A great example of engaging with the public on science
We love Reddit here. Like most websites that encompass a wide range of tops, there’s some great stuff on Reddit, and some really terrible stuff. We also love engaging with the public on scientific topics. So, we were delighted to see this thread from Dr. Zachary Neal (a community psychologist), where he not only promoted…
How many $$$$$ is your title worth?
RWJF maintains a database of all awards they have granted since 1972; a number that comes up to around 30,000 awards. We’ve been looking more deeply at what wasn’t funded for another project, but I spend a moment looking at this database to see what trends we could see. If you are applying, and wonder…
Digging into some CDC data
This is another one of those live blog post that I write while I do some data analyses. I hope you find this interested to see how we approach the analytic process and the types of questions that we want to answer. The focus today is on the CDC-RISE project. We have five major evaluation…
Analyzing change using the Pathways to Population Health Compass
This is another one of those “writing a blog while I’m working” blogs. For the Rhode to Equity project, we administered three waves of the P2PH Compass. This tool actually warrants some discussion up-front. The Compass measures a variety of capacities for community health engagement and improvement on a developmental scale. We designed the Compass…
Effective Twitter Use Among PA Congressional Representatives
In our work for the RISE project, we have been looking at how different organizations have used Twitter to spread public health messages. These organizations aren’t the only ones with an interest in trying to communicate with the public at large. Government officials have a vested responsibility that involves being able to directly communicate news…
A new dawn (chorus)
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends! We’re so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside. After several months of development, we’ve relaunched the Dawn Chorus Group website. Of course, it was our buddies at Mind Development and Design who helped shepherd this into reality, so we would be remiss if…
Solving a large data cleaning problem: an experiential live blog
10:11 p.m. About five hours ago, a dear colleague said to me, “We need to have this data cleaned for the reports, oh, and it’s also going to be shown at a [high-level government function.] Here’s a fact. This data has been a disaster for a long time. Well, not the data itself but the…
Notes on “Notes on Effective Altruism”
I first came across the effective on Lex Fridman’s podcast where he interviewed William MacAskill. In a nutshell, effective altruism is the practice of making decisions based on the greatest good for the greatest number of people. This can be done by donating money to charity, volunteering your time, or advocating for change. Effective altruism…
TA can work….if we study it well.
Our friend and colleague Victoria Scott just published a large scoping review on TA effectiveness evidence. She writes: Advances in the science and practice of TA hinge on understanding which aspects of TA are effective, and when, how, and for whom these aspects of TA are effective. Addressing these core questions requires (i) a widely adopted standard…
Using Twitter Data to tell stories
Earlier this week, our friends at the New Jersey Health Initiatives we kind enough to host our dear friend Dr. Elena Ragusa of Drive Evaluation and myself to talk about how to use Twitter more effectively in social services. We might have this sense that we have to jump on major trends or spark something…
Analyzing Twitter Data: There’s an App for that.
Well, we finally did it. We launched a beta version of Readiness Learning Systems. So far, we only have two apps up there, which are designed to help you analyze and learn from Twitter data. What you can do is either enter a hashtag or a full account (like @waitbutwhy, for example), and we’ll process…
Implementation Matters: A website to document community-based practices, knowledge, and evidence.
We just launched Implementation Matters–our 100% open-source, community-driven wiki to collect and store community-based evidence and perspectives on community-based issues. This is why we’re doing it. Vanishing Ideas Over the past decade, I’ve worked with dozens and dozens of amazing coalitions and organizations. And the work that they do sometimes gets documented into evaluation reports…
