Code Monkey Hate Bug tweets:
Is it inevitable that committee designs end up looking like this?
It isn’t statistically inevitable that committee designs have this result.
However, the history of the U.S. Congress indicates the odds of a different outcome are extremely low.
Unpronounceable — why can’t people give bioinformatics tools sensible names? by Keith Bardnam.
From the post:
Okay, so many of you know that I have a bit of an issue with bioinformatics tools with names that are formed from very tenuous acronyms or initialisms. I’ve handed out many JABBA awards for cases of ‘Just Another Bogus Bioinformatics Acronym’. But now there is another blight on the landscape of bioinformatics nomenclature…that of unpronounceable names.
If you develop bioinformatics tools, you would hopefully want to promote those tools to others. This could be in a formal publication, or at a conference presentation, or even over a cup of coffee with a colleague. In all of these situations, you would hope that the name of your bioinformatics tool should be memorable. One way of making it memorable is to make it pronounceable. Surely, that’s not asking that much? And yet…
…
The examples Keith recites are quite amusing and you can find more at the JABBA awards.
He also includes some helpful advice on naming:
There is a lot of bioinformatics software in this world. If you choose to add to this ever growing software catalog, then it will be in your interest to make your software easy to discover and easy to promote. For your own sake, and for the sake of any potential users of your software, I strongly urge you to ask yourself the following five questions:
- Is the name memorable?
- Does the name have one obvious pronunciation?
- Could I easily spell the name out to a journalist over the phone?
- Is the name of my database tool free from any needless mixed capitalization?
- Have I considered whether my software name is based on such a tenuous acronym or intialism that it will probably end up receiving a JABBA award?
To which I would add:
6. Have you searched the name in popular Internet search engines?
I read a fair amount of computer news and little is more annoying that to search for new “name” only to find it has 10 million “hits.” Any relevant to the new usage are buried somewhere in the long set of results.
Two word names do better and three even better than two. That is if you want people to find your project, paper, software.
If not, then by all means use one of the most popular child name lists. You will know where to find your work, but the rest of us won’t.
Some statistics can be so unbelievable, or deal with concepts so vast, that it’s impossible to wrap our heads around them. The human mind can only do so much to visualize an abstract idea, and often misses much of its impact in the translation. Sometimes you just need to step back and take a good, long look for yourself.
That’s why we just put 700 red dots on a map.
The dots don’t represent anything in particular, nor is their number and placement indicative of any kind of data. But when you’re looking at them, all spread out on a map of the United States like that—it’s hard not to be a little blown away.
…
Enjoy!
PS: Also follow ClickHole on Twitter.
Governments will still comfort the comfortable, afflict the afflicted and lie to the rest of us about their activities, but this may keep you from becoming a humorless fanatic.
The benefits of being a humorous fanatic aren’t clear but surely it is better than being humorless.
I first saw this in a tweet by Matt Boggie.
Howler Monkeys with the Louder Voices have Smaller Testicles by Donald V. Morris.
This was too funny to pass up.
Reminds me of pitch people for technologies that gloss over the details and distort reality beyond mere exaggeration.
Claims of impending world domination when your entire slice of the market for a type of technology is less than one percent for example. That not “impending” in any recognizable sense of the word.
Add your own commentary/remarks and pass this along to your co-workers.
I first saw this in a tweet by Violet Blue.
PS: Yes, I saw that Howler monkeys with smaller testicles live with harems. Consider that a test of how many people will forward the article without reading it first. 😉
Audit of DoD Cardholders Who Used Government Travel Cards at Casinos or Adult Entertainment Establishments by Michael J. Roark, Assistant Inspector General, Contract Management and Payments, Department of Defense.
From the memorandum:
We plan to begin the subject audit in September 2015. The Senate Armed Services Committee requested this audit as a follow-on review of transactions identified in Report No. DODIG-2015-125, “DoD Cardholders Used Their Government Travel Cards for Personal Use at Casinos and Adult Entertainment Establishments,” May 19, 2015. Our objective is to determine whether DoD cardholders who used government travel cards at casinos and adult entertainment establishments for personal use sought or received reimbursement for the charges. In addition, we will determine whether disciplinary actions have been taken in cases of personal use and if the misuse was repo1ted to the appropriate security office. We will consider suggestions from management on additional or revised objectives.
