Friday Foolery #55 Entrance to the Maternity Ward

This Picture speaks for itself, I suppose

Source: Facebook page of George Takei (link to picture)

Related articles

• Leave it to Takei! (juliannrich.wordpress.com)
• George Takei’s Facebook Adventure Now Includes An Apologizing Ghostwriter (webpronews.com)
• Journalist apologizes to George Takei for revealing that he contributes Facebook items (jimromenesko.com)
• Friday Foolery #54 The Best 404 Message ever? (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #53 : Variations on the Cochrane Logo & Farewell from the #Cochraneauckland Colloquium. (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)

Friday Foolery #54 The Best 404 Message ever?

claimtoken-510ebd2ada419

Somebody send me a direct message via Twitter, asking me if he had missed any posts. Sorting his Google Reader feeds, he saw this blog was last updated October.

And he is right :(.

Just to assure you that this blog is not dead, but hibernating*, I would like to link to perhaps the BEST 404 message ever.

This 404 message aptly shows where you can turn to when you “Lost your sense of direction” at the ASRM (American Society for Reproductive Medicine) website.

http://www.asrm.org/error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/Media/Ethics/childrearing.pdf

——————————

Hattip: Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ), @palmd) and Rebecca Weinberg (@sciliz)

* I have little spare time (and energy) at the moment to write my “usual” long exhaustive posts. Sorry. But I will come back!

Friday Foolery #53 : Variations on the Cochrane Logo & Farewell from the #Cochraneauckland Colloquium.

Two weeks ago the annual Cochrane Colloquium was held in Auckland, New Zealand.

Unfortunately I wasn’t there, but I followed the tweets (see Storify for a selection). And for a more in depth coverage: the webcasts of the plenary sessions are still online here.

The Cochrane Logo is very recognizable and stereotype and therefore well chosen. I‘ve explained the details of the logo in a previous post.

In the Cochrane Colloquium Announcement the blue logo is replaced by a Cochrane logo in “New-Zealand” style (or whatever).

A few entities have permanently adapted the Cochrane Logo.
Below are the logos of the Canadian and the Brazilian Cochrane Centres and the Cochrane Public Health group

The trigger for  this Friday Foolery post is the “souvenir of the #cochraneauckland Colloquium“, the “last”  photo taken by Chris Mavergames on Pukatea Bay, South Island, NZ.

It illustrates very well the Farewell-feeling….. a memorable (Cochrane) meeting in a fabulous country (although these memories will slowly fade away, taken by the sea)

The Diamond in the Cochrane Logo (the result of the metaanalysis) is standardly called Wybertje by the director of the Dutch Cochrane Centre, because its format resembles a Dutch liquorice with that name. (if you don’t believe me, then read the text of his oration speech: “Hoe sterk is het eenzame bewijs” (“how strong is the solitary evidence”, which alludes to a Dutch song)

Perhaps because he is fond of liquorice and sweets, coworkers once gave him M &M’s with the Cochrane logo on it (below is a photo-shopped version).

I also like to play with the Cochrane Logo. For instance, when I gave a presentation at the OLVG, a Dutch hospital, I changed the O into the Cochrane logo (left: the OLVG logo, right: the logo in my presentation)

Silly Sunday #52 Online Education Sites: and the Spam Goes on.

On many occasions  (here, here, here and here [1-4), I have warned against top 50 and 100 lists made by online education sites, like  accreditedonlinecolleges.com, onlinecolleges.com.

They are no more than splogs and link bait scams. Thus please don’t give them credit by linking to their sites.

I have also mentioned that people affiliated with these sites sometimes offer to write guest posts. Or they ask me to place an infographic.

Apparently they don’t do a lot of research. The post don’t really fit the topic of this blog and the writers don’t seem aware of my critical posts in the pasts.

Nevertheless, the number of requests keeps on growing. Sometimes I get 4-5 a day. Really ridiculous…

They don’t seem discouraged by my lack of response.

