Humor4u

Intuitively--regular sentient folks have suspected their leadership may be psychotic or even worse. As much as no one wants despicable events, heinous behaviors and savage approaches these always seem to be a constant throughout human history, even unto today. In almost all cases of chronic catastrophic event there is a decision maker who displayed abhorrent behavior regardless of consequence to innocent victims. If so many of the world population crave basic peace and tranquility, then how is it we live in a perpetual state of fear, be it fear of violence, fear of corporate activities, fear of larceny or any number of life elements proven to be dangerous to health and well-being. With collapse of every kind looming on the horizon one eventually has to consider the source of the condition. It certainly seems time to examine the mental state of our leadership be it governance, corporate or otherwise. To-date--folks who question the m...

Progress is good, it smacks of going forward, of improvement, betterment and advantage. Progress by definition suggests things are improving and innovation is lessening burdens and adding quality to life. The test for advantageous progress is "result", we can assess a progress change through the advantage it provides. Can a point be reached where progress reaches a place where the gains become overwhelmed by disadvantages? I find the question interesting. In today's world it is difficult to ascribe the word satisfying to the condition of being alive as a human on this planet, no doubt we have also contributed to dissatisfaction for all other life on the planet, so--explain to me again the intent of "progress." Often the disadvantages of progress come in a form we call unintended consequence. This occurs when a particular step in progress manifests a series of disadvantages which render the attempted progress as regressive in practice. Have we reac...

Yesterday I completed the online feedback questionnaire for the IATEFL 2013 conference, which took place earlier this month in Liverpool , and, inevitably, started thinking back to the conference. It was the fourth IATEFL conference I've attended - superbly organised as ever - and probably the most intense one. Whether it was the fact that my hotel was not so close to the venue or the number of sessions on offer every day or the number of sessions I wanted to go to every day – but at the end of the week I was absolutely exhausted. New format   I don't know whether the new format –  30 minutes for talks, 45 minutes for workshops – is the way to go. I felt 30 minutes presentations (including mine) were somewhat rushed while 45-minute workshops didn't have anything workshop-y about them. I stupidly put myself down for a talk and had to cut my presentation by half from its original 60 minute length - as it was given at TESOL France 2012. To do so I had to get rid of all ...

It's the  Catch-22  of clinical trials: to protect pregnant women and children from the risks of untested drugs....we don't test drugs adequately for them. In the last few decades , we've been more concerned about the harms of research than of inadequately tested treatments for everyone, in fact. But for "vulnerable populations,"  like pregnant women and children, the default was to exclude them. And just in case any women might be, or might become, pregnant, it was often easier just to exclude us all from trials. It got so bad, that by the late 1990s, the FDA realized regulations and more for pregnant women - and women generally - had to change. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) took action too. And so few drugs had enough safety and efficacy information for children that, even in official circles, children were being called "therapeutic orphans."  Action began on that, too. There is still a long way to go. But this month there was a sign that ...

The world has become a strange and seemingly frightening place--or at least seems so, perhaps because of real-time event reporting and social media. Perhaps in gentler times the risks presented to humanity on the planet earth were just as potent but isolation contained the wide threat picture to a few affected individuals and preserved individual mental health. In early time becoming a meal might have been the big risk, followed later by diseases and epidemics with no apparent cause, these days, with those threats by and large contained we now have a new mortal enemy--ourselves. All over the planet populations quiver in anticipation of brutality as internal or external forces smash their way into positions of control. This is in spite of any particular government promising immunity from such brutal incursions. It seems authorities are woefully unable to deliver any semblance of protection no matter how cooperative the citizens or the sophistication of governments...

Apparently there is a good living to be made proving something known as "global warming." Global warming has the promise of tax grab heaven for the elitist New World Order practitioners. The theory ostensibly... is needed to prove that the climate of earth is greatly influenced by the activity of humanity in that our carbon output is causing the earth to become warmer. Never mind we are a carbon based planet. Should this "warming" case be proven then the legislators move in and place taxes upon us for being alive. It is easy to see that fitting findings to the agenda is imperative for both the sycophant researchers and their sponsor--the NWO inspired tax fiends. Towards this end many fancy charts and data has been concocted to make the case. The taxation scheme was going swimmingly for awhile and the sheep shears were oiled and serviced in anticipation of giving all a short back and sides in the way of a carbon footprint tax. Said tax was to be used for developi...

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Unfortunately, little Suzy isn't the only one falling for the temptation to dismiss or explain away inconvenient performance data. Healthcare is riddled with this, as people pick and choose studies that are easy to find or that prove their points. In fact, most reviews of healthcare evidence don't go through the painstaking processes needed to systematically minimize bias and show a fair picture. You can read more about how it's done thoroughly in this  explanation of systematic reviews at PubMed Health . A fully systematic review very specifically lays out a question and how it's going to be answered. Then the researchers stick to that study plan, no matter how welcome or unwelcome the results. They go to great lengths to find the studies that have looked at their question, and they analyze the quality and meaning of what they find. The researchers might do a meta-analysis - a statistical technique to combine the results of studies (explained here at Statistically Fun...

Of course, every time Cynthia and Gregory make the 8-block downtown trip to the Stinsons, it's going to take a different amount of time, depending on traffic and so on - even if it only varies by a minute or two. Most of the time, the trip to the Stinsons' apartment would take between 10 minutes (in the middle of the night) and 45 minutes (in peak hour). Giving a range like that is similar to the concept of a margin of error or confidence interval ( explained here ). So what's a standard deviation and what does it tell you? Well, it's not a comment on Gregory's behavior! Deviance as a term for abnormal behavior is an invention of the 1940s and '50s. Standard deviation (or SD) is a statistical term first used in 1894 by one of the key figures in modern statistics, Karl Pearson . The standard deviation shows how far results are from the mean (or average) . The standard deviation will be bigger when the numbers are more spread out, and smaller when there's no...