Federated Analysis with R/DataSHIELD –
Installation, Data Import, Data Analysis [Tutorial]

Introduction Federated Analysis (FA) has received rapidly increasing attention over the last three years in the scientific literature (Figure 1). It describes the centralized analysis of de-centralized databases while preserving the privacy of personal data. FA was proposed for the identification of rare adverse events in international post-marketing studies to overcome legal barriers [1]. This…

The Dandelion Hub – A (technical) review of an open-source web app (R/Shiny, MariaDB) to support global civil-rights movements

In the following blog I am taking a critical look a the The Dandelion Hub platform (https://dhub.global), which seems a promising open-source project to support the global civil-right movements, or in the words of the developers “to create a movement of movements for science, people power, and a livable future”. Can’t be wrong, can it?…

Tech suffers from lack of humanities, says Mozilla head

Considering myself an academic with a social science (MSc, PhD in psychology) and tech (MSc Medical Statistics, Post-doc in genomics) background, I find it highly interesting that Mitchell Baker, head of the Mozilla Foundation (cf Firefox browser), is arguing that hiring employees who mainly come from STEM (Science, technology, engineering and maths) will produce a…

Doug Altman: A good one gone …

Doug Altman, a professor of statistics at the University of Oxford, died June 3, 2018. Some of his achievements from the Orbituary in The Scientist [1] and Cochrane Library [2]: 1986: Publication of Bland-Altman plot, an incredibly popular technique to visually compare two different methods of taking clinical measurements. According to Nature in 2014, their…

Mirror R/CRAN for internal use

The statistical analysis system R can be extended by a huge number of contributed packages which are stored in the central CRAN repository with multiple synced mirrors around the world. To access this repository from clients in a secure network, and install the packages in a local R installation may pose a security risk, require…