The letters are usually quite impersonal (they just found a wordpress-tag for instance).

———————–

Hey ,

Re:  laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/tag/medicine-20/

While doing research  for an online educational resource I write for, I ran across your blog and thought you may be interested in an idea for a post I have been thinking about.

The fate of schools in California is tied to the financial health of the state and because of years of economic downturn and recession, the state can no longer support the schools and the price of tuition is skyrocketing. This is making attending college considerably more difficult for many qualified applicants.

I would love to write about this for your blog. Let me know if you’re interested and I will send you a full outline.

Thanks!

———————-

Lately I’m also informed about dead links at my blog. How kind. Three guesses which link is offered instead…..

——————————-

Hi Laika Spoetnik,

I came across your website and wanted to notify you about a broken link on your page in case you weren’t aware of it. The link on http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/2009/06 which links to http://www.visi.com/juan/congress is no longer working. I’ve included a link to a useful page on Members of Congress that you could replace the broken link with if you’re interested in updating your website. Thanks for providing a great resource!

Link: http://www. onlinebachelordegreeprograms . com / resources / bachelor-of-arts-in-political-science-congress /
(spaces added)

Best,
Alexandra Sawyer

—————————-

p.s. ( as far as I know I never linked to visi com, and 2009/6 is not a single post, but many..)

References

1. Vanity is the Quicksand of Reasoning: Beware of Top 100 and 50 lists! (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
2. Beware of Top 50 “Great Tools to Double Check your Doctor” or whatever Lists. ((laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
3. Even the Scientific American Blog Links to Spammy Online Education Affiliate Sites… (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
4. Health and Science Twitter & Blog Top 50 and 100 Lists. How to Separate the Wheat from the Chaff. (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)

 

Friday Foolery #51 Statistically Funny

Epidemiologists, people working in the EBM field and, above all, statisticians are said to have no sense of humor.*

Hilda Bastian is a clear exception to this rule.

I met Hilda a few years ago at a Cochrane colloquium. At that time she was working as a consumer advocate in Australia. Nowadays she is editor and curator of PubMed Health. According to her Twitter Bio (she tweets as @hildabast) she is (still) “Interested in effective communication as well as effective health care”. She also writes important articles, like “Seventy-Five Trials and Eleven Systematic Reviews a Day: How Will We Ever Keep Up? (PLOS 2010), reviewed at this blog.

Today I learned she also has a great creative talent in cartoon drawing, in the field of …  yeah… EBM, epidemiology & statistics.

Below is one of her cartoons, which fits in well with a recent post in the BMJ by Ray Moynihan, retweeted by Hilda: Preventing overdiagnosis: how to stop harming the healthy. In her post she refers to another article: Overdiagnosis in cancer (JNCI 2010), saying:

“Finding and aggressively treating non-symptomatic disease that would never have made people sick, inventing new conditions and re-defining the thresholds for old ones: will there be anyone healthy left at all?”

I invite you to go and visit Hilda’s blog “Statistically funny“ (Commenting on the science of unbiased health research with cartoons) and to enjoy her cartoons, that are often inspired by recent publications in the field.

* My post #NotSoFunny #16: ridiculing RCTs and EBM even led David Rind to sigh that “EBM folks are not necessarily known for their great senses of humor”. (so I’m no exception to the rule 😉

Related articles

• Bastian, H., Glasziou, P., & Chalmers, I. (2010). Seventy-Five Trials and Eleven Systematic Reviews a Day: How Will We Ever Keep Up? PLoS Medicine, 7 (9) DOI:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000326
• How will we ever keep up with 75 trials and 11 systematic reviews a day (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• The over-abundance of over-diagnosis (http://statistically-funny.blogspot.nl)
• Patients’ Health Threatened By Overdiagnosis (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Diagnosis: Overdiagnosis is a Big Problem (livescience.com)
• The Scatter of Medical Research and What to do About it. (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Can Guidelines Harm Patients? (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• “How do you feel about Evidence-Based Medicine?” (sciencebasedmedicine.org)
• Evidence, Medicine, and EBM (http://www.evidenceinmedicine.org)
• #NotSoFunny #16: Ridiculing RCTs and EBM (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)

Silly Sunday #50: Molecular Designs & Synthetic DNA

As a teenager I found it hard to picture the 3D structure of DNA, proteins and other molecules. Remember we didn’t have a computer then, no videos, nor 3D-pictures or 3D models.

