October news 2024
RPySOC 2024 - 21-22 November 2024
Not long to go now! We have published the agenda (subject to change) on our website.
The agenda was produced in R code which you can see by selecting the arrow next to the word code to expand. This is a function of Quarto called code folding.
We have also confirmed our sponsors to the event and are pleased to share their logos on the front page of the website: The Health Foundation, The Strategy Unit, Jumping Rivers and Royal Statistical Society. Jumping Rivers and Royal Statistical Society both have stands at the conference so please do say hello if you are in person at the conference.
Tickets are still available for online and can be booked by emailing nhs.rcommunity@nhs.net as we move to a new booking system.
In person RPySOC
At the end of each day of the conference we will be having a small raffle for some NHS-R Community mugs, provided through a funding grant from Jumping Rivers. Each attendee will receive a raffle ticket as you check in which will put you into the raffle. If you attend both days you are welcome to take a raffle ticket for each day’s draws.
Unconference
We are also going to try unconferencing again.
On the first day we will take suggestions for informal group discussions which people can vote for or say they can turn up to. Then, on the second day, we will be splitting the room so that people can move between the speaker sessions and the unconference.
We had some great discussions that ranged from Quarto to statistical tests to NHS-R Community branding.
Unconferencing was a popular addition to the conference last year and to learn more about what happens we have a podcast talk with Pawel Orzechowski from the University of Edinburgh who introduced the idea of unconferencing to us and a blog by Ben Murch on how it went at the conference.
Virtual RPySOC
Tickets are still available for the virtual event and, as for last year, we want to ensure that people get as involved with the discussions and can submit questions to all the talks. To do this last year we used Slack and noticed that the conversations carried on with the speakers and others well past the Q&A sessions which was wonderful.
Timings
We have a packed agenda and it’s likely that times will change for talks, possibly even on the day. Whilst we’ll try to keep times as close to their published details do keep checking the website if you are planning your day (particularly virtually) around the talks.
Accessibility
We have started a new chapter in the NHS-R Way on accessibility detailing our work to date with subtitles and alternative text.
And this month we published this podcast on Friends and Family text mining project with subtitles that have been checked manually:
Postcards
The NHS-R Community virtual postcard with all our links including the direct access Slack link which we update as required.
You might recognise the similar postcode layout for the recently moved Midlands Decision Support Network!
Finds
This month NHS-R Community shared the following in the Slack #Finds channel:
When the green check mark in RStudio doesn’t work as expected you can use either the equivalent unicode representation, for example "\U2705" or use the {emoji} package, for example
emoji::emoji("check_mark_button").
The {patchwork} package now supports GT tables.
The {dfeR} package from the Department of Education (DfE) not only has a lovely hex logo worth checking out but creates a pre-populated projects using the create_project() function.
The {flint} package finds and fixes lints in R code. A lint is a tool that is used in programming to flag errors, bugs and stylistic issues in code.
It’s been raised a couple of times in Slack and as messages get deleted after 90 days so sharing here in case it needs “finding” again - when using {renv} particularly renv::update() the code runs slowly and hangs on the message Checking for updated packages… The workaround is to to change the download method that {renv} uses before attempting other {renv} functions:
options(renv.download.override = utils::download.file)
Thanks to contributions from Claire Welsh, Matt Dray, Jason Pott, Jake Tufts, John MacKintosh and Jamie Lupton.