EMWA conference, day 3

It's been a busy day at the EMWA conference today (well, technically yesterday now) without a spare 5 minutes to update the blog until now.

The day began at 8 am with a plenary lecture on knowledge and information management. Some good hints and tips there, especially for the knowledge management wiki that we've recently set up at Dianthus.

Then for the rest of the morning I sat in on Victoria Cairns's workshop "statistical thinking for medical writers". I'll shortly be developing some new statistics workshops for EMWA, and I thought it would be useful to make sure we don't overlap too much. I was pleased to see that Victoria gave a particularly thorough and comprehensive explanation of what confidence intervals were. Some of my workshops assume that participants are already familiar with such things, and now I know that I can confidently (no pun intended) suggest that anyone who isn't totally comfortable with confidence intervals attends the statistical thinking workshop before coming to mine.

In the afternoon, I gave two short seminars, the first on XML for medical writers, and the second on CDISC. The CDISC seminar generated some lively discussion on the protocol representation model (which has been a recent subject of this blog), and it is clear that it is going to be of great interest to the medical writing community. I was lucky to have Art Gertel, who had been on the team that produced the model, attend the workshop, as he was able to add some invaluable perspective from a CDISC insider.

The seminars were followed almost straight away by an editorial board meeting for The Write Stuff (EMWA's journal), which generated some interesting ideas for future issues. The one that I thought was most promising was a question and answer column. Readers can send in questions on any aspects of medical writing, and the TWS team will find an appropriate expert to answer them. I hope it takes off.

And then, with the serious business of the day over, it was time to join the guided walking tour, in which we got to see some lovely bits of Lisbon and learn a little more about the city, before an agreeable dinner of lovely fresh seafood with fado singers in the background.

The last day tomorrow, at which I shall present my workshop on statistical analysis of binary data. The conference seems to have gone very quickly this year.