This project is a follow up to: Report No. DODIG-2015-125, “DoD Cardholders Used Their Government Travel Cards for Personal Use at Casinos and Adult Entertainment Establishments” (May 19, 2015), which summarizes its findings as:
We are providing this report for your review and comment. We considered management comments on a draft of this report when preparing the final report. DoD cardholders improperly used their Government Travel Charge Card for personal use at casinos and adult entertainment establishments. From July 1, 2013, through June 30, 2014, DoD cardholders had 4,437 transactions totaling $952,258, where they likely used their travel cards at casinos for personal use and had 900 additional transactions for $96,576 at adult entertainment establishments. We conducted this audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.
Let me highlight that for you:
July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014, DoD cardholders:
4,437 transactions at casinos for $952,258
900 transactions at adult entertainment establishments for $96,576
Are lap dances that cheap? 😉
Almost no one goes to a casino or adult entertainment establishment alone, so topic maps would be a perfect fit for finding “associations” between DoD personnel.
The current project is to track the outcome of the earlier report, that is what if any actions resulted.
What do you think?
Will the DoD personnel claim they were doing off the record surveillance of suspected information leaks? Or just checking their resistance to temptation?
Before I forget, here is the breakdown by service (from the May 19, 2015 report, page 6):
I don’t know what to make up the distribution of “adult transactions” between the services.
Suggestions?
The Ministry of Education, British Columbia, Canada posted MISSING DRIVE CONTENTS:
Despite extensive physical and electronic searches, the Ministry of Education has been unable to locate an unencrypted external hard drive with a variety of reports, databases, and some information detailed below.
The missing external drive is a black Western Digital drive about 7-inches high, 5.5 inches deep, and two inches thick. The disk has 437 GB worth of material made up of 8,766 folders with 138,830 files.
Inside some of the files is information on a total of 3.4 million individuals from between 1986-2009
The red color was in the original.
I’m not sure how listing the contents in detail is going to help find this drive but I do have a local copy should the online version disappear.
If I had to guess, someone converted the drive to home use and formatted it, losing the data of concern unless you want to pay for expensive data recovery efforts.
But, in the event it was stolen and sold along with other equipment, check any second hand Western digital drives you have purchased. Could be worth more than you paid for it.
I first saw this in a tweet by Dissent Doe today and I have no date for the actual data loss.
Dare Obasanjo posted this list on Twitter:
“Self-documenting” is my personal favorite.
We are all guilty of it, albeit in different contexts.
Specialized terminologies are time savers and improve accuracy, between experts using the same terminology.
They also serve as guild barriers and promote job security.
Yes?
Do you think obscurity is one of the reasons you remain employed?
That’s sad.
Everybody likes XKCD so here’s your chance to give something back:
Enjoy!
You have no doubt heard of the “mile high club,” well, now there is even a more exclusive club for the sexually adventuresome. The Courthouse High Club as reported in: US Marshals Employee Caught Having Sex On Courthouse Roof in Pennsylvania.
From the post:
A resident of a nearby apartment building who was concerned that there was a security breach snapped the pictures this week and sent them to WHTM-TV in Harrisburg, which alerted authorities.
Is this another instance of see something, say something?
The inability to filter duplicates of this story prevents estimating the membership of the courthouse high club.
Violet Blue mentioned wanting one of these on Twitter the other day.
From the description:
Aspiring lockpickers often find themselves in a frustrating situation: Armed with all the practical knowledge that the internet and locksport community can provide, they still have to overcome the frustrations of picking an actual lock. In those cases, the Clear Practice Lock is an invaluable tool for novices, allowing them to see their developing skills in action.
The bible of the lock is made of clear plastic, allowing the lockpicker to observe the manipulations of the pins while practicing his/her lockpicking techniques.
- Uses standard pins and an SC1 keyway
- Clear plastic bible
- Includes matching key
- Great for teaching & learning locksmithing and lockpicking
This would be a real conversation starter at security conferences.
Not to mention a distraction while you pwn someone’s laptop. 😉
50 Lies Programmers Believe by Tom Morris.
From the post:
1. The naming convention for the majority of the people in my country is the paradigm case and nobody really does anything differently.
… (49 others follow)
I think this is the short list. 😉
I first saw this in a tweet by Andrea Mostosi.
New gTLDs: .SUCKS Illustrates Potential Problems for Security, Brand Professionals by Camille Stewart.
From the post:
The launch of the .SUCKS top-level domain name (gTLD) has reignited and heightened concerns about protecting brands and trademarks from cybersquatters and malicious actors. This new extension, along with more than a thousand others, has been approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as part of their new gTLD program. The program was designed to spark competition and innovation by opening up the market to additional gTLDs.