I tried to fill the gap, by making DNA-molecules of (used) matches and colored clay, based on descriptions in dry (and dull 2D) textbooks, but you can imagine that these creative 3D clay figures beard little resemblance to the real molecular structures.

But luckily things have changed over the last 40 years. Not only do we have computers and videos, there are also ready-made molecular models, specially designed for education.

O, how I wished, my chemistry teachers would have had those DNA-(starters)-kits.

Hattip: Joanne Manaster‏ @sciencegoddess on Twitter: 

Curious? Here is the Products Catalog of http://3dmoleculardesigns.com/news2.php

Of course, such “synthesis” (copying) of existing molecules -though very useful for educational purposes- is overshadowed by the recent “CREATION of molecules other than DNA and RNA [xeno-nucleic acids (XNAs)], that can be used to store and propagate information and have the capacity for Darwinian evolution.

But that is quite a different story.

Related articles

• Friday Foolery #49: The Shortest Abstract Ever! [2] (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Synthetic DNA substitute gets its own enzymes, undergoes evolution (arstechnica.com)
• DNA Alternative Created By Scientists (freeinternetpress.com)
• Evolution seen in ‘synthetic DNA’ (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)

Friday Foolery #49: The Shortest Abstract Ever! [2]

In a previous Friday Foolery post I mentioned what I thought was the shortest abstract ever.

 “Probably not”.

But a reader (“Trollface”) pointed out in a comment that there was an even shorter (and much older) abstract of a paper in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. It was published in 1974.

The abstract simply says: Yes.

It could only be beaten by an abstract saying: “No”, “!”, “?” or a blank one.

Related articles

• Friday Foolery #46 Bad Science: The Psychology Behind Exaggerated & False Results (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery # 47 WTF, the True Spirit of Christmas (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #48 Brilliant Library Notices (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)

Friday Foolery #48 Brilliant Library Notices

Today’s Friday Foolery post is handed on a silver platter by my Australian friend Mike Cadogan @sandnsurf from Life in the Fast Lane

brilliant library notice | The Poke: http://t.co/cz5aa6K9 cc @laikas

— Mike Cadogan (@sandnsurf) January 12, 2012

Yes, aren’t these brilliant librarian notices from the Milwaukee Public Library?!

Note:

@Bitethedust, also from Australian rightly noticed: there’s no better place to stick @sandnsurf than in Friday foolery

Indeed at Life at the Fast Lane they have fun posts amidst the serious (mostly ER) topics. Want more Friday Fun than have a look at the Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five Posts.

Related articles

• Friday Foolery # 47 WTF, the True Spirit of Christmas (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #46 Bad Science: The Psychology Behind Exaggerated & False Results (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #44. The Shortest Abstract Ever. (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #45. What have you got in your head? (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)

Friday Foolery # 47 WTF, the True Spirit of Christmas

The true spirit of Christmas is in “loving” and to “do good for others”, ” thinking of” and “helping the less fortunate”.

However, many of today’s children,  weaned on luxury goods and gadgets, consider themselves as the “less fortunates” and thus are on the  “receiving” rather than the “giving” site. And are easily disappointed… and crossed if they don’t get the expected $$$ gift.

Am I exaggerating? I truly hope so.

