Today is World Population Day

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.

7 billion actions poster - UNFPA

They highlight 7 key issues to explore:

  1. Poverty and inequality: reducing poverty and inequality also slows population growth.
  2. Women and girls: unleashing the power of women and girls will accelerate progress on all fronts.
  3. Young people: energetic and open to new technologies, history’s largest and most interconnected population of young people is transforming global politics and culture.
  4. Reproductive health and rights: ensuring that every child is wanted and every childbirth safe leads to smaller and stronger families.
  5. Environment: all 7 billion of us, and those who will follow, depend on the health of our planet.
  6. Ageing: lower fertility and longer lives add up to a new challenge worldwide: providing for aging populations.
  7. 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 don’t think it’s wishful thinking to write that everyone can help. Besides being in the introduction brochure, teaching a child to read, planting a tree, visiting a senior, finding a cure, standing up for others and making someone smile are all simple actions we can do (even if we can’t do all of them, we can do some of them). We can start with our own kids, our own family, our own environment.

What will be your unique story?

Sometimes people are really stupid

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 …

Agent OrangeBut this is already very stupid because since at least the Vietnam war, we know that the orange agent is a very toxic product with detrimental effects on human health (in the USA, the Veterans Affairs are busy with that). On top of already using the orange agent to clear forests for mining, these guys thinks it will be interesting to go there and take care of the livestock. They will of course quickly earn money from selling meat from animals that grew there. But they will face health issues, at some point, for them and most probably for people who will eat that meat.

Because that’s the second stupid thing they are making: cows, horses, goats, sheep, etc. that will graze there will also be contaminated. In the worst case (for them), their meat will immediately be unfit for human. In the worst case (for everybody), the meat will be sold to people outside contaminated zones and these people will also be contaminated …

I will not be surprised if I read news about baby malformations in the coming years in Brazil. And I’m wondering why Monsanto is still selling orange agent anywhere in the world. Is money so important compared to human health?

Photo credit: Agent Orange by Emilio Labrador on Flickr (CC-by)

The Top 5 Killers of Men

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.

However, it’s rather easy to obtain these numbers …

For the US, the CDC FastStats website is a hub to data about health in the US. Here is the CDC ranking for the top 5 killers in 2007 (in both US women and men):

  1. Heart disease: 616,067 deaths
  2. Cancer: 562,875 deaths
  3. Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 135,952 deaths
  4. Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 127,924 deaths
  5. Accidents (unintentional injuries): 123,706 deaths

If you look at the whole world (data from the UN), the picture is somehow different! The UN ranking for the top 5 killers in 2008 (in both women and men) is:

  1. Lower respiratory infections: 1.05 million deaths
  2. Diarrhoeal diseases: 0.76 million deaths
  3. HIV/AIDS: 0.72 million deaths
  4. Ischaemic heart disease: 0.57 million deaths
  5. Malaria: 0.48 million deaths

All of them causes more than 45% of deaths around the world. These diseases with high-mortality vary in an important manner when we compare the USA and the whole world. The main caveat is that the data I presented above are for men and women. It would be interesting to use the UN data API project to dig further into details.

Facebook -vs- Twitter short message usage?

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.

Both Facebook and Twitter play in the “social networking websites” circle and both are proprietary. You must register with both to be allowed to participate although no registration is required to read Twitter messages (they are public by default). No such thing with Facebook: only registered users can read what other users posted. Another difference: Facebook allow you to share more than just text messages (photos, videos, play games, etc.) while Twitter relies on third-parties for that (although they are rolling out a photo sharing service). Is that difference in features that make most people prefer Facebook on Twitter? Is that just a snowball effect?

Twitip states that “Facebook appeals to people looking to reconnect with old friends and family members or find new friends online; the mashup of features like email, instant messaging, image and video sharing, etc. feels familiar, while Twitter is a bit harder to get your arms around at first. […] Twitter on the other hand, encourages you grab ideals in byte-size chunks and use your updates as jumping off points to other places or just let others know what you’re up to at any given moment.” Even with those differences, Facebook and Twitter had very similar demographics in 2010, according to Digital Surgeons.

