In October ‘06, the people at ICORD (International Collaboration On Repair Discoveries) in Vancouver asked me to give a talk. I spoke on Statistical Considerations in Designing a Trial in Spinal Cord Injury with ASIA Motor Score as the Outcome, and you can download a 1.5 MB pdf copy of my slides. I tend to write everything I plan to say into my slides, so they’re less schematic and easier to read than most.
Recently there have been many potential treatments for spinal cord injury reaching the stage of development where they’re ready for human trials, and thus there’s interest in using previous data to develop design information. The largest existing data set is the one from the Sygen GM-1 multi-center trial, which recruited 760 patients in 28 centers in the US and Canada in the 1990s. I was a designer of it, and so my colleagues and I have been trying to be helpful in filling requests for information.
This talk summarizes my preliminary thoughts about using the ASIA (American Spinal Injury Association) motor score as the outcome variable. Read the rest of this entry »
I see no reason to segregate scientific and technical posts from humanistic ones. In my life, scientific concerns mix with ethical ones, and they shade into a philosophical interest in the nature of cognition and the nature of people. Doing science is as creative as writing fiction, and I get inspiration for both from the same gods.
You will find little here on current politics. I'm activist, but in causes not symptoms. Experience in martial arts shows me that the sure way to lose is reactivity; but if you stay cool and remember your training and what you're there for then you achieve goals and, when conflict is unavoidable, you fight and win. The idea of the liberal arts I was brought up in is that broad understanding of cultures and ideas gives you deeper, better goals -- making success more likely and more satisfying. Negatively, the hysteria since 9/11 shows how a country frightened and reactive can destroy itself more than an enemy can. I'm trying to contribute by changing the terms of discourse. See 
One fact shouldn't require special mention; but -- given the nature of the society in which I've grown up and lived -- it often does: namely that I'm gay. You'll see it in some posts and in some links below. I'm proud of being gay and do not hide; more about this on the 
