KIND network update
Week beginning Mon 1st July 2024
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to our regular KIND network update. Full details of our events and training can be found on our Teams channel. This week we’re starting a new minimum standards doc for data collection. This is an area where KIND staff are often asked to contribute, but where few of have relevant training or official resources to guide and support. The standards doc will develop over the next few weeks, and be made available as part of our set of SOPs and standards docs.
Hope to see you at something soon
Brendan
Training
There’s no need to register for these drop-in training sessions. You should be able to follow the link on the day - although please note you’ll need to join the KIND Teams channel to follow the chat, and to access sample data files etc. You can see all the forthcoming sessions, and a menu of possible training sessions, on the new training micro-site.
| Session | Date | Area | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excel tables | 10:00-10:30 Mon 1st July 2024 | Excel | |
| An introduction to AI (...and why you might avoid that term) | 13:00-14:00 Mon 1st July 2024 | AI/ML | |
| Shiny from scratch | 09:30-11:30 Wed 3rd July 2024 | Shiny | |
| Formulas in Excel | 15:00-16:00 Wed 3rd July 2024 | Excel | |
| Iteration in R | 09:30-11:00 Fri 5th July 2024 | R |
Events
SCODAS meetings, our social sessions, and the community meetups are on summer hiatus, and will return in late August. Please get in touch if you have ideas for new sessions - you can see a schematic list of possible topics on the KIND resources page.
Book of the week
Trent D. Stephens and Rock Brynner. 2001. Dark remedy: the impact of thalidomide and its revival as a vital medicine. ISBN 9780738205908, Worldcat link. We’re still on a mini-exploration of manufactured doubt in medicine. This week’s book of the week is about thalidomide. Initially sold as an entirely safe sedative, suitable for use in pregnancy, the drug turned out to cause serious harms in utero. A spectacular increase in a previously-rare limb abnormality called phocomelia, even though a cause of widespread alarm amongst paediatricians, did not prevent the continued marketing of the drug. This book, which takes a long and cold look at this ‘disaster’, with particular attention to the greatly-enhanced safety research that became required for new medicines as a consequence. This change was in large part due to one of the great heroes of obstinancy, Frances O. Kelsey, and her tenacious work in demanding higher standards for FDA drug approvals. Also highly recommended is the short review of this book in Nature from a lost era when high-quality book reviews were still a priority for academic publishers.
Resource of the week
After a turbulent community meetup session this week looking at CALCULATE() in Power BI, I was delighted to see two excellent video recommendations from Jennifer Lee (NHS Dumfries & Galloway) and Sylvan Sham (NHS Lanarkshire). Together, they’re a great introduction to CALCULATE() and KEEPFILTERS()