KIND network update
Week beginning 2024-05-27
Dear colleagues,
This is a quick update to give you a summary of the activities on the KIND network next week. Full details and joining instructions can be found on our Teams channel - please count yourself very welcome there whenever suits. Please also feel entirely free to pass these details to any colleagues who might be interested, and do get in touch with me with any questions or queries.
Brendan
Training
- new training dates for our core courses coming 10am Monday 27th via the Teams channel. Also added c.50 one-off training sessions booked over the summer/early autumn.
- 15:00 - 16:30ish Mon 27/05/24. Pivot tables and pivot charts This is based on our Excel skill-builder session, and is a quick and friendly introduction to pivot tables and charts for those who are already comfortable working in Excel 🌶🌶 - an intermediate-level session. You’ll need the following skills and tools for the session: Excel M365 Desktop. Comfortable working in Excel, and familiar with tables, references, formulas.. No need to register - just follow the link on the day.
- 10:30 - 12:00ish Thu 30/05/24. Version control for beginners Come to a friendly and informal thematic introduction to version control, and leave knowing that you’ll never have to call a file 04_final_really_final.txt ever again. 🌶 - a beginner-level session. You’ll need the following skills and tools for the session: None. No need to register - just follow the link on the day.
- 13:00 - 14:30ish Thu 30/05/24. References and names in Excel. Aimed at complete beginners in Excel, this session is all about references and names. All welcome! 🌶 - a beginner-level session. You’ll need the following skills and tools for the session: Excel. No need to register - just follow the link on the day.
- we also learned that most of us spend a lot of time encountering new and confusing material at work. It’s normal to find things that you don’t understand (yet)!
Events
- 13.00 - 14.00 Tues 2024-05-28. SCODAS meeting. Julie Arnot and Martin Taulbut (PHS) - Child Poverty Indicators. The Scottish Community of Data Analysts is a community of practice for those working with data in territorial NHS Boards.
- 13.00 - 14.00 Wed 2024-05-29. The KIND Community meetup theme this week is Statistical simulation. All welcome at our regular Wednesday get-together/webinar/tech demo. Full details and joining links via the community meetup channel
- 15.00 - 16.00 Thurs 2024-05-30. The wildly-alliterative monthly multi-modal mentoring meetup. Join us to hear more about our mentoring scheme, hear from some of our first mentor/mentee pairs about their progress, and hear from prospective mentors about projects they would like to work on. All welcome.
Book of the week
John Carreyrou. 2018. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. ISBN 9781524731656, Worldcat link. A love-letter to the power of domain knowledge. Theranos was big-business - a tech startup offering near-instant blood testing for nearly anything at the bedside (or clinic, or shop, or…) with remarkable precision. Investors, including the media tycoons, politicians, and other tech leaders, believed this would be tranformative - indeed, highest praise, disruptive. Yet laboratory medicine experts were absolutely convinced that the technology glibly described here as “near market” was an illusion. Want to guess who was right?
Resource of the week
Jon Minton (PHS) has suggested Flexbox Froggy - an interactive game to help smooth the (unintuitive) business of learning CSS for styling webpages. Beware if you’re prone to hook-y casual games…