Today, 11th of July 2011, is World Population Day. For that occasion, and as the world population is expected to surpass 7 billion this year, the UNFPA is launching a new campaign: 7 billion people - 7 billion actions. They highlight 7 key issues to explore: Poverty and inequality: reducing poverty and inequality also slows population growth. Women and girls: unleashing the power of women and girls will accelerate progress on all fronts. Young people: energetic and open to new technologies, history’s largest and most interconnected population of young people is transforming global politics and culture. Reproductive health and rights: ensuring that every child is wanted and every childbirth safe leads to smaller and stronger families. Environment: all 7 billion of us, and those who will follow, depend on the health of our planet. Ageing: lower fertility and longer lives add up to a new challenge worldwide: providing for aging populations. Urbanization: the next two billion people will live in cities, so we need to plan for them now. These issues are not new. They are not even original: most bodies or meetings looking at issues for the future have approximately the same issues. But at least it’s another initiative to raise awareness, to think about them. And, most importantly, to act to tackle them. ...

I just read that orange agent is used in Brazil to clear the Amazon. I am not judging people who may be forced by their living conditions to do this (although I doubt people who did this are poor since they sprayed it by plane). It may be the cheapest way to clear a forest to use the land for pasture (although I doubt buying chemical and spraying it by plane is cheap). But … ...

The other day, I was the witness of a demonstration in Happyland! It all started with Mr. Crab who had something interesting to show: And then people started to gather around him very quickly: And he was soon surrounded by many people (moreover, Duplo’s came to the rescue): ...

From Delicious, I saw that Yahoo had an article about the top 5 killers of men. I thought it would be nice to see from where they get there data. First, I have to mention that the article is really about American men, nothing else (not about mankind, not about men around the world, not about women, children, etc.). The article is related to the US National Men’s Health Week (the US National Women’s Health Week was in May 8-14, 2011). Although the article is giving advices, there are no sources of information. ...

The other evening, we started an interesting discussion with some colleagues about usage of Twitter and Facebook. Obviously most people in the room were (and are) using Facebook and knew about the feature (“status”) allowing you to share text messages with your friends (and the whole world). Less people were aware of Twitter, although is also offers the possibility to share text messages with your friends (and the whole world too). I was wondering why most (if not all) people in the room were registered on Facebook but almost none of them were registered (or even using) Twitter. Do not even mention Identi.ca, the open source alternative to Twitter. ...

I am still managing my photos based on directories named by date + event (e.g. “110515-person” contains photos from the person and taken today). I tried Shotwell, saw Picasa or iPhoto working but I was not really convinced. Maybe I like to be closer to the file structure (and it’s enough for my needs) and don’t like too much the idea of being dependent on a software and its internal database. ...

The Mozilla Foundation updated Firefox to its version 4 last month and it has lots of interesting features. So I upgraded and although I initially criticized the new interface (when looking at screenshot from beta releases), I now quite like it: it gives more space to the actual content (web pages) to keep the “container” (the Firefox GUI in itself) to a minimum. But … (because there always is a “but”). But I found 2 annoying issues with the new version … ...

TB stands for tuberculosis. It’s an infectious bacterial disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which most commonly affects the lungs. It is transmitted from person to person via droplets from the throat and lungs of people with the active respiratory disease. Like all other World Days regarding infectious diseases, it is meant to raise awareness about its global epidemiological aspects and the efforts to eliminate it. For tuberculosis, March 24th was chosen because Robert Koch first described Mycobacterium tuberculosis on March 24th, 1882. He then received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this in 1905. ...

R is a " a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics". Being a desktop software, R is working out-of-the-box, even if you don’t have a network connection. However, if you want to install packages using a repository on the internet, you need a network connection (of course). If your computer happens to be behind a proxy server, you have to slightly modify your shortcut (in MS-Windows) to allow R to download packages. This can be done by modifying the “Target” field in the “Shortcut” tab of the shortcut properties (right-click on the shortcut to R, select tab “Shortcut”, edit field “Target”): ...

" In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application) that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers." From Wikipedia. This can be useful for a company to force its employees to use a proxy (to filter where they surf, to cache the web content for speed issues, to keep machines on the network anonymous, etc.). This post will look at 3 ways to get the proxy definition for a Windows XP machine in order to use that information in another program. It may work in other Windows-type operating systems. ...