This week we have a couple of papers from Epidemiology, an intro/thoughts on coding in qualitative research, an invitation to join the School’s R-users group, and more. Please send all suggestions to calum.davey@lshtm.ac.uk before 9am on Friday.

1. Ever the engaging speaker, David Speigelhalter has a recorded talk at LSE called Learning from Data: the art of statistics. Definitely worth a listen when on a coffee break.
2. Eleanor Murray and team at Harvard are proposing guidelines for more informative causal inference in pragmatic trials. They are looking for feedback on draft guidelines so be sure to click on the link and send your thoughts.
3. Sonja Swanson has an engagingly-written piece on the threats of bias when using instrumental variables in Epidemiology, and Sam Harper takes a Bayesian approach to evaluating seat-belt policy and its potential to reduce road deaths (he describes the typical frequentist approach to this problem as ’empirically absurd, given what is already known from prior studies’ — intrigued?)
4. At the BetterEvaluation blog, Helen Marshall shares some practical insights into coding while doing qualitative research.
5. The statistical software/coding language R has many benefits for evaluation, such as beautiful charts, interactive maps, reproducible reports, and oh — it’s free. The School now has a flourishing ‘R Users Group’ with over 200 subscribers to the mailing list. They meet once a month and one or two members share features of R. The group is for advanced users and total novices alike — if you’re at all interested, follow the link above and sign up!