Canadian artist Yue Wang has an incredible talent for portraits, as a glance through her gallery will quickly reveal. Many of these are superb interpretations of fantasy characters, such as Princess Mononoke, Aragorn and a bunch of videogame protagonists.
Her version of Jessica Rabbit is utterly stunning.
As I briefly mentioned yesterday, the snow has finally arrived. For me, this meant a three hour drive home on a Friday night, so I wasn’t best pleased. Some people, however, thought it was great.
After some climbing and a bit of low speed sledging (the drive is steep enough for Macsen to launch himself, but not long enough for him to really pick up speed), we started looking for more fun things to do in the snow. Luckily, I had a broom.
Testing Treatments is a book I heard about (if my memory serves me correctly) by way of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog. He described it as the “best pop science book on Evidence Based Medicine ever,” and I was sufficiently interested to add it to my Amazon wish list. I don’t know how many pop science books on Evidence Based Medicine have been written, but this one is very good indeed.
To quote the blurb:
How do we know whether a particular treatment really works? How reliable is the evidence? And how do we ensure that research into medical treatments best meets the needs of patients? These are just a few of the questions addressed in a lively and informative way in Testing Treatments. Brimming with vivid examples, Testing Treatments will inspire both patients and professionals.
Building on the success of the first edition, Testing Treatments has now been extensively revised and updated. The second edition includes a thought-provoking chapter on screening, explaining why early diagnosis is not always better. Other new chapters explore how over-regulation of research can work against the best interests of patients, and how robust evidence from research can be drawn together to shape the practice of healthcare in ways that allow treatment decisions to be reached jointly by patients and clinicians.
Testing Treatments urges everyone to get involved in improving current research and future treatment, and outlines practical steps that patients and doctors can take together.
What the book does is lay out – very clearly – how new treatments should be evaluated, and how they often are evaluated. The disconnect is surprising and the book strongly advocates patients becoming better informed and asking the questions that should be asked if we are to ensure that research isn’t wasteful or harmful, and that treatments actually meet the needs of those receiving them.
The book, which is available from Amazon or as a free PDF, concludes with an action plan of things you can do to ensure that the treatments you receive are the ones that are right for you. I was tempted to paste that plan into this post, but I do think you need the context of the book to fully appreciate it. So instead, I shall just urge you to treat yourself to a copy. It’s well worth it.
… and it’s late. Again.
I have to say that the weather has been terribly disorganised since they privatised it. Going home on a Friday night is not the ideal day to be facing snow related delays.
On a more positive note, I have made a massive dent in my podcast queue.
This has just brightened up my day far too much.
Much gratitude to Unreasonable Faith for the heads up..
I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.
- Alan Moore on the news that DC has announced a series of Watchmen prequels, blatantly to cash in on that god-awful Zach Snyder film.
I find it difficult to bring myself to care about this. Watchmen is a high watermark of comic storytelling and I don’t see how these cash-ins will be anything other than forgettable and derivative. That said, am would be mildly interested if someone can tell me how on Earth they are going to justify that splotch of blood on Comedian’s mask.
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Fox News before, and it’s certainly not a channel I feel any need to pay any attention to. But this is incredible:
Here’s the pull quote, from Bill O’Reilly, starting at 2:40.
The way they do the statistics in the Netherlands is different, plus its a much smaller country, it’s a much smaller base to do the stats on.
So my question is this: Is Bill O’Reilly really as statistically illiterate as he appears, or is he just assuming that his entire audience is made up of morons?
Horror/mystery, The Big Bad is a nightmarishly surreal reworking of Little Red Riding Hood and one that packs a lot into its script. I liked it and can see myself pulling out the DVD again in the future.
If you want more, you can read my full thoughts over on Pulpmovies.
I like Sean Chandler’s column on the System i Network. He’s been around a bit and tends to take a slightly jaundiced view of the next big thing, discarding the hype and looking for the parts that might be useful. This month its the turn of “The Cloud” and the claim that they can solve all of your Big Data Problems.
Big Data refers to the expanding volume of unstructured data (email, Word documents, PDFs, and so on) that businesses accumulate and – increasingly – are obliged to retain. The problem is twofold; firstly you have to find somewhere to put all of this stuff and, secondly, you need to be able to retrieve it reasonably quickly. For this, “The Cloud” is often touted as a one-size-fits-all solution, often by people who understand marketing better than they understand IT.
Chandler hits exactly the right note when he says:
The key word there is “supplement.” Cloud-based storage doesn’t replace tape storage. It doesn’t replace near-line disk storage. It’s simply another tool in the toolkit. You may want to, for example, move archived data to both cloud storage and tape storage selectively. For instance, full system backups are better suited to tape, but targeted file backups may reasonably go to both tape and cloud storage.
Technologies come, technologies go, technologies are reinvented. When new technologies are announced, or older technologies are reinvented, they are often surrounded by a great deal of hype and an endless array of breathless commentators telling us how this new shiny thing will change the way we work, play, communicate, eat, sleep, or whatever. Nothing ever lives up to this hype, however, and it’s often when the technology goes – or disappears from the headlines – that it begins to become useful. This is the point when the marketing pressure starts to ease off and people can begin to look at how the new or changed technology can be realistically used.
Cloud storage is here to stay. But it won’t begin to become a useful tool until the press stops talking about it.
I started this year with the intention of blogging more regularly. Specifically, I wanted to try to put up at least one post a day. Surprisingly enough, once month in, I am managing to do so.
It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected and, gratifyingly, I have found that I am spending a lot less time on various social networks and a lot more time doing and reading stuff that actually interests me. I think the take-home point here is that, while a lot of social networking activity does provide the instant gratification of an immediate response, it is also very easy to allow it to become too much of a time sink.
I do prefer the longer, slightly slower, approach that blogging necessitates. Counter-intuitively, I have also found that this is a lot less time consuming – and a lot more satisfying – than trying to express myself in the shorter form encouraged by social networks. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, and I have to acknowledge that this is not a heavily trafficked blog, blogging doesn’t feel like a live conversation in the same way that microblogging does. As such, I don’t worry about how quickly I release or respond to comments and an quite happy to engage in conversations that develop more slowly and (hopefully) more thoughtfully.
Secondly, and related to the first point, is the fact that I am increasingly recognising that there are some issues which I do think are important but about which I have nothing to add. While it is easy to tweet, dent or plus a link to some news article or online opinion, seeking to actually write a blog post is pushing me towards focusing more actively on things about which I actually have something to say.
That’s not to say that social networks are a bad thing and I have gained a lot of entertainment from them, but I do think it is useful to recognise just how much of a time sink and an echo chamber these things can be.
I started blogging way back in December 2002 and, for a long time, I got a great deal out of it. Over the last three or four years, I have blogged less as I became increasingly distracted by various social networks. I’m not about to abandon social networking – identi.ca is a great place to talk to smart people and Google+ is a handy way of posting links about which I have little to say – but I do find that blogging works best for me and is something that I am finding increasingly easy to maintain.
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