Sharing information via social channels (Facebook, Twitter and alike) grew fast between 2009 (14%) and 2010 (24%) according to Social Twist. It even overtook instant messaging. But this shouldn’t hide the fact that most people still use e-mails to share links. Is it because most people using social media are still “old” (25-35 years old) and used to send and receive e-mails. Of course, Social Twist only records a special kind of measure (media sharing) and I wonder if the supposed use of social media in “Arab revolutions” will have an impact on the 2011 usage. It would be interesting to see the trend in the coming years.

Coming back to the initial question, I think most people in that other evening were mostly using Facebook (and not Twitter) mainly because of the snowball effect (most of the friends are also on Facebook). I mainly use Twitter to share information and Facebook to keep in touch with my friends’lives.

And you, do you use Facebook and Twitter in different manners?

P.S. If you want you can follow me on Twitter and, yes, you can find me on Facebook 😉

Managing photos

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 only issue I faced is that I’m collecting photos from my camera and my phone: they both use different naming conventions. So when I look at my photos, I first have all the photos from my phone in chronological order then I am forced to go back to the beginning of the event and look at all the photos from my camera (again in chronological order).

The solution I applied is to take into account the EXIF tag concerning the date/time each photo was taken in order to rename the file accordingly. For that I use exiv2:

exiv2 -r'%Y%m%d-%H%M_:basename:' rename $(ls)

The result are names like: 20110515-1814_IMG_3704.JPG. This is easily sorted. Provided my phone and my camera date/time settings are approximately synchronised, it solves the issue mentioned before.

Now not all pictures are rotated. Most file managers and photo editing software take care of that and show you corrected photo if needed (Nautilus and Gimp do that at least). But some software do not take that into account (I think of Piwigo for instance). Here I use jhead with the following command:

jhead -ft -autorot *.JPG

Now in order to get some photos out of the computer,

  • I just use a regular USB key to give the photo shop and print some photos ;
  • I use a simple FTP client to upload some photos to our private photo gallery ;
  • I use Postr (previously mentioned here) to upload some photos to my Flickr gallery ;
  • I finally sometimes use the Picasa web interface to upload a few pictures there.

And you, how are you managing your photos?

P.S. By the way, I recently discovered a nice tip to transform all spaces in file names by underscores (or any other character):

rename ' ' '_' *

Two annoying issues with Firefox 4 (and their solutions)

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 …

  1. the “open in new Tab” option is now second in the pop-up menu when you right-click on a link;
  2. Firefox will not save all your open tabs when you close it.

In version 3, when you right-click on a link, the pop-up menu shows you options to open in new window or in new tab in this order:

  1. Open Link in New Window
  2. Open Link in New Tab

Now in version 4, when you right-click on a link, the pop-up menu shows you these options in the following (inverted) order:

  1. Open Link in New Tab
  2. Open Link in New Window

So if you are used to click on the second option to open the link in a new tab (in version 3), you automatically do this in the new version. But you open a new window. That’s annoying! And that’s a known bug/feature.

There are three solutions to this issue:

  1. use Ctrl + (left) click to open a link in a new tab.
  2. use the Menu Editor add-on to re-organise the pop-up menu order as you wish.
  3. use this tweak proposed in a Mozilla forum.
  4. (I know, a fourth solution) just get used to it because I’ll also find it annoying if Firefox developers suddenly change the order of the menu items back in version 5.

My other issue with this new version of Firefox is that it doesn’t warn you that you will close it but not save the tabs you are currently browsing. In Firefox 3, there was a warning dialog box telling you something like: “you are about to close Firefox but there are still tabs open. Would you like to save them, quit anyway (and lose them) or stay in Firefox”. In Firefox 4, no warning, it closes and doesn’t save your tabs.

Initially you think you made a mistake, there was no tab when you closed Firefox. Or maybe you didn’t pay attention to the dialog box and closed Firefox, telling it not to save. At the third occurrence, you are sure there is an issue! And there is one indeed! The Firefox development team apparently decided not to show this box anymore. It sounds ok if you think that this roadblock-dialog-box isn’t in the user’s way when he/she decides to quit. But then save the tabs to users used to this features don’t lose their tabs. This evening, I lost at least 20 tabs containing things not so important (so not in bookmarks) but I wanted to read tonight. Grrr …

Fortunately, as usual, there is a solution:

In the address/url bar enter: about:config
In the filter box enter: quit
set browser.showQuitWarning to ‘true’

Again, this is a feature or an explicit decision: see bugs 592822 and 593421 for instance.

