Humor4u

When a big medical conference is on, we're saturated with coverage of the presentations. This makes them a critical target for marketing and a major contributor to unrealistic expectations about what health care - and health research - can really do. To their great credit, professional societies are developing policies to ensure disclosure of financial interests by presenters. After all, financial interests pose an obvious  risk of bias to research  about the effects of health care - and to what the research means for clinical practice and education.  Disclosures are increasing  at conferences, but compliance can be a problem . Disclosure is made especially hard when so many people make a mockery of disclosing their potential conflicts - maybe by not pointing it out when the commercial source of their salary has been passed through a filter first - or by ignoring major hospitality from a company while at the same time declaring trinkets. The  disclosure of indirect financial intere

How animating ListView items can lead to problems as views are recycled, and how to perform these types of animations correctly with new API added in Jellybean. Code: http://developer.android.com/shareables/devbytes/ListViewAnimations.zip YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MIfSxgsHIs

INTERLUDE  Stay tuned...

This is a somewhat belated reaction to Catherine Walter's article which appeared in the Learning English section of Guardian last autumn. Click here  to read it. Language or maths? Spaarnestad Photo via  Nationaal Archief Dr Catherine Walter’s article Time to stop avoiding grammar rules  defends explicit grammar teaching in EFL. Proudly subtitled The evidence is now in: the explicit teaching of grammar rules leads to better learning, the article makes numerous references to a "wide range of studies" that have shown evidence of effectiveness of explicit grammar teaching. Although no sources are cited, the forthright and cogent tone of the article written by the co-author of How English Works , The Good Grammar Book and Oxford English Grammar Course (all with Michael Swan) would win over any ELT practitioner. As one would expect, to make her argument more convincing, Dr Walter talks with mild disdain about other approaches that have de-emphasised explicit grammar instructio

I read an interesting article on The Verge today ( Photoshop is a city for everyone ), which detailed a short history of Photoshop, to explain why it is the way it is, and how it will continue to be that way. I enjoyed the article, but one quote in there bugged me: "Many of the Adobe employees I met — all fantastic conversationalists — seem like the sort of people whose children grow up to become employees of Google. You know, smart people who’ve had their own heyday, and are now ready for the next generation to shine.” The quote felt more personal to me because I’ve worked at Adobe (albeit not on Photoshop), as well as other venerable tech companies in Silicon Valley, and now find myself at Google. What irks me is this: Just because an engineer has some level of success, or got the chance to work on a successful product in some previous generation, doesn’t have any bearing on whether they want to let someone else do it. In fact, I’d argue the opposite: any engineer that has worke

Precise numbers and claims - as though there is no margin for error - are all around us. When someone tells you that 54.3% of people with some disease will have a particular outcome, they're basically predicting the future of all groups of people based on what happened to another group of people in the past. Well, what are the chances of exactly  that always happening, eh? If our fortune teller was quoting the mean of a study here, it could be written like this: 67.5% (95% CI: 62%-73%). The CI stands for "confidence interval" and it gives you an idea of how much imprecision or uncertainty there is around the estimate. The confidence level - 95% here, which is common - is chosen when a confidence is calculated. The 95% level means the significance level is at 0.05 (or 5%) - more about that here . It has set the level of uncertainty being measured - how probable it is, that roughly that result would occur. The chances of the result always being precisely 67.5% can be prett

How to use AnimationDrawable to construct a keyframe animation where each frame is shown for a specified duration. YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3ksidLf7vA Code: http://developer.android.com/shareables/devbytes/KeyframeAnimation.zip

My hard drive crashed last week, taking all of my data and digital life with it. I've written and rhymed about this already, but I thought I'd jot down some notes about how it happened and how I got my life back in case it helps anyone else in the same boat. Background: I have an iMac at home, running Snow Leopard, purchased about 3 years ago. It's been reasonably solid; we haven't had any hardware issues with it until this doozy. Part I: The Symptoms My wife complained that the computer had gotten painfully slow, so I took a look at it. Indeed, it was horrible, taking tens of seconds to perform simple tasks and minutes to do something really complicated like launch an application. I ran Activity Monitor to see what was causing the problem and ... nothing. The CPU was nearly idle, memory usage was well below the physical limits, and the disk didn't seem to be thrashing. On a hunch, I thought I'd check the disk, so I ran Disk Utility. (Note to self: This would h

EMP is a high probability False Flag opportunity... either by (claimed) sun activity or rogue nation "attack." With increasing buzz about EMP... it is probably time to wonder about the much touted phenomena! (Should power/communications fail for an extended period - cause may be difficult to establish) Was power selectively "turned off" to create a population control mechanism with blame going to the sun or a rogue nation...  or.... The point is, should all communications, electronic devices and power supply experience extended failure, even in contained regional areas, it would be difficult to determine what, why or how the event precipitated... or what the likelihood of restoration or assistance may be. Folks would literally be in the dark. For me this represents the worst case scenario for modern society, be it a natural occurrence or not. It is certainly worthy of contemplation especially since the advent of relatively low tech EMP inducing weaponry and noted so

Simple uses of ValueAnimator, ObjectAnimator, and interpolators to control how a shape is moved around on the screen. Code:  http://developer.android.com/shareables/devbytes/Bouncer.zip Video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCTcmPIKgpM

"What is it you wanna hear?" - Lynyrd Skynyrd In case you don't follow me on Google+ , or you missed my recent G+ post about DevBytes requests , I'll reproduce it here. Comments are welcome either on the original G+ post or here; I'll see them in both places. Writing your suggestion on a nearby tree, probably not as helpful. Scribbling it on a piece of paper and putting it in a bottle that you toss in the ocean, not so much. Shouting it out to the wind to carry it to my ears, not really. Just stick to comments on these posts. Boring, but slightly more effective... Hey #android developers: Laundry list time. Now that I've started doing these DevBytes videos (something I've been planning on for a while now), it would be great to hear from you about tutorial topics that you would find helpful. I have a few more episodes in the can that will roll out over the next few weeks, but eventually I'll write some more apps and record shows around them, so I'

This example shows how to speed up bitmap loading and reduce garbage collection by reusing existing bitmaps. Note that the reused bitmap must be mutable and of the same size and configuration as the bitmap you load into it. Not sure if this is clear from the video, although it is documented in the API. Code: http://developer.android.com/shareables/devbytes/BitmapAllocation.zip Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsQet4nBVi8

This example shows how the use of BitmapOptions affects the resulting size of a loaded bitmap. Sub-sampling can speed up load times and reduce the need for large bitmaps in memory if your target bitmap size is much smaller, although it's good to understand that you can't get specific Bitmap sizes, but rather power-of-two reductions in sizes. Code: http://developer.android.com/shareables/devbytes/BitmapScaling.zip Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12cB7gnL6po