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Good evening,

The two projects I am interested in are:

  * 1. TA Grading Consistency     
         What is meant by reference table? What kind of data is given to create such table? Were all TA's involved in all the grading (homework/midterms/final exams) and in all of the tutorials? If not, how was that decided? What does the "plug and play” statistical tool do? For instance in an office job there are different positions held by different people such as an HR Manager or a Payroll Manager in which they are qualified in most instances only to those specific positions. The same notion applies to TA's since they are hired based on their qualifications and placed in their respective departments. In the social sciences (Criminology), the TA has a different background and a different marking criteria than that of a Science Department (Statistics). How were the TA's chosen? Did they all come from the same department? What if there are not enough TA's to test in one department? Were the rest of the TA's chosen from other departments within the same school? Or were there other TA's from another school within similar department chosen? What did their grading consist of? How much time were they given for grading? Some people need more time than the others to grade especially if the student's handwriting is messy and this may affect the grading consistency. In order to run a statistical analysis, one would need a large enough sample and I am concerned if that was accomplished. This is something I have always wondered and I am very interested if there is any inconsistency between the grading, and if there is how big the inconsistency is. In that case, the TA's would need more training so that there would be fair grading for all students.

  * 2. Predictors Of Anemia 
           What are the eight independent variables? And what is it meant by the 30 in the parenthesis? Were there 30 samples tested for each of the eight independent variables? What are some of the assumptions I should be aware of? Why were the samples chosen from only four villages? Are there any limitations? Effect modification often occurs in biomedical research so we might need to take it into consideration.

Sincerely, Simona Cristiana Hrehorciuc

Hi, I am interested in the following two projects:

1. Longevity in China
   • What kind of periodization is proposed? Are these periods same in length?
   • If R can read the occupation code, we can save a lot of work from doing that in Excel. In despite, using Excel to isolate individuals according to their occupation groups is not hard (assuming isolation is not doable in R). If the codes involve some complexity, I believe we can observe some patterns in the codes. Above all, we need to view the data first.
   • Is residence region considered in this case? People who resided in an urban area might have more access to medication, fresh food and water comparing to those who resided in rural area, and thus lifespan could be affected by this factor. To make the result more accurate, we can further separate the data into different regions (if this piece of information is included in the original data)
2. DNA and Age in Mice
   • How are young and aged mice defined?
   • What is sample size? What kind of data have collected so far?
   • More details about the experiment are needed, ie, the experiment needs to be replicated, mice are randomly selected.