Speaking of blegs, Howard Wainer, a renowned statistician at the National Board of Medical Examiners, is looking for sets of blood sugar measurements in Excel format. The ideal set would be measurements six or more times per day for several months. He is writing a paper about better ways to analyze such measurements, which are commonly made by diabetics and persons at risk for diabetes. He has collected such measurements himself; he wants to see how well the methods he developed using data from himself work with data from someone else. You can reach him at hwainer at nmbe dot org.
I told Howard: You will be the first statistician (a) to use your professional skills to improve your own life and (b) publish the results. (Which is what I did with my self-experimentation.) Lots of statisticians must have done something similar, said Howard. For example? I asked. He mentioned John Tukey making traffic measurements to help his wife push a change in traffic rules. However, Tukey didn’t publish the results and the relevance to Tukey’s own life was tiny. If anyone reading this knows of an example, please let me know. Statistics is hundreds of years old; there are thousands of professional statisticians. It seems strange that it has taken this long for such a thing to happen but that seems to be the case.