Gianluca Baio’s blog

I know… long time no speak and the rest… I do feel a bit guilty about it — and I do have lots of good excuses for not having posted almost at all in the recent past and definitely at all in the past 3 months (lockdown-cum-homeschooling is something I may want to discuss separately…). Anyway: a piece of news on survHE. This has first come out in exchange with Ash Bullement, whom I’m jointly supervising in his PhD at Sheffield — Ash has found the time to break the current CRAN version of survHE and we’ve been back and forth in the Autumn to solve them.

Last Friday on Monday, we held our online R-HTA workshop. We will discuss the feedback and agree on ways forward in the consortium Scientific Committee soon, but I thought I’d write down some personal reactions to the very interesting discussions — of course, what come out of all this eventually may well be very different to my synthesis! Still… I thought the two days went very well — I have enjoyed them very much and I think so did the participants.

This comes as the results of two external forces that have prompted me to do some work on the website — specifically the section on books. The first one is the newest version of hugo-academic (which is the engine underlying the whole of my website, together with the R package blogdown). This has a new facility that can be used to format books or tutorial or documentation. Trouble is that it assumes that you’re writing a book and so if you have a folder named “book” it automatically use that new format for the pages in that folder.

Our paper on the CBD trial has just been published in The Lancet Psychiatry (and found its way through the media, for example here or here). Basically, the objective was to determine whether (a specific dose of) CBD was a safe treatment for cannabis addition (I’d already talked about this here and here). This has been quite a long process — I think even before I got involved there has been lots of work put in.

I was reading the (Italian) newspapers today and saw a few articles about the upcoming Referendum. It will be held in September and it will legislate about whether the constitution should be changed to modify the number of MPs (400 from the current 630 in the lower house, Camera dei Deputati; and 200 from 315 in the upper house, the Senate). This is a long-standing debate in Italian politics — I think that the original constitution only mandated a number of representative that was proportional to the population and the number was later fixed in the 1960s.