Not surprisingly, though, complaints are emerging that unscrupulous operators are using .SUCKS to extort money from companies by threatening to use it to create websites that could damage their brands. ICANN is now reportedly asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Canada’s Office of Consumer Affairs to weigh in on potential abuses so it can address them. Recently, Congress weighed in on the issue, holding a hearing about. SUCKS and other controversial domains like .PORN .
Vox Populi Registry Ltd. began accepting registrations for .SUCKS domains on March 30 from trademark holders and celebrities before it opened to public applicants. It recommended charging $2,499 a year for each domain name registration, and according to Vox Populi CEO John Berard, resellers are selling most of the names for around $2,000 a year. Berard asserts that the extension is meant to create destinations for companies to interact with their critics, and called his company’s business “well within the lines of ICANN rules and the law.”
…
If you follow the link to the statement by Vox Populi CEO John Berard, that post concludes with:
The new gTLD program is about increasing choice and competition in the TLD space, it’s not supposed to be about applicants bilking trademark owners for whatever they think they can get away with.
A rather surprising objection considering that trademark (and copyright) owners have been bilking/gouging consumers for centuries.
Amazing how sharp the pain can be when a shoe pinches on a merchant’s foot.
How many Disney properties could end in .sucks? (Research question)
Machine-Learning Algorithm Mines Rap Lyrics, Then Writes Its Own
From the post:
The ancient skill of creating and performing spoken rhyme is thriving today because of the inexorable rise in the popularity of rapping. This art form is distinct from ordinary spoken poetry because it is performed to a beat, often with background music.
And the performers have excelled. Adam Bradley, a professor of English at the University of Colorado has described it in glowing terms. Rapping, he says, crafts “intricate structures of sound and rhyme, creating some of the most scrupulously formal poetry composed today.”
The highly structured nature of rap makes it particularly amenable to computer analysis. And that raises an interesting question: if computers can analyze rap lyrics, can they also generate them?
Today, we get an affirmative answer thanks to the work of Eric Malmi at the University of Aalto in Finland and few pals. These guys have trained a machine-learning algorithm to recognize the salient features of a few lines of rap and then choose another line that rhymes in the same way on the same topic. The result is an algorithm that produces rap lyrics that rival human-generated ones for their complexity of rhyme.
…
The review is a fun read but I rather like the original paper title as well: DopeLearning: A Computational Approach to Rap Lyrics Generation by Eric Malmi, Pyry Takala, Hannu Toivonen, Tapani Raiko, Aristides Gionis.
Abstract:
Writing rap lyrics requires both creativity, to construct a meaningful and an interesting story, and lyrical skills, to produce complex rhyme patterns, which are the cornerstone of a good flow. We present a method for capturing both of these aspects. Our approach is based on two machine-learning techniques: the RankSVM algorithm, and a deep neural network model with a novel structure. For the problem of distinguishing the real next line from a randomly selected one, we achieve an 82 % accuracy. We employ the resulting prediction method for creating new rap lyrics by combining lines from existing songs. In terms of quantitative rhyme density, the produced lyrics outperform best human rappers by 21 %. The results highlight the benefit of our rhyme density metric and our innovative predictor of next lines.
You should also visit BattleBot (a rap engine):
BattleBot is a rap engine which allows you to “spit” any line that comes to your mind after which it will respond to you with a selection of rhyming lines found among 0.5 million lines from existing rap songs. The engine is based on a slightly improved version of the Raplyzer algorithm and the eSpeak speech synthesizer.
You can try out BattleBot simply by hitting “Spit” or “Random”. The latter will randomly pick a line among the whole database of lines and find the rhyming lines for that. The underlined part shows approximately the rhyming part of a result. To understand better, why it’s considered as a rhyme, you can click on the result, see the phonetic transcriptions of your line and the result, and look for matching vowel sequences starting from the end.
BTW, the MIT review concludes with:
What’s more, this and other raps generated by DeepBeat have a rhyming density significantly higher than any human rapper. “DeepBeat outperforms the top human rappers by 21% in terms of length and frequency of the rhymes in the produced lyrics,” they point out.
I can’t help but wonder when DeepBeat is going to hit the charts! 😉
WikiLeaks Adds More Hacked Emails From Sony Pictures Entertainment by Sohini Auddy.
From the post:
WikiLeaks has added thousands more of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s hacked emails in its database, as mentioned in a Twitter post on Thursday.
