I passed

It has been a while since I have posted, but I'll take a minute to say I passed my dissertation proposal. This basically means I have been deemed competent to procedure with my dissertation research. Here is a quick description of what I'm doing:

A great deal of research centers on questions of whether there are group differences. Are males different from females? Did the drug group get better faster than the placebo group? There are also many situations where we group people without really justifying it - Are 'type A' personality people different from 'type B'. I'm improving statistical methods which as the question - do 'type A' and 'type B' really exist, or are they arbitrary cutoffs on the personality continuum? If there really are types (groups) instead of a continuum, we may want to assign people to groups. Currently there are not very good ways of determining how accurately people are assigned to these types of groups.* I'm working on a method to estimate assignment accuracy.

* For those of you who love online quizzes which place you into a group like facebook's "What is your personality type??", I'm going to assume the reader is aware that the results cannot be trusted to represent anything real. They are for entertainment purposes only. If you are not aware of this, consider yourself educated ;).