But if you had searched Twitter for popular expensive gits “car”, “i-pad” or “i-phone” like comedy writer Jon Hendren (@fart) did, you had seen numerous dissatisfied tweets of extremely spoiled kids and adolescents:

https://twitter.com/#!/Tonimoretto/status/150701909479661569

https://twitter.com/#!/Bossybeegee/status/150985722730512384

https://twitter.com/#!/SamStandsFoSwag/status/150993796312739840

http://twitter.com/LeemyLeem_/status/150978171200745472

https://twitter.com/#!/dizzydentgirl/status/150980418718543872

https://twitter.com/#!/guhrace_/status/151039463672397824

My parents are the worst mother Fucking parents in the world fuck you mom and dad for not getting me a Iphone. FUCK YOU. FML. #Iphone

— MA, Glory (@vvvvv___vvvvv) December 25, 2011

https://twitter.com/#!/paulyandmolly/status/151053132498087936

———–

The tweets have even been compiled in a song by Jonathan Mann, the “Song a Day Man“. After seeing the tweets it should be no surprise that it is called “WTF?! I wanted an iPhone!”

———–

It makes me kind a sad. It is quite an anti-Christmas attitude.

The kids in this video below have every right to be disappointed though. (via Mashable)

———–

Sources

• ‘WTF?! I Wanted an iPhone!’ Entitled Christmas Tweets Put to Music [VIDEO] (mashable.com)
• Ungrateful Kids React to Bad Christmas Presents (mashable.com)

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• Friday Foolery #46 Bad Science: The Psychology Behind Exaggerated & False Results (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #45. What have you got in your head? (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #44. The Shortest Abstract Ever. (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• WTF! I Wanted an iPhone [Video] (collegecandy.com)
• Wanted an iPhone 4S / iPad / Pair of Jordans for Christmas And Didn’t Get It? (gottabemobile.com)

Friday Foolery #46 Bad Science: The Psychology Behind Exaggerated & False Results

Very up-to-date infographic about Bad Science: it includes (or was inspired by?) the recent fraud by Diederik Stapel, a well-known psychologist in the Netherlands.(e.g. see NY Times.com (2011/11/03/).

I am not sure though, that I agree with the 3rd solution to make research more honest: anonymous publication.

Created by: Clinical Psychology

Hattip: @nutrigenomics, @Vansteenwinckel, @kitteybeth & @rawarrior via Twitter

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• Friday Foolery #44. The Shortest Abstract Ever. (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Silly Sunday #43 Know Your Numbers (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #42 So You Think You Can Dance Your PhD Thesis? (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)

Friday Foolery #45. What have you got in your head?

What have you got in your head?

I hope it is not Barley, Chilli,  Hemp seeds, Candies, Black Rice,  Food for canaries,  Brain sandwich, Sugar or Hay. (No, are you nuts?)

But these foods do make beautiful, sometimes even tasty-looking “brains”.

The composition below is from the project “What have you got in your head?” (series 2, 2010) by the Italian Artist Sara Asnaghi. As you might have guessed she sculptured the human brains with different  foods. Each brain is 17 cm by 12 cm.

Watch the higher quality individual art works/photos at Behance Network (The Creative Professional Platform). [Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial]

I’ve found these brain sculptures via someone on Twitter or Facebook, but I don’t remember who I took it from. Sorry!

Related articles

• Friday Foolery #44. The Shortest Abstract Ever. (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #42 So You Think You Can Dance Your PhD Thesis? (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #41. A Special Offer for the Major [#4square] (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Silly Sunday #43 Know Your Numbers (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• What Have You Got In Your Head?, Human Art Brains Made With Food (laughingsquid.com)

Friday Foolery #44. The Shortest Abstract Ever?

This is the shortest abstract I’ve ever seen:

“probably not”

With many thanks to Michelynn McKnight, PhD, AHIP, Associate Professor, School of Library and Information Science, Louisiana State University, who put it on the MEDLIB-L listserv, saying :  “Not exactly structured …. but a great laugh!”

According to Zemanta (articles related to this post) Future Twit also blogged about it.

