Did not respond:

Jining (responded in email)
Josue Orellana Arreaga
Yuxiong (Albert) Wang
Shannon Gallagher

----------------------------

Responses:

------------------------------------------------------

Jining Qin

Project:

My writing project would be my ADA report. I have finished the
analysis and have a whole draft at hand. But I feel that is only
remote from a publishable paper (assuming the material is enough for a
publication).

Purpose: 

The report would be directed to astronomers mainly. We applied some
not too sophisticated methods to astronomy data to get more desirable
results than astronomers previously did. It extracts much more
information and gives more powerful results compared to the method
previously used by astronomers. We think the method, if applied in
more similar analyses, would be helpful.

Me:

What I like about writing (though it tortures me sometimes) is that it
made me clear up my thoughts and state the analysis process from
bottom up. It somewhat helped me find the real significance of my
work. The challenging part is I am not too familiar with my readers,
sometimes it wasn¡¯t obvious what to assume about my reader,
especially when I¡¯m writing for someone outside statistics.

During my ADA projects I am very much a binge writer. I am doing the
¡®writing schedule¡¯ attempt as described in the book How To Write A
Lot, trying to sit down and work on writing at fixed time every
weekday. I hope to become a daily writer from now on.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Taylor Popsil

1) ADA Report

2) At this point the audience is my ADA advisers.  The purpose of the
current draft is to summarize my analysis of several aspects of the
problem and present tentative results.  If we find more promising
results, it would be great to turn the report into a paper.

3) I like writing because it lets me share what I've done/learned.  It
also provides a structured way to fill in details in my thinking (as
in I left a placeholder paragraph for this topic so I should think
about it some more).  The most challenging aspect for me is making
sure that things that seem *obvious* to me aren't inferential leaps to
someone who isn't as familiar with the topic.  I tend to have a
difficult time imagining what people will have trouble understanding.

I typically write in batch-mode; I'll keep terse notes while I'm
working on something and when I "have" to have something done or I
have a lull in actual work I'll write up sections.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Maria Cuellar

1. My project is my second Heinz paper, in which I will review
statistical arguments made in the medical and legal literatures about
the diagnosis of Abusive Head Trauma or AHT (formerly called Shaken
Baby Syndrome).

The AHT diagnosis is controversial because there are no reliable
sources of data that connect symptoms/signs to a definitive diagnosis,
so clinicians have had to make their judgments based on experience and
an informal reading of the limited literature (some of which has
serious statistical problems). In recent years this has led to some
controversial decisions and subsequent legal proceedings, some of
which have later been overturned. The problem of incorrect processing
of statistical evidence to reach a diagnosis can lead to
misinterpretations, which is what happened in the Sally Clark
case. This paper will point out some of those misinterpretations in
the case of AHT and propose new analyses.

2. The purpose of this paper is to critique previous work and provide
clear and correct statistical guidelines for i) physicians who need to
diagnose whether a specific injury was due to child abuse or an
accident, ii) attorneys who are prosecuting or defending an adult who
was accused of inflicting child abuse in the form of AHT, and iii)
statisticians or other researchers who seek to analyze the data
available on the clinical features of AHT and the likelihood of abuse.

3. I am a joint PhD student in statistics and public policy, so I
would like my paper not just to be able to convey concepts to
statisticians, but also to a diverse audience that is not familiar
with statistics.

I like that technical writing does not have to be long to be of high
quality. It can be concise and as long as the ideas are good, it can
be of good quality.

I find it challenging to write things up! Maybe this is a silly way to
say it, but I have had several ideas and results for papers, and I
haven't been able to write them down as papers for some reason. I am
hoping that this course makes that process easier so I can actually
show some of the work I've done.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Amanda Luby

1. I plan to use my ADA report as the writing project for this
course. I have a full draft which I hope to refine, and I also am
planning to try and publish versions of it in both a statistics
journal and a psychology journal, which I also hope to work on
throughout this class.

2. I'd say I'm generally writing for a statistics audience, but I
would also like to share this work with the psychology community as
well. The statistics included are very psychology-oriented, so I would
like the psychology theory to be accessible to statisticians and the
statistics theory to be accessible to psychologists as they read my
paper. I'm trying to improve the statistics currently used to inform
criminal justice policy, so it's very important that I'm able to
convey why the current methods aren't adequate and why my methods are
stronger.

3. I enjoy technical writing because it's a way to share my work with
a much broader audience than a presentation or a poster session. It's
much more of a standalone product and it's easier to give a full
picture of everything that I've done. A lot of times it's challenging
to put down in words why I've made certain decisions, or why a
specific result is important. I find the most challenging aspect is
being concise while still conveying everything I want.

When I'm working on a project and have enough results to begin
writing, I'd say I write once or twice a week. I like to have at least
4-6 hours to sit down and work on it. I find when I try to write every
day, I don't leave myself enough time to do all the editing that I
want and sometimes forget to fix it later.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Purvasha Chakravarti

1. My writing project would be my ADA report. I have a whole draft of
my ADA report ready but I am not entirely happy with it right now and
I think it can be improved.

2. My ADA project is on a viral disease called Chikungunya and the
report talks about predicting the number of cases of Chikungunya in
the Americas in the future. I also plan to discuss about the problems
that I had to overcome due to the quality of the data available to
us. This is important for epidemiologists and statisticians who work
on similar diseases. The predicted number of cases in the future could
also help people in health care prepare for Chikungunya better with
different treatment methods. So the purpose of the report is to
explain the challenges that have to be overcome to work on
epidemiological data and understand the methods that can be used to
predict the disease better.

3. The aspect I like the most while writing a report in Statistics is
the usage of tables, plots and other visualizations of the data or the
results. I feel like these are the easiest to explain and interest the
audience. I find explaining methods used to obtain the results the
most difficult task. I find it very challenging to explain statistical
models in an interesting way so that readers would stay interested and
understand what I am trying to say.

I usually write about once a week and find it very difficult to sit
for a long stretch of time. So instead I plan to work on writing three
days a week this semester and write for short durations of about an
hour or so.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Liangyan Gui

1. A journal paper

2. I think people in related areas are my readers.

3. I would like to learn more about how to write logically and
clearly. I feel that clarity and concise are most challenging for me.

   Once a week.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Lee Richardson

1. I am going to write a journal article detailing the synthetic
populations we have been generating for the MIDAS group. We have some
preliminary drafts written down, but we want to polish it off and be
able to submit it soon.

2. We have developed synthetic populations for various countries, and
we want to publish a paper detailing how they work, and how to use
them, so they can start to gain some traction in the community. The
target audience would be primarily researchers using agent based
models to study infectious disease.

3. I enjoy the challenge of being able to communicate ideas from the
statistical world back into reality, as well as seeing if I can
explain a technical concept to other statisticians/scientists. My main
struggle is coming to a complete understanding of the technical
concept I'm trying to communicate.

I write every other day, primarily just summarizing what I'm reading,
so it's usually not very polished.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Sam Adhikari

1. Project: I'd like to complete a manuscript of a methodological
journal paper based on my research work. I have bits and pieces
written out which I want to complete as a publishable paper.

2. Purpose: The purpose of my project is to convey technical
statistical details and interesting findings of my model to a
statistically inclined audience.

3. I am a fifth year PhD student working on statistical methods for
social network analysis. I like writing my ideas as I think through
them. I find transitioning from a technical rough draft to a more
formal (shareable) paper most challenging.

I maintain a technical report for most of my work, but write more
formally only when I have substantive part of the problem I'm working
on figured out.

--------------------------------------------------------------------