Sony has yet to develop a sense of humor over the hack attack late last year.
Suggestion: Search the Sony emails at Wikileaks and then the Dilbert archives for a matching Dilbert cartoon.
Tweet the link for the Sony email and your matching Dilbert cartoon, #sonydilbert.
Let’s try that for a week, ending May 9, 2014.
Tweet with the most retweets will be declared the winner by acclamation. (Contest not open to Sony managers.)
Enjoy!
Stuart Wolpert reports that 84 out of 85 students could not draw the Apple logo from memory. 85 college students tried to draw the Apple logo from memory. 84 failed..
…
Could you draw the ubiquitous Apple computer logo from memory? Probably not, as it turns out.In a new study published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, UCLA psychologists found that almost none of their subjects could draw the logo correctly from memory. Out of 85 UCLA undergraduate students, only one correctly reproduced the Apple logo when asked to draw it on a blank sheet of paper. Fewer than half the students correctly identified the actual logo when they were shown it among a number of similar logos with slightly altered features.
Among the participants were 52 Apple users, 10 PC users and 23 students who used both Apple and PC products — but the findings did not differ between Apple and PC users.
…
Just as we have a “murder of crows,” a “pride of lions,” etc., do we need a term for a collection of nearly alike logos?
I ask because of less than one half of those asked could recognize the Apple logo when shown among slightly altered logos.
Would a “confusion of logos” be the correct phrase?
Perhaps Apple will start embedding punch-outs in its ads so you can take an authentic Apple logo with you shopping to avoid confusion while shopping. 😉
PS: The failure of the 84 out of 85 may be explained by 84 out of 85 people not being able to draw an apple from memory, much less an apple based logo. That’s just speculation on my part.
Purely in the interest of Spring and Cherry trees being in full bloom, a site that generates a haiku from your IP address. Ideal for afternoons that seem to go on forever. 😉
I saw this several days ago on Twitter but I honestly don’t remember where.
Quiz: North Korean Slogan or TED Talk Sound Bite? by Dave Gilson.
From the post:
North Korea recently released a list of 310 slogans, trying to rouse patriotic fervor for everything from obeying bureaucracy (“Carry out the tasks given by the Party within the time it has set”) to mushroom cultivation (“Let us turn ours into a country of mushrooms”) and aggressive athleticism (“Play sports games in an offensive way, the way the anti-Japanese guerrillas did!”). The slogans also urge North Koreans to embrace science and technology and adopt a spirit of can-do optimism—messages that might not be too out of place in a TED talk.
Can you tell which of the following exhortations are propaganda from Pyongyang and which are sound bites from TED speakers? (Exclamation points have been added to all TED quotes to match North Korean house style.)
When you discover the source of the quote, do your change your interpretation of its reasonableness, etc.?
All I will say about my score is that either I need to watch far more TED talks and/or pay closer attention to North Korean Radio. 😉
Enjoy!
PS: I think a weekly quiz with White House, “terrorist” and Congressional quotes would be more popular than the New York Times Crossword puzzle.
How to Speak Data Science by DataCamp.
One of my personal favorites:
“We booked these results with a small sample” – Our financial budget wasn’t large enough to perform a statistical significant data analysis.
See: Use of SurveyMonkey by mid-level managers. Managers without a clue on survey construction, testing, validation, much less data analysis of the results.
Others that DataCamp missed?
http://www.owenboswarva.com/opendata/OD_Pub_DecisionTree.jpg
No way this will display properly so I just linked to it.
I don’t know about the UK but a very similar discussion takes place in academic circles before releasing data that less than a dozen people have asked to see, ever.
Enjoy!
I first saw this in a tweet by Irina Bolychevsky.
Posted by Mirko Krivanek as What Is MapReduce?, credit @Tgrall
27 hilariously bad maps that explain nothing by Max Fisher.
For your weekend enjoyment!
One sample:
Max says that the United States is incorrect and I agree.
Should extend down to the tip of South America, plus our clients states in Europe and two still occupied countries, Germany and Japan.
Oh, it was supposed to be acknowledged international borders! I see. A fictional map available at many locations on the Internet and at better stores everywhere.
From the post:
BALTIMORE—A team of scientists at Johns Hopkins University announced Monday that a five-year study examining the link between polyphenols and lower cholesterol rates has found jack shit.
“I can’t explain what happened,” head researcher Dr. Jeremy Ingels said. “We meticulously followed correct scientific procedure. Our methods were sufficiently rigorous that they should have produced some sort of result. Instead, we found out nothing.”