From my point of view, the gold standard is: don’t change the UI and user experience ; or do it but tell the user you did it the first few times the old behaviour isn’t occurring.

March 24th was world TB day

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.

On the WHO website, there is a huge amount of data that can be easily parsed (here too).

I was first interested in the estimated TB incidence per 100 000 population in 2009 (per 100,000 population) in the BRIC countries (see table below). Clearly, there is Brazil with a low incidence (compared to others, it’s still around 10 times values found for “occidental” countries) then Russia and China around 100 cases/y and finally 168 cases/y for India. I added their respective Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the table as it’s often considered as an indicator of a country’s standard of living (in 2009, numbers from Wikipedia/IMF). I also added the annual growth rate of GDP per capita (in 2006, numbers from EarthTrends/World Resources Institute). The only interesting thing I see is that if your annual growth of GDP per capita is low, your estimated TB incidence per 10,000 is also low.

Country Est. incidence GDP per capita Annual growth rate …
Brazil 45 11,289 2.4
China 96 7,518 10.1
India 168 3,290 7.7
Russian Federation 106 15,807 7.2

Now if we look at some occidental countries (table below, same sources), this seems right.

Country Est. incidence GDP per capita Annual growth rate …
Belgium 8.6 36,274 2.6
France 6.1 34,092 1.4
Germany 4.9 35,930 2.9
Japan 21 33,828 2.2
UK 12 35,053 2.2
USA 4.1 47,123 1.9

The treatment involves medications for long period and is usually accompanied by antibiotics. Regarding prevention, Bacille Calmette Guerin (BCG) is the only current vaccine for tuberculosis and contains a live attenuated (weakened) strain of Mycobacterium bovis. TB eradication is part of the UN Millenium Development Goals (Target 6c: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases). It is also part of the WHO Global Plan to Stop Tuberculosis.

Recently (because of this World TB Day?), two interesting research papers were recently published in the litterature:

R and the proxy server

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”):

"C:\Program Files\R\R-2.12.2\bin\i386\Rgui.exe" http_proxy=http://proxyaddress:80 http_proxy_user=ask

Adapt the path to your R version, change the string “proxyaddress” by your proxy (see this previous post for a tip on this) and you’re done!

Because I never remember them, I’ll conclude this post with standard commands related to the installation of a packages:

Installing packages in R:
> install.packages("packageName", repos = "http://cran.ma.imperial.ac.uk/", dependencies = TRUE)

Notes:

  • You might get a window asking you for your firewall credentials and to choose a mirror server
  • CRAN repositories can be found here: http://cran.r-project.org/
  • This will download and install the package again, even if it is already installed

Updating packages in R:
> update.packages("deSolve") # for the deSolve package, for example

Know all packages installed in R on your computer:
> libraries()

Finally, here is a R reference card that can be useful too.

What is my proxy on Windows XP?

“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.

The first one is to use the command line tool proxycfg but this is different from the one that may be used by Internet Explorer, see here. On my corporate PC, there is no proxy defined this way. But there is one defined in Internet Explorer.

So, in Internet Explorer, to see the proxy connection, you go in the “Tools” menu -> “Internet Options” -> “Connections” tab. And then click on the “LAN settings” button. But this can be blocked by your PC administrator (it’s my case) so let’s look at the other options.

Another option is to use the Firefox (if your company allows you to use it): in the “Tools” menu -> “Options” -> “Advanced” tab -> “Network” tab, in the box named “Connection”, click on the “Settings” button. Then:

  • You have no luck if the settings are auto-detected.
  • If the option “No proxy” is chosen, your company doesn’t use a proxy.
  • If the option “Use system proxy settings” is chosen, you should have seen the proxy with the command line tool proxycfg above.
  • If the option “Manual proxy configuration” is chosen, you can directly read the parameters.
  • If the option “Automatix proxy configuration URL” is chosen, you can copy-paste the link given in the text field in the address bar to see how Firefox will determine which proxy to use. This page is just a bit of code that tells Firefox in which conditions it should use what proxy. You can find some details here or elsewhere on the web. You have to use the value just after the string “PROXY“. For instance, your proxy is “LOCATIONPROXY01” if your proxy string is “PROXY LOCATIONPROXY01“. If there are many proxy definitions, you have to try to understand the logic behind the .pac file if you want to be sure to find the correct one. Or you can try all of them (brute-force) and you’ll find the one that works.