Good News

POPH4101/8101 has been successfully transferred to full-online mode and students have been given remote access to STATA for the course.  So far the students seem to be satisfied with the transition to online mode, and we have not lost any students or had any complaints about the transition.  Tutorials are continuing remotely via video-link and have been running successfully.

Conferences, Workshops and Seminars

Joanne Thandrayen, Grace Joshy and Ben O’Neill have all had talks/ papers accepted for upcoming statistical conferences, but these have both been postponed until further notice due to COVID-19.  At this stage it is unclear whether these conferences will go ahead.

Engagement and Outreach

Ben O’Neill appeared on a US radio podcast to discuss legal and economic theory relating to zoning laws (a subject he has previously written about).

Publications

Richardson A, Joshy G. (2020) Deconfounding confounding part 3: controlling for confounding in statistical analyses. MJA (invited tutorial paper, accepted 20 Mar 2020).

Other

Ben O’Neill and Neal Fultz (NLNM Consulting, LA) have created a beta version of an R package called stat.extend.  This package adds functions to create highest density regions (HDRs) for probability distributions, plus confidence intervals for sampling problems.  The package is available on GitHub; once it has completed the beta phase it will be submitted to CRAN to become part of the public repository of R packages.