Humor4u

The age of suspicion, NOT paranoia. A few decades ago... record storms could be wholly attributed to natural events and circumstances. Since the advent of extreme technology and demonstrated ill-advised use of it... we now live in a period where the waters of understanding are thoroughly murky and clarity of cause and effects is blurred. As our world spirals into a state of chaos and overwhelming changes, we can never deduce the causal patterns since government has succumbed to the desires of corporate interests and routinely approves insane implementation of horrendous practices which are known to carry risk far beyond the sensibility of any good purpose. We have lost all semblance of established baseline, a must if one is to understand what is going on and why. The crime scenes are so trampled with self-anointed elitist boots that we may never know the extent of their culpability. Who knows what impact insane application of technology has c...

I have recently received an email from a colleague, an EFL teacher in Israel, about how her students find it difficult differentiating between near-synonyms. I repost here my reply alongside the original email with the author's kind permission. Hi Leo, I wonder whether you can help me. Do you know any place on the web where I can compare the meanings of near synonyms? I've used the concordance type sites which give me lots of collocations, but that isn't what I want. It doesn't help my pupils to give them 10 collocations for each word (e.g. regular, usual, routine ) some of which are identical. I need to be able to put my finger on a general rule(s) like, one is for people and the other is for abstract ideas (I know this example is irrelevant to those particular words) Thanks for any help you can provide. Renee Wahl Dear Renee, First of all, it's great to know that you use concordance software. I wouldn't give pupils 10 collocations for each word as it is a bit ...

Sometimes, people combine data that really don't belong together - conflict all over the place! The I-squared statistical test in a meta-analysis can pin it down. It tests the amount of variance between results of different studies to see if there is more difference than you would expect just because of chance. The test measures how much inconsistency there is in the results of trials (technically called heterogeneity). Cochrane includes a (very!) rough guide to interpreting the I-squared : 75% or more is "considerable" (read, an awful lot!). Differences might be responsible for contradictory results - including differences in the people in the trials, the way they were treated, or the way the trials were done. Too much heterogeneity, and the trials really shouldn't be together. But heterogeneity isn't always a deal breaker. Sometimes it can be explained. Want some in-depth reading about heterogeneity in systematic reviews? Here's an article by Paul Glasziou ...

Anecdotal observation leads many of us to the realization our environment is changing, once in a while "officialdom" discloses information which supports said personal observation, this is usually couched in terms of either a climate change 'taxation" opportunity or as a cost burden to corporate interests, seldom is the human misery aspect considered or practical adaptation strategies offered. The topic of extreme earth change is most often cited by authorities as a phenomena of huge surprise. The only surprise in these conversations is that folks seem entrenched in a thought we live in a fixed and frozen galactic situation. It is a dynamic environment,extremely fluid and constantly active. Solar system CHANGE is normal. Observing the changes is normal. Experiencing the changes is normal. Not addressing the coming and unavoidable "shifts" is abnormal. If you think the solar system will stay in the (current) short lived "sweet spot" to accommodate ...

Scientists working with the VLA telescope recently discovered something very "surprising" -- two bright radio spots in the globular cluster M22, which they interpret as proof of two small "black holes." But the discovery does not fit with the expectations of black hole theorists. Stay tuned...

A classic collocation gap-fill activity I don't why I haven't posted this earlier because this is my favourite song when it comes to introducing for the first time the idea of collocations to students and teachers alike. It is full of verb-noun collocations ranging from very common ( take a step , play a game ) to less frequent ( stake a claim ). Note that common collocations often involve delexicalised verbs ( take , make etc) with wide collocational fields while less common ones usually involve more semantically charged words ( stake ) which collocate with a limited number of words ( claim ). There are two versions in the handout below: the first version is the one I normally use with students, the second one is for teachers but can also be used with advanced students (C1/2). The focus of the activity is not listening so with both versions the gap fill should be attempted before listening . To complete the gaps, students should draw on their lexical knowledge; some would prob...

"It's extremely hard not to have a diagnosis," according to Steve Woloshin, this week at the NIH Medicine in the Media course for journalists. Allen Frances talked about over-diagnosis of mental disorders (read more about that in my blog at Scientific American online ). The National Cancer Institute's Barry Kramer tackled the issue of over-diagnosis from cancer screening.  He explained  lead-time bias  using an image of Snidely Whiplash tying someone to train tracks. Ineffective screening, he said, is like a pair of binoculars for the person tied to the tracks: you can see the train coming at you sooner, but it doesn't change the moment of impact. Survival rates after a screening diagnosis increase, even when no one lived a day longer: people have cancer for longer when the diagnosis comes long before any symptoms. Screening is effective, on the other hand, when earlier detection means more people do well than would have done if they'd gone to the doctor fir...

