Humor4u

If you like reading randomized trials about skin and oral health treatments - and who doesn't? - you come across a few split-face and split-mouth ones. Instead of randomizing groups of people to different interventions so that a group of people can be a control group (parallel trials), sections of a person are randomized. It's not only done with faces and teeth. Pairs of body parts can be randomized too, like arms or legs. These studies are sometimes called "within-person" trials. This kind of randomization means that you need fewer people in the trial , because you don't have to account for all the variations between human beings. It has to be a treatment that affects only the specific area of the body treated, though. Anything that could have an influence on the "control" part is called a spill-over effect . There are still inevitably things that happen that affect the whole person, and those have to be accounted for with this kind of trial. Body part

Photo by @GoldsteinBen via eltpics on Flickr A second lesson with two new pre-intermediate (A2) students (I usually put my private students in pairs). In the first lesson we read three stories about immigrants (from Innovations Pre-Intermediate ) and underlined useful bits of language (I hadn't introduced the word "chunk" yet). For our second lesson they were asked to prepare a short talk about their lives using as much "useful language" as they could – no writing! They did a pretty good job and successfully integrated some chunks into their stories: Back home… When I came over here… I didn't have enough money To support my family Naturally, their attempts to produce their own, novel utterances almost invariably caused disfluency as they searched for the right words to express their ideas and the right grammar to frame their words. Fluency is not so much speaking fast as pausing less, as Thornbury (2005) aptly observes. To avoid pauses, competent language

Let's talk about laziness. No, let's not just talk about being lazy - let's do something about it. Let's be lazy. There's a common pattern that I use in Android programming where I will create objects lazily, especially when these objects will not necessarily or frequently be needed at runtime. This is especially true for code that I write for the Android framework, where we like to be as lean as possible and leave more memory available for the system and the application. Often, these objects are collections. My personal favorite is ArrayList (ever since I moved on years ago from the original, but somewhat crusty,  Vector class), although I am also known to use Hashmap for those key/value pair situations (especially after I got used to ActionScript's paradigm of everything-is-a-hashmap). Of course, you can't simply start poking into a lazily-created collection willy-nilly, unless you're a big fan of NullPointerExceptions. So you need to first check

Agenda 21 Realization - Renewed Hope - Are Folks Finally Getting It! For decades I have engaged myself in what I term "advocacy in the face of corpocracy.  Along the way, corpocracy and its marxist/fascist approaches slithered off their (historical) slimey, brutal path of politico incursion and adopted a benevolent, warm and assuring optic deceiving many about their true intent, a lesson they well learned. Since their transformation from jack-boot subjugationists into a futuristic transhumanism, environmental sustainability facade, the inner sanctum has made great strides in displacing what people desire... fair and equitable representation in the matter of self-governance. I cannot fault the unwitting... for who would be against the wholesome tokens of environmental sustainability, political correctness and a raft of other deceptions wrapped in motherhood labels? Once the mantle of deceit took hold it seemed less and less probable the intended victims would come to realization un