KIND network update
Week beginning Mon 12th August 2024
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to our regular KIND network update. Full details of our events and training can be found on our Teams channel. We’re again celebrating some community wins-of-the-week, which have included:
- using power BI and not breaking things
- completed the Stage 2 research phase of the local British Sign Language Plan Equalities and Human Rights Impact Assessment
- figured out the ‘right’ workflow for a recurrent data cleaning task
- I’ve gone from never having heard of Power Automate to now being aware of it and knowing how to write a ‘flow’ - every day is a school day!
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neural nets made ridiculously simple | 13:00-14:00 Mon 12th August 2024 | AI/ML | |
| Hacker Stats (AKA Resampling Methods) | 14:00-15:00 Wed 14th August 2024 | R | |
| Flexdashboard | 13:00-14:30 Thu 15th August 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
Tom Koch. 2011. Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground. ISBN 9780226449357, Worldcat link. This is an excellent introduction to disease geographies. If you’ve ever wondered about how maps can be used to understand health and disease, this book gives a wide-ranging and engaging series of examples. It’s also (pretty unsurprisingly) packed with well-reproduced examples of unusual and historically-important maps that might provide some left-field food for thought if your work involves a geographical element. There are also lots of useful cross-connections made between disease mapping and other issues of health and care interest - tropical medicine, deprivation, and occupation especially.
Can you help?
I’d like to thank Jonathan Minton (PHS) for kindly agreeing to put on a training session on resampling methods for us next week. If you have an idea for a training session that you’d be interested in sharing more widely, please get in touch. We can provide resources and support to help turn it into a successful session. I’d particularly like to hear from people with ideas that might relate to the planned intermediate-level courses in Shiny and Power BI.