Randomised trials

A simple explanation about the need for randomized trials in testing medicine, critical of the exemption homeopathic medicine seems to expect from this. Also, how some homeopaths have reacted to criticism.

Has mainstream Western society lost a belief in the objective to try and gain back the romantic?

(PS. This is not say that "big pharma" are not capable of running their own scams, but that fairly conducted randomized trials are the way to test medicinal claims, regardless of who is making the claims.)

Quote on integers

Leopold Kronecker

God created the integers, all else is the work of man.

Teaching by passwords

Overcoming Bias's Eliezer Yudkowsky has a painfully accurate description of how science can quickly become a game of passwords with no true understanding. This should be required reading for all school teachers.

My computer's thoughts on neuroscience

How to write consistently boring scientific literature

This was funny (and sad).

HT: Michael Nielson

SciVee a PLoS initiative

It will be interesting to see if PLoS's newest initiative, SciVee, will be a success. It allows researchers to upload a 10 minute video presentation about their publications (although at the moment it only allows open-access publications to be described, hopefully that will change soon).

I was pleasantly surprised to find my university has already gotten in on the act.

Presenting the design flaw...

Have you ever had the experience of going to a presentation where the presenters laptop/projector did something dumb like showing a screensaver, turning off etc. Actually let's turn that around, can you recall the last time you saw a presentation where presenter's computer DIDN'T do something dumb? I've seen (and have been the presenter on occasion) when all 3 major OSes do something stupid, like suspending, showing the screensaver, installing updates and trying to reboot or deciding that now seems like a great time to reindex the hard-drive (and don't get me started on the voodoo you see people have to go through to make their in-slide movies play consistently).

How hard can it be??? Surely, this is not a difficult problem, to have the ability for presentation software to tell the computer "I'm doing something really important right now, don't do anything else!" It's a sad comment on the current state-of-art in software engineering that this still remains and outstanding problem.

Will somebody please fix it (and it will have be one of the "other" OSes because Microsoft considers unreliability a feature)?