News

Daylight saving time is coming to a close here in California. When we were younger, my brother would call POP-CORN, which was a phone service that you could call and hear the correct time. Did you ever do that? He would call POP-CORN right before the time change, and the automated message would answer, “At the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be…1:59 and 50 seconds.” Then 10 seconds later the chime would say, “Pacific Standard Time will be 1:00 exactly.”  

The 2024 Olympics may be starting in a few weeks, but California’s Local Lead Agencies (LLAs) have been racing against the clock to complete their ECTC Data Collection in time. We are excited to declare that LLAs medaled in all four events— stores, parks, sidewalks, and MUH! 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new concept; if you’ve ever used a program that checks your spelling and grammar, you’ve used a form of AI! However, the release of products like ChatGPT has kicked off a boom in AI technology, and it is growing more sophisticated every day. 

So how does this AI boom affect our work in tobacco control evaluation? I took a deep dive into the topic to find out!

Once an intervention or evaluation activity is over, it can be important for those involved (project staff and volunteers) to reflect on what happened and discuss what worked, where there is room for improvement, and what any next steps should be. (See documenting organizational history.) Depending on how complex the activity was, this process could be fairly quick – anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or two.

I joined TCEC in March of 2013, and here I am in April 2024 writing a newsletter article looking back at my 11 years with TCEC. It is a challenge to come up with a summary that does the time I have spent with TCEC justice. I don’t say that as a boast of myself, but I have been part of an amazing team that has managed to do so much. I have had the great fortune of working with great people, to work with a team that made my time at TCEC feel less like work, and more like a group of friends tossing ideas and coming up with creative content.

It is an exciting time in the public health world!  State and local policymakers are taking action to reduce the availability of the tobacco industry’s deadly products in the retail environment.

What's the point of giving feedback, anyway? Will my comments actually change anything? 

If you've interacted with the Tobacco Control Evaluation Center at any point, you've undoubtedly received requests for feedback— whether on a training, a webinar, or how satisfied you were with our technical assistance.

When you need to collect data, how do you know what’s important to ask? Do you brainstorm a list of questions? Or do you dust off an instrument your project has used in the past? If you wonder about that, the Tobacco Control Evaluation Center (TCEC) has an array of tools that can help!

TCEC has been my family for almost 6 years, and I’m sad to announce that we're parting ways. I started at TCEC in 2017 as an undergraduate research assistant.  What began as a part-time gig doing data entry and file management evolved into more than what I could have ever imagined. Through these years, I graduated with a B.S. in Statistics, earned a Master's degree in Public Health, and stayed on as a full-time associate with TCEC.

Evaluation report writing can be an intimidating task, especially when it comes to Final Evaluation Reports (FERs). Our website has many resources that can help with FER writing and hopefully ease some of that anxiety. However, after hearing from evaluators in the field, we wanted to answer some of the questions about how FERs are scored. So grab your favorite beverage, sit back, and read on as we share the process with you.