Humor4u

Photo by Sandy Millin via eltpics A bit less heavy on political news this year and featuring more sports, showbiz and gossip items, here is my traditional annual news quiz. As in the previous years, it is available in two levels: upper-intermediate/advanced and lower intermediate, and comes complete with 7-page teachers notes (scroll all the way down). The notes contain ideas on how to use the quiz in class and, no less importantly, how to explore the language. Check back in the first days of the New Year for vocabulary review activities ( update - click here ) Quiz The London Olympics kicked off with a spectacular and at times peculiar Opening Ceremony directed by the acclaimed British director Danny Boyle. Who jumped from a helicopter as part of the Opening Ceremony?  In October 2012 the New York Stock Exchange was closed for two consecutive days for the first time in over a hundred years. What caused the shutdown? The music video for "Gangnam Style" by the Korean singer P...

Much is written about the pending "fiscal cliff..." mostly the conversation revolves around how to avoid the automatic increases in taxation coupled with the slashing of government spending, solution is seldom mentioned. There are exceptions however... Pay Raise For Congress, Federal Workers Even though the deficit and debt issue has been on the radar for years, nothing has been done to address the issue and now the time has expired... in politics it seems if not for the last minute... nothing would ever get done. Both significant tax increases and deep spending cuts are entirely necessary if sovereign debt slide is to be arrested and slowed to a manageable place, this truism may set the stage for 2013 as doltish world leaders face the unsolvable problem of shrinking income and burgeoning costs of operation, this is a global issue and so carries global impact. Amazingly the cast of characters who manufactured this obscene situation remain in place and profe...

INTERLUDE Stay tuned..

We are all familiar with the standard news sections, typically we flip to our personal area of interest... be it sports, travel, entertainment, business or world events and so forth, never did I ever imagine a mainstream newspaper would feel the need to add a section devoted specifically to the genre of Financial Crime. Yet, here it is in black and white. So corrupt has the world of finance become... financial crime now commands a specific section in the Telegraph newspaper. Such is the volume and degree of daily and weekly financial crime it now commands a "section" all its own. Financial Crime The latest news on financial crime, insider trading, fraud and financial crime security. The cost of such fiscal felony crime is almost incalculable since it comprises personal ruination for the victims and contributes to the imbalance of the capital system, which even without such criminal interference is teetering on the edge of demise with little hope of sus...

and tips for new bloggers Photo by aclil2climb via eltpics This post is written in response to Adam Simpson's blogchallenge , which, he admits himself, is an act of "shameless self-promotion". And this is a man who urged us not to vote for him when he was recently  nominated for annual Edublog Awards and who was also the winner of last year's TeachingEnglish blogathon ! Anyhow,   here is my Top 12 of 2012. There is, however, one difference. Seeing that it was really difficult for me to decide which posts are MY personal favourites, the list below, unlike that of Adam's, is a list of the most viewed posts of 2012. 1. In response to Hugh Dellar's Dissing Dogme: In Defence of… TBL Hugh Dellar's anti Dogme series were enlightening and hugely entertaining but there was one particular argument which I didn't quite agree with and addressed in this post which has had the highest number of clicks this year. I don't know if it's down to an increased in...

It all started with a single category in the 1840 US Census: "idiocy/lunacy", with the first DSM appearing in 1952 ( Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders ). Now there are hundreds of ways for us not to be 'normal'. Frances Allen, the psychiatrist who led DSM-4, has written a scathing critique of DSM-5 that has even more diagnoses: meet Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder, folks (formerly known as temper tantrums). Read more about psychiatric over-diagnosis in my guest blog at Scientific American: "Is anybody sane here?" said the psychiatrist to the journalist .  Find out more about tackling this problem in medicine generally at Preventing Overdiagnosis: Winding back the harms of too much medicine .  More of my cartoons on over-diagnosis: You have the right to remain anxious and The over-abundance of over-diagnosis . [Update] In 2016, another look at the history of the DSM, with another call for the next one to be based on an objective as...

INTERLUDE Stay tuned...

Just what the world needs.... another inadequately discoverable journal! The number of medical journals is doubling every 20 years - and trials are scattered across so many , that it is becoming ever harder to track them down. Just how many journals do you need to read?, blogs Paul Glasziou .   Richard Smith and Ian Roberts argue that trials shouldn't even be published in journals any more. And in case you were wondering what an n-of-1 trial is: it's a trial with one person in it (number = 1). It means the patient is their own control in a structured experiment. For example, an "n of 1 trial" of a particular drug would mean taking it for a pre-specified time, stopping for a pre-specified time, and so on. You can read more about this kind of trial here . (Or you could ponder how a trial on "n of 1"s had to be terminated because of lack of enrollment - and I thought I had a tough week!) [Update 12 April 2016] Salima Punja studied meta-analysis of n-of-1 tria...