Added Ingels: “Nothing!”
As Ingels stepped aside to compose himself, fellow researcher Dr. Thomas Chen took the podium to discuss the $7 million jack-shit-yielding study.
“We are all very upset,” Chen said. “When we began, this looked so promising, I would have bankrolled it myself. Now, after five years, I couldn’t tell you if polyphenols even exist.”
The study, which Chen characterized as a “huge waste of time and money,” was financed by a Johns Hopkins alumni grant to determine the effects of the compound polyphenol on cholesterol. A known antioxidant found in herbs, teas, olive oil, and wines, polyphenol was originally thought to lower cholesterol—a theory that remains unproven because the Johns Hopkins researchers couldn’t prove squat.
“We can’t say zip about whether it lowers cholesterol,” Ingels said. “We don’t know if it raises cholesterol. Hell, we don’t know if it joins with cholesterol to form an unholy alliance to take over your gall bladder. At this point, I couldn’t prove that a male donkey has nuts if they were swinging in my face.”
…
I mentioned earlier today that neither phone vacuuming nor the TSA have identified a single terrorist since 9/11. I didn’t want those responsible to feel like they were the only people who find “jack shit.”
The difference here, of course, is that a university that doesn’t find jack shit runs out of funding, unlike the NSA and TSA.
Enjoy!
I won’t reproduce the photographs because newspapers are picky about that sort of information but be aware that the photos of dignitaries “marching” in Paris aren’t what they appear to be.
First, Spot the difference: Female world leaders ‘Photoshopped’ out of Paris rally picture, Claire Cohen reports that a Israeli newspaper The Announcer (HaMevaser), photoshopped out all the women in the original image.
But the “march” was fakery from the outset. They were assembled on an empty street with lots of police presence. See: Paris march: TV wide shots reveal a different perspective on world leaders at largest demonstration in France’s history by Adam Withnall.
A photograph of a faked march that was further falsified by the Israeli newspaper The Announcer (HaMevaser). Closer to being accurate?
NASA’s Kepler Marks 1,000th Exoplanet Discovery, Uncovers More Small Worlds in Habitable Zones by Felicia Chou and Michele Johnson.
From the post:
NASA Kepler’s Hall of Fame: Of the more than 1,000 verified planets found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, eight are less than twice Earth-size and in their stars’ habitable zone. All eight orbit stars cooler and smaller than our sun. The search continues for Earth-size habitable zone worlds around sun-like stars.
How many stars like our sun host planets like our Earth? NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope continuously monitored more than 150,000 stars beyond our solar system, and to date has offered scientists an assortment of more than 4,000 candidate planets for further study — the 1,000th of which was recently verified.
Using Kepler data, scientists reached this millenary milestone after validating that eight more candidates spotted by the planet-hunting telescope are, in fact, planets. The Kepler team also has added another 554 candidates to the roll of potential planets, six of which are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of stars similar to our sun.
Three of the newly-validated planets are located in their distant suns’ habitable zone, the range of distances from the host star where liquid water might exist on the surface of an orbiting planet. Of the three, two are likely made of rock, like Earth.
“Each result from the planet-hunting Kepler mission’s treasure trove of data takes us another step closer to answering the question of whether we are alone in the Universe,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “The Kepler team and its science community continue to produce impressive results with the data from this venerable explorer.”
To determine whether a planet is made of rock, water or gas, scientists must know its size and mass. When its mass can’t be directly determined, scientists can infer what the planet is made of based on its size.
Two of the newly validated planets, Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b, are less than 1.5 times the diameter of Earth. Kepler-438b, 475 light-years away, is 12 percent bigger than Earth and orbits its star once every 35.2 days. Kepler-442b, 1,100 light-years away, is 33 percent bigger than Earth and orbits its star once every 112 days.
Given the distances involved, Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b, at 475 light years and 1,100 light years, respectively, the EU has delayed work on formulating conditions for their admission into the EU until after resolution of the current uncertainty over the Greek bailout agreement. Germany is already circulating draft admission proposals.
While you have been working hard to get a few hours off with family or other loved ones for the holidays, Sony, the only resident of Sony Land, has been burning cash by the sackful.
Matthew Ingram writes in: Why Sony is way out on a limb with legal threats against Twitter:
The ripple effects of the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack continue to spread, and one of the latest — and also arguably the least plausible — is Sony’s attempt to threaten Twitter with legal action if it doesn’t remove tweets that contain content from the company’s hacked emails. Sony may have hired superstar attorney David Boies, who led the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s, but the consensus in the legal community is that the company’s blustering is all sound and fury, signifying little.
