The Problem: For several years at Hopkins I have been involved in teaching a large (500+ person) introductory Biostatistics class. This class usually has a team of 12-15 teaching assistants, who together staff the twice-daily office More
My derby wife Logistic Aggression (aka Hanna Wallach) posted a fantastic essay (via her blog) about things she s learned from roller derby. Some points are pretty derby specific, and some are more broadly applicable. Points 4 and 5 about growth mindset and grit are especially worth a look for non-roller-girls, and apply directly More