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• Friday Foolery #42 So You Think You Can Dance Your PhD Thesis? (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Silly Sunday #43 Know Your Numbers (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Shortest Scientific Paper Abstract Ever? A: Probably Not (futuretwit.com)

Silly Sunday #43 Know Your Numbers

As I touched upon in Grand Rounds 8.5 the Mayo Clinic Center held the 3rd Social Media’s Health Care Social Media Summit a few weeks ago. Lots of good information and resources were shared, including the video below. The video has already gone viral (it has been viewed appr. 24,000 times), but most important is that its message gets viral.

The song is a parody of 867-5309/Jenny, produced by the Mayo Clinic Center* to promote healthy heart awareness, especially among women:

Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women, but most women aren’t aware of this.

You need to know your numbers, don’t let them get too high: blood pressure, lipids and BMI

I love it & remember, know your numbers!

Go to http://knowyournumbers.me/ to calculate your heart risk (BMI and LDL-cholesterol) and see how you can lower it.

You can become a fan of Mayo Clinic at Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/MayoClinic

* For this purpose, the band of Ron Menaker, the administrator for the Mayo Clinic Division of Cardiovascular Diseases, was renamed to “Tommy and the Heartbeats” (see The  Making of  Know Your Numbers) .

Hattip: Scott Hensley (Facebook)

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• Friday Foolery #41. A Special Offer for the Major [#4square] (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Friday Foolery #42 So You Think You Can Dance Your PhD Thesis? (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com)
• Mayo’s Parody Video Invites You to Know Your Numbers: Blood Pressure, Lipids, and BMI (Sing to the tune of Jenny 867-5309) (managemypractice.com)
• Health Care Social Media Summit – Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media – Wrapup (healthblawg.typepad.com)
• Mayo Clinic Parodies ‘867-5309/Jenny’ Song To Promote Heart Health (huffingtonpost.com)

Friday Foolery #42 So You Think You Can Dance Your PhD Thesis?

It’s hard to explain your research to non-scientists. My PhD defense was preceded by a slide show (yes, that was once-upon-a-time that we didn’t use Powerpoint). It was the only part the public could follow a bit. But it is too long, static and detailed.

That cannot be said of these videos, where PhD’s from all over the world interpret their graduate research in dance form.

The videos below are the winners of the 2011 edition of the Dance your PhD contest. For the 4th year, this contest is organized by Gonzolabs & Science. See http://gonzolabs.org/dance/

There are 4 categories—chemistry, physics, biology, and social sciences

The overall winner of 2011 was Joel Miller (category physics), a biomedical engineer at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Miller apparently compensated his poor dancing skills and the lack of a video by applying stop-motion animation (stringing together about 2,200 photos to make it look as though his “actors” were dancing). His video shows the creation of titanium  alloys that are both strong and flexible enough for long-lasting hip replacements.
I love the song by the way. It fits perfectly to the dance scene.

You can see all winning videos here and all 2011 (this years) PhD videos here. You can also check out the 2010 and the 2009 PhD dances.

The other winners of 2011 were  FoSheng Hsu (chemistry category) who guides viewers through the entire sequence of steps required for x-ray crystallography,  Emma Ware (social science) who studies the traditional ‘stimulus-release’ model of social interaction using pigeon courtship (a beautiful pas a deux) and Edric Kai Wei Tan (biology) with the funny dance about Smell mediated response to relatedness of potential mates, simply put “fruit fly sex”.

Being Dutch, I would like to close with the Dutch winner of the biology category in 2010, Maartje Cathelijne de Jong who dances her PhD, “The influence of previous experiences on visual awareness.”

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• Ph.D Dance of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• Physics Wins Dance Your Ph.D. Contest (cenblog.org)
• Ph.D. dance-off makes science sexy (cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com)
• BLOG: So you think you can dance, PhD candidates? (cbc.ca)
• Dance Your Ph.D.: When Science People Shake A Tail Feather, Everybody Wins (npr.org)
• Winnaar dans je proefschrift speelt een beetje vals  (weblogs.nrc.nl) [Dutch]