I continue in the serie of “World x Day” and for a reason still unknown even to myself, I thought today was the World Epilepsy Day (it’s in fact on March 26th, called Purple Day). But, anyway, epilepsy is “a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. […] Epilepsy is usually controlled, but cannot be cured with medication, although surgery may be considered in difficult cases.” ( Wikipedia). Out of curiosity, I was looking for mathematical models for the description of the epidemiology of epilepsy. But unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything. Probably because epilepsy is not an infectious disease for which tentative mathematical models have more predictive power (in terms of the population scale and time scale). The epidemiology of noninfectious diseases is primarily a study of risk factors associated with the chance of developing the disease. Nothing very fancy for a mathemarical model! ;-) (But if you find something, feel free to share! Thanks in advance!) ...

It doesn’t seem jolly but last Friday, it was the World Cancer Day. About this, the WHO set up a nice website about cancer control. Following my previous post on Jamie Oliver and the top 15 causes of death in the USA, I started to collect similar data from other countries. Linking this to cancers, the annual statistics on cancers in Belgium can be found on the Belgian Cancer Registry. The latest numbers are however from 2006. Here are the top 15 cancers in Belgium in 2006 (all sexes and regions mixed): ...

Happy Vietnamese New Year!

Today was World Leprosy Day. Leprosy has a high incidence in countries like India, Brazil and Burma (and other countries in the middle of Africa). But its incidence in occidental countries is rather low. This may explain why there isn’t a lot of [epidemiological models of leprosy](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=leprosy epidemiological model) (I wish I had some time for this kind of thing).

Delicious is " a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet". I extensively use(d) it and I think it’s one of the very good tools Yahoo! (its parent company) has to offer on the web for the moment (along with Flickr and the currency converter). I was thus very disappointed to read persisting rumours that Yahoo! will shut down Delicious. And I’m not totally reassured by the official comment from the Delicious blog: " No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive". ...

Here is yet another interesting video from Prof. Hans Rosling :-) From the video: “Believe me, there is nothing boring about statistics, especially not today when we can make the data seen”. For the rest, watch the video … http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/oOOmqHzkkOo?fs=1&hl=en_US Btw, it is also featuring David McCandless whose work was already shown here before. Re- :-)

A few years ago (2006!), I wished Merry Christmas with a 12 days of Christmas from Boymongoose. This year, I wish you some wonderful holidays (under the snow for those in Northern Europe) and a Merry Christmas with again a 12 days of Christmas song. This time, it’s from Straight No Chaser ;-) Enjoy! http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/2Fe11OlMiz8?fs=1&hl=en_US

I just watched “WikiRebels - The Documentary”, a “rough-cut of first in-depth documentary on WikiLeaks and the people behind it” by the Swedish Television. It doesn’t show much new information but give a nice perspective on the past events. http://svt.se/embededflash/2264028/play.swf Note: this video is said to be available until January 16, 2011. It may not appear above after this date.

In the latest TED Prize wish, Jamie Oliver, the “Naked Chef”, talks about teaching every child about food. His wish is: I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity. Although I have a child and I’m obviously interested in his idea, I was also interested in the simple bar chart depicting the leading causes of death in the USA. In the tiny Flash video, the text is unfortunately barely legible and I was interested in knowing where he got his data from. ...

No issue, installation even smoother than the installation of Fedora 13 on the same machine, last month.