KIND network update
Week beginning Mon 5th August 2024
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to our regular KIND network update. We’ve got several training sessions coming up next week, and as usual full details can be found on our Teams channel and on our training pages.
As a result of the #IAmRemarkable workshop last month, expertly delivered by NES’s Joanne Haddrick and Elaine Lawther, we’ve also started a Win of The Week Teams thread to help the community celebrate their professional (and personal) achievements. A random selection from last week:
- Shared R knowledge with my colleague when they were stuck on a problem
- Making conversations in the office with colleagues. It might not sound like much, but as an introvert, this is a big step!
- Realized that I am now confident with Pivot Tables
- Putting myself out there a bit more to be involved in new projects as opposed to them being suggested to me
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referencing | 15:00-16:00 Mon 5th August 2024 | Skills | 🌶🌶 : intermediate-level |
| Testing R code | 15:00-16:30 Wed 7th August 2024 | R | 🌶🌶 : intermediate-level |
| Power automate for health and care | 13:00-14:00 Thu 8th August 2024 | Data | 🌶 :beginner-level |
| Relative, absolute, mixed, structured, and R1C1 references in Excel | 15:00-16:00 Thu 8th August 2024 | Excel | 🌶🌶 : intermediate-level |
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
Cathy O’Neil. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction.
ISBN 9780241296813,
Worldcat/Knowledge Network.
If you’ve ever been stunned by an unexpectedly high insurance quote, you won’t need reminding that data-driven algorithms can have negative consequences in the real-world. This book looks across a series of ordinary activities to show how, a decade or so ago,
algorithms were shaping our lives. While the tech may have moved on, the moral of the work remains: algorithms are capable of serious harms if they are designed and applied thoughtlessly. I’d make this compulsory reading for colleagues working with data if
I could - not least because it’s a surprisingly engaging read given the serious subject-matter. The data that we work with can have all kinds of unpredictable destinations, and the potential scope of end-uses of that data should be considered when building
tools that collect and combine powerful data. Again, it’s another reminder that data with enough power to effect positive change will often be usable to bring about harms..
Resource of the week
There’s some scoping work going on at present about Tableau, and the possibility of using the Tableau Public service as a platform for building Tableau skills. There’s a bit of a shortage of free-to-access training for that platform in general, so I was delighted to find that UNICEF have a full introductory tutorial available to all (registration required).