Humor4u

Technically, I guess Shelley would be a specialized type of epizoologist (or epizootiologist ) - someone who studies patterns of diseases in animals. Epidemiology comes from the word epidemic, which means visited upon humans . It was given its medical meaning by Hippocrates. But the study of epidemiology has become broader than only epidemics. And the profession is growing , too.  "Clinical epidemiology" was proposed as a discipline  by John Paul in 1938 . He described it as concerned with a deeper understanding of the patient and the social determinants of health. The first textbooks on clinical epidemiology were published in the 1980s: you can read more about the history here . Around the same time, the term " evidence-based medicine " came into vogue, a concept that had unfortunately shed the social determinants' focus along the way. Without a notion of "unbiased" embedded in it either, evidence-based medicine is in danger of becoming a label that ...

Seldom have I seen such admission or disclosure of how rotten the core of the financial and commercial sectors are... at least in a single day. While the general world population grapples with the reality of economic drought and misery it turns out the self-anointed elitist has/is, ( as always supposed by the perceptive ), been shoveling wealth with a vengeance, illegally of course. That part is no surprise, the surprise is the fact "mainstream media" has begun reporting the travesties. For decades the press has exalted the captains of industry and commerce as our leading light. If the objective of terrorism is to destroy the will and well-being of citizens then your governance (the enablers), corporate entities and banking fraternity should all be in GIT-MO. Headlines in a single day... Banking suffers another blow as scandals pile up (Notice the use of "scandals"  instead of "larceny", makes it seem naughty rather than hard-core criminal... doesn't i...

People often don't like the idea of "drawing the short straw" in a randomized trial. But being in the control group could turn out to be a very lucky break! Ideally, trials are blinded so you don't know which group you're in. Knowing you're in the control group could affect your behavior and your opinions about whether or not you're benefiting (or being harmed). But even when it's not possible, it's not always fail-proof. (A placebo wasn't going to do THAT to Lisa's eyebrows!) In theory, a trial is being done because it's genuinely not known whether the interventions being tested are better than alternatives (including doing nothing). And people who participate in clinical trials, on average, don't seem to be any worse off than people who don't - whether or not they were in a treatment or control group. For studies that addressed this question, it was possible for researchers to get an average on experimental versus established...

Image by photosteve101   on  Flickr www.planetofsuccess.com/blog Diigo is a social bookmarking tool which allows you to save and access all your bookmarks online. But it's not only a great app for keeping your links in one place; its highlighting function can be used in class for drawing students attention to and keeping track of lexical chunks in online articles, texts and web pages. You will need to be in a connected classroom (computer, projector, access to the Internet). After your students have read the article for meaning - and possibly discussed it - ask them to underline lexical chunks, collocations and other useful bits of language. Then display the text on the board and highlight the chunks with the whole class on the board using the Highlight function on Diigo: For example, I recently used a BBC article about Cricket making an Olympic bid - click here At this point I should say that I have no qualms about using what might be considered an outdated article, particula...

The race to the bottom - update. As the global financial three legged stool predictably tips over, I see increasing support for my 2007 prophetic statements regarding a seven year period of global financial collapse and reset. All things being equal... it should all be said and done by 2014. I am not an alarmist, merely an observer who chronicles observations. In 2007 all indicators screamed imminent "correction"--not a slight correction but a catastrophic failure of global economic possibility. The situation at that time was obviously well beyond any sort of sustainability, saving or subsequent salvage. To state this in simple terms, direct and indirect debts accrued at all levels of society around the globe were hundreds of times greater than asset values used to secure them. This would be equivalent to finessing a mortgage on a $10 Million home (actually worth $10 thousand) when you have no visible means of support or ability to make payments, made worse by the fact only $...

Records falling: OK, this is a change of pace, well sort of. Much of my material is aimed at what I think of as "willful travesty." These natural and synthetic catastrophic events or situations were/are--by and large avoidable, yet were foisted upon an unsuspecting citizen at large providing negative rather than positive societal contribution. In the case of natural disaster, most could have been mitigated but weren't--man-made catastrophe has its root in greed without compunction. Most often "travesty" involves large scale larceny, untenable corruption, Eco-destruction and other ill-advised, wanton and otherwise destructive moves made by self-anointed power mongers such as elitist corporations or self-serving politicos--or more often a combination of both working in a mutually satisfying tandem with little thought given to victims and casualties. It seems in 2012 many records are being set in the "misery" arena. 2012 is shaping up to be a year of u...

See also my guest blog at Scientific American: "Are you a knowledge philanthropist? If not, why not?" She's definitely picked up one of Wikipedia's most important messages [ citation needed ]: "Exercise caution before relying on unsourced claims." Even if you don't want to devote time to editing Wikipedia pages, why not learn to at least add the occasional (reliable) citation where it's needed? It's a far more important habit than clicking"like" buttons! Wikipedia's medical pages get well over 3 million visits a day. Systematic reviews are designated as one of the reliable sources for medical claims in Wikipedia. Making better use of systematic reviews will be discussed by WikiProject Medicine at the international Wikipedia conference, Wikimania  - kicking off tonight at the Library of Congress, Washington DC. Here's the abstract for my Wikimania talk .

The videos and slides are now posted for the presentations that I did with Romain Guy at Google I/O a couple of weeks ago. What's New in Android : A developer's overview of some of the new features available in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, including a deep dive into the enhanced Notifications capabilities (this part by Daniel Sandler, one of the engineers responsible). For Butter or Worse : A very geeky look into how hardware accelerated rendering works on Android, what we did to make things smoother and faster in the latest release, and what Android developers can do to make their applications faster and smoother as well. These videos were posted within a day of the talks, but the slides took a bit longer (possibly explained by the rush up to IO followed by everyone collapsing in fatuge when it was over). There are tons of other great talks from the conference that are posted as well, both in the Google Developers channel on YouTube and (with slides) on the IO site itself . Enjo...

INTERLUDE Stay tuned....

With apologies to all birds: they don't really believe their pre-dawn chirping makes the sun come up! This kind of thinking is one of the most  common traps for humans about their health though - even for healthcare professionals and researchers. J ust because two things happen at the same time, it doesn't mean one causes the other.

Although this submission draws inspiration from the extended power outage... "No easy fix for eastern US storm power outages as heat wave persists..." which goes on to say... "In the aftermath of violent storms that knocked out power to millions from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic, sweltering residents and elected officials are demanding to know why it's taking so long to restring power lines and why they're not more resilient in the first place. The answer, it turns out, is complicated: Above-ground lines are vulnerable to lashing winds and falling trees, but relocating them underground involves huge costs — as much as $15 million per mile of buried line — and that gets passed onto consumers. With memories of other extended outages fresh in the minds of many of the nearly 900,000 customers who still lacked electricity Wednesday, some question whether the delivery of power is more precarious than it used to be." This observation did get me thinking about h...