Bigger and bigger circles - the expanding biopharmaceutical statistician’s toolbox

The bigger picture concepts

If a concept is not well defined, it can be abused. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated a range of intellectual fields from physics to linguistics, but with no underlying, unified theory. Complexity has become a popular buzzword that is used in the hope of gaining attention or funding — institutes and research networks associated ...

The Spindle Gets Bigger

Although cortical nonmuscle myosin II has long been implicated in cytokinetic aspects of cell division, there has never been strong evidence that it plays a role in the organization of the mitotic spindle. ([this issue of Cell]) use a number of methods to show that cortical myosin II is in fact important for spindle assembly in higher eukaryotic cells, specifically for the complete separation o...

Bigger uncertainties and the Big

We use Bayesian hierarchical models and recent results from the theory of minimax confidence interval estimation to study the effect of prior information in a cosmological inverse problem. We consider the effect of prior information on uncertainty estimates of a linear functional Lx of an infinite-dimensional model x, given noisy observations y = Kx+x. The model represents the cosmic microwave ...

Bigger and better things.

Is Bigger Really Badder?

Increasing attention is being focused on the role(s) that obesity may play in the development of cardiovascular disease, particularly congestive heart failure (CHF).1,2 Several indirect or associated effects are potential culprits. For example, obesity is strongly associated with many atherosclerotic risk factors, including arterial hypertension, insulin resistance, diabetes, and dyslipidemia.3...