Humor4u

I've heard versions of this "increasing confidence" aphorism for years, but recently wondered it came from. This seems to be its source - A Skeptic's Medical Dictionary , by Michael O'Donnell :      Clinical experience. Making the same mistakes with increasing confidence over an impressive number of years.       Evidence-based medicine. Perpetuating other people's mistakes instead of your own. (Cited in The Lancet - and see the book review in The BMJ .) Shrikant Kalegaonkar pointed out  that Oscar Wilde said something similar - and it is as exquisite as you would expect. It's here, in his 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray : He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regard...

To inoculate yourself against "significant" effects that might not improve health, have a look at papers by Ioannidis and Gotzsche . Want to know more about the risks of relying only on biomarkers? Here's an explanation of their pitfalls at PubMed Health .

Pre-listening activities: what to focus on? At last year's IATEFL conference in Brighton I was at a presentation on teaching listening where I got into a bit of an argument with the speaker. I don't know if it was my nerves before my own, first presentation at IATEFL but I wasn't on my best behaviour, which I later regretted. The whole situation was rather ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was the fact that in principle I agreed with the presenter who argued that there is little benefit in pre-teaching vocabulary before listening activities - I wouldn't agree though with his claim the word "prowl", one my favourite words in English, is useless :) There is an interesting piece of research to substantiate the speaker's argument, which he surprisingly did not mention. Chang and Read (2006) administered a listening comprehension test to160 students who were divided into four groups and received a different kind of support: 1.     Providing background informatio...

Disappointment in early intervention, and the cycle begins anew: even earlier intervention in even more people who will mostly not get sick anyway. Read more about why starting the disease clock ticking earlier sometimes helps, but often doesn't:    http://1.usa.gov/xywTjg

INTERLUDE Our Electric Universe... Stay tuned...

A take on a classic saying - can't face the data mining boom without it! You can read about the dangers of data analyses that weren't pre-planned and multiple testing (data dredging)  here . Another important related read? Epidemiologist John Ioannidis' " Why most published research findings are false ."