Humor4u

Let's just say, for the sake of argument... the Fukushima nuclear disaster is indeed leaking and dispersing noxious, toxic radiation fallout all around the globe, even as you read this!  Many background sources, as opposed to mainstream sources certainly posit that indeed is the case and Fukushima is slowly but surely contaminating everything with potentially lethal doses of nuclear radiation, the kind that seeps into the soil, water and hence the food-chain forever altering the stuff of life, even the air we must breathe. Unless one has a radioactive counter of some sort we are totally reliant on the authorities to keep us informed and warned about such a hideous proposition. However, history shows us that when the threat is large enough or must be sequestered intelligence information, that quite the opposite has proven true and said information has been withheld, usually, as they say, for our own good. Out in the world there...

(This tip and anecdote is specifically about Android, but the same technique applies to every platform I've ever worked on , which at this point is quite a few. In fact, it's a technique that Romain and I have stressed in our book and in most graphics/GUI talks that we've given over the years, such as this one from Devoxx in 2008 ) . I was debugging an application recently (names withheld to protect the completely and utterly guilty) and discovered that the source of a serious performance bottleneck was simply the size of the bitmaps involved. The application's job is to display lots of pictures, so using bitmaps is a given. And the size of the bitmaps being loaded and displayed is signficant, so there were going to be issues around memory and performance anyway. But it was the way in which the application was treating the source and destination sizes that was at the root of the problem. In particular, the application was loading each image into a bitmap of size X x Y...

What should I do with these? Photo by Tzvi Meller I’ve always envied people who can whip up a blog post straight after returning from – or sometimes while still at - a conference. Although I didn’t write any IATEFL 2012 reflections there was one session that particularly resonated with me: Andrew Walkley’s Technology and principles in language learning . He talked about how trying to bring technology to our digitally native learners many teachers have lost the focus on language. He listed five things that he found particularly worrying about unprincipled integration of technology into ELT: Vocabulary and grammar are seen as separate entities Grammar domination Vocabulary taught in sets Activity overload Skills are separated from language Andrew seems to have taken the thoughts right out of my head – only I was afraid to verbalise them apart from  this post where I lightly bemoaned the lack of web tools and apps focusing on the link between grammar and vocabulary, multi-word phras...

The topical issue today is the so called 2012 record drought, specifically the current North American drought. As of today the 2012 drought is rated as the sixth worst since record keeping began. Drought’s Footprint More than half of the country was under moderate to extreme drought in June, the largest area of the contiguous United States affected by such dryness in nearly 60 years. Nearly 1,300 counties across 29 states have been declared federal disaster areas. The down side of stubborn drought conditions are obvious of course, various levels of food production are seriously impacted which invariably leads to shortages and of course rising prices for food, but are rising prices inevitable? Seldom are these posited reality "facts" closely examined or portrayed through in depth journalistic investigation--it seems only the sight and sound bites make the cut. Often the general population does not dwell beyond the journo-fodder and so acceptance is almost automatic without cha...

Compelling anecdotes  - "It saved my life!" - can drive us so wildly astray. Rigorous research is the antidote, but it often doesn't feel like it has an even chance! Especially when it comes to screening and "preventive" medicine (conventional and complementary). A wonderful book by Margaret McCartney is a great example of what we need so much: a combination of beautiful storytelling with reliable research. It charts the paths that lead to health care that does more harm than good - over-treating the (well-off) worried well while the (less well-to-do) sick wait. This is  The Patient Paradox , where "clinics and waiting rooms are jammed with healthy people" but there's not enough care for the sick. Margaret blogs here and tweets here .

At the Olympics, humans try to go "higher, faster, stronger" - and achieve their personal best. The bar is constantly raised. Drugs don't have to be better to cross the line, though: they can get by on what's called non-inferiority or equivalence trials. "No worse" (more or less) can be good enough. Some drugs are now only loosely possibly non-inferior to other non-inferior drugs - several degrees removed from proven superior to doing nothing. Add the increasing reliance on shortcut measures of what works , and there's a real worry that for drugs, the performance bar is being lowered. If you want to read about the differences between traditional randomized controlled trials that can show superiority and their non-inferiority/equivalence cousins, click on the PDF here at the CONSORT website .