Phew – it’s actually hot outside. If like me you’re not sure how to cope when summer finally arrives, perhaps these links will give you something to read in the shade.

• The hugely ambitious and hotly anticipated popART trial has been in the news (NPR), with an interesting take on the who, the whys, and the what nexts. The trial found that universal test and treat for HIV can reduce population-level incidence of HIV by meaningful levels.
• Alicia McCoy offers some candid thoughts on life as an evaluator in an NGO. She touches on something that seems to come up in discussions in the Centre: what is evaluation for? Evaluations, she suggests, are often seen as being about accountability, but should be used for more than that, including learning how to design better interventions next time. That’s more difficult, however.
• We’re a broad church, in the Centre for Evaluation, but as a rule most of us don’t explicitly use methods from economics and econometrics. Although sometimes suffering from language barriers, there’s a lot to like and learn from the econometrics field. For a sense of what’s out there, David Mckenzie has put together a list of technical topics.
• Twitter is a total waste to time that makes you feel bad about yourself, right? Wrong! A small corner of Twitter is bucking the trend and engaging in nice, supportive, and informative discussions. Yes, you guessed it, it’s the epidemiologists. Search #epitwitter to pull up posts on causal reasoning, coping with PhD stress, paper writing, and dogs. There’s even a #epibookclub where denizens of Epi Twitter are reading Nancy Krieger’s Epidemiology and the People’s Health together over the next couple of months (only just started). She’s even agreed to answer questions about the book at the end of the summer.