INTERLUDE

Making a good impression with headlines based on tiny preliminary studies? Too easy! Other ways to fall into traps about exaggerated research findings: reports of laboratory or animal studies that don't mention their limitations, studies with no comparison group, conference presentations with inadequate data reports. These were some of the key points made by Steve Woloshin at the first full day of NIH's Medicine in the Media course , happening now in Potomac near Washington DC. Read more here if you want to know more about the pitfalls of small study size and how to know if a study was big enough to be meaningful. Update 31 July 2016: And now there's jumping from a plane without a parachute .

Forest plots, funnel plots - and what's with the mysterious diamond symbol, lurking like a secret sign, in meta-analyses? Meta-analysis is a statistical technique for combining the results of studies. It is often used in systematic reviews (and in non-systematic reviews, too). A forest plot is a graphical way of presenting the results of each individual study and the combined result. The diamond is one way of showing that combined result. Here's a representation of a forest plot, with 4 trials (a line for each). The 4th trial finds the treatment better than what it's compared to: the other 3 had equivocal results because they're crossing the vertical line of no effect. A funnel plot is one way of exploring for publication bias : whether or not there may be unpublished studies. Funnel plots can look kind of like the sketches below. The first shows a pretty normal distribution of studies - each blob is a study. It's roughly symmetrical: small under-powered studies spr...

Interlude The increase in activity beyond 2010 is self-evident. Stay tuned

Bought to you by the Institute for Economics and Peace , NO!... Not peace and economics, economics THEN peace. I suppose it is good to hi-light the main thrust of the institutes concerns so we can grasp their main interest and priority. It seems upheaval, at least willy-nilly unplanned bickering among nations disturbs economic sweetness, diminishing the opportunity for maximizing corporate profits.  Well... any improvement in world peace is good in my book no matter, so I will not quibble the point. It could well be "peace" as a commodity could be a viable industry spawning many opportunities for peace-keepers and the peace keeping industrial sector, according to this trend peace is about having a packaged peace product to peddle.      The world has become more peaceful for the first time since 2009, according to the 2012 Global Peace Index. All regions excluding the Middle East and North Africa saw an improvements in levels of overall peacefulness. T...

Yikes, I haven't been updating this blog much!  Here's some recent stuff, though.  A lot of it has appeared on my Tumblr , so sorry for the repetition.   I got this neat pose book in Little Tokyo with people fighting, so here are some tiny doodles I did while looking at it. Next I wanna try drawing some of the men in the book...it's getting boring drawing just girls all the time. Hopefully the Instagram treatment isn't too annoying to anyone.  I've seen people complain, but honestly it's a pretty useful tool for getting your art seen by people outside of your circle!  Here's a scan of the actual sketchbook, just in case.    A little while ago I had a day-long obsession with Artemis and drew her a bunch.  When I was younger I really liked Greek mythology and she was my favorite goddess. Man, this new blogger stuff is a pain in my ass.  Anyhow, above is a sketchbook doodle and it's Photoshop clean up.  Which one do you prefer? ...

All of the recordings of the technical sessions I gave with Romain Guy at Devoxx 2011 are now free on the Parleys.com site. This means that you'll have a chance to watch them all before we go to Antwerp next month and present several more sessions. Which means we'll need another five hours of new material. Dangit. In the meantime: Android Awesomeness ( Part 1 and Part 2 ) This vaguely-titled talk was in two parts. In the first half , Romain and I did a very quick introduction to the Android 4.0 release. The second half was more interactive, as we showed how we use the tools that ship with the SDK to debug performance, memory, and UI issues. You can also download the slides for this talk here: Part 1 and Part 2 . Graphics Goodies This session was an updated version of the Android Accelerated Rendering talk we did at Google I/O 2011. Here are the slides . Sticky GUIs This presentation was a collection of techniques and principles for creating GUI applications that will make...

والعصى والحجارة سوف تكسر العظام ولكن  الكلمات لن للاساءة. Celebrating 300 posts. Today I was dismayed to read that the right to self-expression, (at least outside of a persons mind and thinking) is being assailed yet again. Over the past few decades I have watched in fascination as my prior and rather plump rights as a human being within civilized society have been slowly but surely rendered down to a mere fraction of what those rights once were. I am at a point now in this over zealous political correctness madhouse we call modernized society-- whereby I am reluctant to look at a fellow being sideways lest I be pilloried for some infraction against said beings sensibilities.  Rights have been whittled to privileges, privileges have been brutally rationed and I, like you have been reduced to a thought box with little or no capacity to express.  The constraints applied to personal mores, (to a point)--did make sense in the initial parsing...