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Kristen Kotter, M.A.

Biostatistician II

Email: kristen.kotter@vanderbilt.edu VA Phone: 615-873-8025 Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Department of Biostatistics
1161 21st Avenue South
S-2323 Medical Center North
Nashville, TN 37232-2158


Areas of Interest
  • Research Ethics
  • Making things as simple as possible but no simpler and then approaching them thoroughly
  • Proper Descriptives, Graphics
  • Computing and Reproducible Research
  • Documenting things
  • Coding to extract information for pre-specified requests from:
    • structured data
    • semi-structured data
    • unstructured data (free text--pattern recognition)
  • Cleaning/Checking data
Projects: My Alma Mater Important College Course:

Biological Anthropology: Primates under wonderful primatologist Colin Groves at Australian National University where I learned not only hands on about behavior and taxonomy, but more importantly about conservation issues and particularly how some of the leading primatologists/scientists of other developed countries view current research practices in America today. Today, the United States is the only developed country in the world that continues the large-scale confinement of chimpanzees in laboratories. Please read the Humane Society's post about The Great Ape Protection Act which would be a big step in getting America's research practices more up to par....morally that is. Thanks!

Richard Dawkins, a preeminent professor at Oxford and Berkeley in biological anthropology, and more specifically evolution, gives a clear and concise explanation for the fallacy and danger that goes along with the commonly misconceived discontinuous mind-view of the relationship between humans and our closest relatives...and beyond....in his short explanation about about Gaps In the Mind in support of the Great Ape Project.

Quotes

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." ~ Samuel Johnson

.....and lack of knowledge without integrity is: weak, useless, dangerous, AND dreadful

"Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen—or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness."
—Carl Sagan from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

"A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem" ~Einstein

"Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age" ~Einstein

Funny joke I read the other day:

"A mathematician, a theoretical economist, and a statistician are asked to find a black cat (who doesn’t really exist) in a closed room with the lights off. The mathematician gets crazy trying to find a black cat that doesn’t exist inside the darkened room and ends up in a psychiatric hospital. The theoretical economist is unable to catch the black cat that doesn’t exist inside the darkened room, but exits the room proudly proclaiming that he can construct a model to describe all his movements with extreme accuracy. The statistician walks securely into the darkened room, spends one hour looking for the black cat that doesn’t exits and shouts from inside the room that he has caught it by the neck."

Topic attachments
I Attachment Action Size Date Who Comment
011.jpgjpg 011.jpg manage 78.2 K 25 Jun 2008 - 15:17 KristenKotter  
DSC00704.JPGJPG DSC00704.JPG manage 2048.0 K 03 Jun 2007 - 15:34 KristenKotter  
KristenKotter.JPGJPG KristenKotter.JPG manage 93.1 K 13 Aug 2007 - 11:32 JohnHarrell  
KristenKotter_2008.pdfpdf KristenKotter_2008.pdf manage 117.5 K 24 Sep 2008 - 19:16 KristenKotter  
YesWeCamera_Photo_1000.jpgjpg YesWeCamera_Photo_1000.jpg manage 229.3 K 13 Jan 2010 - 18:50 KristenKotter  
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Topic revision: r64 - 12 Aug 2011, KristenKotter
 

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