Malaria is the 5th cause of death in low-income countries ( according to WHO). That’s why I’m very happy to read that a malaria vaccine showed promising results in a phase 3 clinical trial (in The Guardian, The New York Times or Google News). As usual, I find very interesting to get all the information at the source: the original scientific paper was just published in The New England Journal of Medicine. ...
On 14 December 1990, the United Nations General Assembly designated 1st of October the International Day of Older Persons. 1990 … it is already more than 20 years ago! People who signed the resolution at that time are now more than 20 years older. Some (most) of them probably are now considered as “old persons”. Do they still have the same view on elderly? Maybe the highlighted principles at that time (independence, participation, care, self-fulfilment, dignity, …) are too broad, too short, just enough? ...
A few days before my last post and still about the UN High Level Meeting on Prevention and Control of Non-communicable Diseases, The Economist issued a daily chart showing that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for the majority of deaths worldwide. I copy the chart below: [caption id=“attachment_1115” align=“aligncenter” width=“497” caption=“The Economist: non-communicable diseases account for the majority of deaths worldwide”] [/caption] ...
Last week, United Nations gathered in New York, USA, to talk about prevention and control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Non-communicable diseases are non-infectious, of long duration and generally progressing slowly. Due to the fact they are not infectious, there is no pathogen to target and there is no transmission medium to fight. Due to their long duration and slow progression, one usually notices NCDs when it’s too late and eradicating NCDs is less spectacular than other (not less important) infectious diseases. However WHO measured that NCDs represents more than 60% of all deaths in the world. For the occasion, WHO released an introductory video that summarize the issue. ...
I became recently interested in wearable electronics and wearable communication. I think we usually don’t need a computer at home. But I also think that electronics, sensory / storage / communication / helper devices will invade our world (privacy) at one point. A few months ago, I liked Phillip Torrone’s retrospective collection of wearable electronic devices (for Make:). It will be quite fun to wear some of the stuff he showed. However most of the current applications shown are mostly designed to collect information from the body they are attached to or to communicate with this body. This is very much self-centered. ...
[caption id=“attachment_1093” align=“aligncenter” width=“497” caption=“ql2400 and ql2500 update in Fedora 14”] [/caption] Although some people think it’s a joke (see kalev’s comment on 2011-09-17 19:13:44 in the bugfix report), I won’t install this update; I agree it’s funny but refusing to install it at least gives me the feeling I have still something to say on my system (that’s also what free software are for, isn’t it?). ...
Google+ (G+) is a social networking and identity service operated by Google. It started a few months ago like a closed service from where you can’t get out any data and where the only possible interaction (read/write/play) is only possible via the official interfaces (i.e. the web and android clients). Google promised to release a public API and it partly did so tonight, here. As they stated, “this initial API release is focused on public data only — it lets you read information that people have shared publicly on Google+” (emphasis is mine). So you can already take most of your data out of G+ (note that it was already possible to download your G+ stream with Takeout from the Google Data Liberation Front). As usual, it’s a RESTful API with OAuth authorization. It comes with its own rules and terms (it could be interesting to add to GooDiff). The next step would be to be able to directly write something on Google+. ...
Reference Manager is a commercial reference management software package. It is extensively used in biomedical research, along with Endnote (sold by the same company), mainly because the main OS in these labs is Windows from Microsoft. I used it at the university and still have some reference databases in its format (with file extension .rmd). This evening, I had to go back into one of those proprietary, closed databases I still had (most of my references were later re-entered in a BibTeX file). I could have borrowed my wife’s computer running Windows or tried some Open Source software that can open .rmd files. But it would have been too easy. So I tried it with Wine, a program that allows Microsoft Windows applications to run under Linux. In Wine AppDB, it is written people had tried version 9 and 11. In the old time, I bought a student license for version 10. ...
When I studied biology as well as when I did my Ph.D., our professors were always after us because of references. I think with their precious help we learnt the art of referencing: choosing good references, citing them at the appropriate location in a text and, of course, giving enough information at the bottom of the text to allow the reader to find these references. I just finished reading two articles in a recent edition of The Economist and they reminded me how important are these references. These articles are What would Jesus hack? and Worrying about wireless. ...
This well-known French proverb is similar to: “pride comes before a fall”. This evening I was told by the newly installed version of Firefox that my Flash player was outdated. Firefox provides a simple link to download that Flash Player. I save the installer (install_flashplayer10_mssd_aih.exe) in a directory where I save all my downloads before sorting them. I launch the installer. It moves itself to my system temporary directory and launches itself again. First I find it very rude from the installer to move itself anywhere on my disk. Then now, since 15 minutes it’s stuck at the step where it tries “retrieving install”. ...