The full extent of Sony’s claims can be read in the letter that Boies sent the company, but in a nutshell the movie studio is asking Twitter to suspend the account of anyone who posts information from the hacked emails, and it specifically mentions the account @bikinirobotarmy — which belongs to rock singer Val Broeksmit, who has a band of the same name — which has been publishing screenshots of some of the emails (with addresses redacted).
Doing due diligence, I found http://www.bikinirobotarmy.com/, where going down the rabbit hole you will find, among other things, Let Those Fuckers’ Roll.
Sony Land is characterized by non-accountable network sysadmins and their corporate overlords, who are also non-accountable. Oh, and poor security practices they seek to obscure by wild accusations about possible hackers.
If you work in Sony Land, you may need to prepare to explain a gap in your CV when you conceal that fact when seeing new employment. Coma works pretty well. Unfortunate motorcycle accident but a full recovery, complete with recent certifications. Yes?
The Ethics of Sarcastic Science by Rose Eveleth.
From the post:
Every holiday season, the British Medical Journal puts out a special Christmas issue. It’s full of papers, as usual, but they’re all a little bit different. They’re jokes. Not fake—the data presented in these BMJ articles aren’t made up—but the premises of the papers are all a bit off-kilter. This year, for example, they showed that men die earlier than women because they’re stupid.
The BMJ has been loosening its ties every Christmas now for 30 years. In that time it has amassed a fair amount of odd little bits of science. But a recent paper on the subject of joke papers, by Lawrence Souder and his co-author Maryam Ronagh, questions whether these wacky studies are all in good fun, or whether there’s a darker side here. Ultimately, they argue that once the laughs have worn off, spoof papers can actually do damage to science.
Souder’s paper focuses on one case in particular. In 2001, Leonardo Leibovici published a paper titled “Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: Randomised controlled trial.” The study purported to show “whether remote, retroactive intercessory prayer, said for a group of patients with a bloodstream infection, has an effect on outcomes.” The study was farcical—the prayers they said for these patients were delivered between four and 10 years after their hospitalization. In some cases these prayers were said for them after they had already died. The reasoning for this, Leibovici explained, was that “we cannot assume a priori that time is linear, as we perceive it, or that God is limited by a linear time, as we are.”
Leibovici’s paper was one of many of BMJ’s Christmas spoofs, appearing in the journal alongside other joke articles. But eight years later the paper was cited, unironically, in a review paper from a well-respected organization.
…
In the Leibovici case, the authors critical of the humor issue are reaching to find an ethical issue. In fact, the article that cited Leibovici concludes:
These findings are equivocal and, although some of the results of individual studies suggest a positive effect of intercessory prayer, the majority do not and the evidence does not support a recommendation either in favour or against the use of intercessory prayer. We are not convinced that further trials of this intervention should be undertaken and would prefer to see any resources available for such a trial used to investigate other questions in health care.
Another “ethical” objection was that “insider” jokes exclude some people. No doubt, but the people excluded by the post-illness prayers example are unlikely to benefit from a clearer explanation. Or find the original article humorous.
I appreciate the posting because I was unaware of the BMJ‘s annual Christmas issue. I shall now enter on my calendar as a recurring annual event.
thebmj, you have to see this, it is a real hoot!
Enjoy!
Cliques are nasty but Cliques are nastier by Lance Fortnow.
A heteronym that fails to make the listing at: The Heteronym Homepage.
From the Heteronym Homepage:
Heteronyms are words that are spelled identically but have different meanings when pronounced differently.
Before you jump to Lance’s post (see the comments as well), care to guess the pronunciations and meanings of “clique?”
Enjoy!
When scientists use ambiguous phrases in research papers… And what they might actually mean 😉
This graphic was posted to Twitter by Jan Lentzos.
This sort of thing makes the rounds every now and again. From the number of retweets of Jan’s post, it never fails to amuse.
Enjoy!
Nothing to Hide: Look out for yourself by Nicky Case.
Greg Linden describes it as:
Brilliantly done, free, open source, web-based puzzle game with wonderfully dark humor about ubiquitous surveillance
First and foremost, I sense there is real potential for this to develop into an enjoyable online game.
Second, this could be a way to educate users to security/surveillance threats.
Enjoy!
I first saw this in Greg Linden’s Quick Links for Wednesday, October 01, 2014.
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