Today is *not* World Epilepsy Day

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!)

According to Wikipedia, the next World [Infectious Disease] Day is on APril 25th (malaria).

So today is just Valentine’s Day 🙂

World Cancer Day

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):

Rank Classification Cancer type Cases Remark
1. C50 Breast 9556  
2. C61 Prostate 9254 male only
3. C34 Bronchus and lung 6956  
4. C18 Colon 5233  
5. C44 Malignant neoplasms of skin 3110  
6. C20 Rectum 2264  
7. C67 Bladder 1986  
8. C82-85 Non-Hodgkin-lymphom 1925  
9. C43 Malignant melanoma of skin 1572  
10. C64 Kidney 1377  
11. C16 Stomach 1356  
12. C54 Corpus uteri 1320 female only
13. C25 Pancreas 1172  
14. C80 Unknown primary site 1168  
15. C15 Oesophagus 920  

It’s interesting to note a few things:

  • These figures represent cases of cancer and not deaths by cancer. Note also that prostate cancer is in third position but only concerns males.
  • The latests data is from 2006. The website doesn’t seem to be updated since 2008 (and 2008 seems to be the year when data from 2006 are available ; if we follow the 2-years-gap logic, I guess the data from 2009 are available somewhere but not on this website)
  • Data accessibility seems to be average. Data is there in Excel format (and PDF which is pretty useless if you want to reuse the data). On one side, these Excel files can be opened by almost every office suite. On the other side, some open format would have been preferred. And some direct interaction with the data on the website is now the norm (ok, I just wrote it doesn’t seem to be updated since 2008)
  • The classification is quite good since it uses the “Classification Internationale des Maladies” which is the “International Classification of Diseases” in English better known as ICD-10 (online).

Is there a life after delicious?

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“.

So, first, export your bookmarks. It seems there is no limit to the number of bookmarks you can save, all of them are there. Delicious uses a modified Netscape bookmark file format with meaningful use of HTML tags. In clear: this file can easily be parsed and stored in another format, in a database, in another tool.

Now what if someone finally decides to shut down Delicious? Or what is the future of your data if Delicious outside Yahoo! is transformed into a paid web service (like Historious for example)? What is the competition? What are the alternatives?

I will not blindly list them all. You can find them via a simple web search. Instead I’ll list the features I liked in Delicious and also add some improvements I would have liked to see. If I go for something new (or an improved Delicious), it would be nice if it’s better than the actual one, isn’t it?

What I like in Delicious (in no particular order):

  • simple: a link, some tags, a description and you are done
  • tags suggestions based on other users’ tags
  • private tags
  • simple “social” link, suggestions between users and trends about what’s currently bookmarked
  • web-based (accessible from everywhere), quite fast
  • simple API, extensions for most popular browsers, widgets and badges for inclusion in websites
  • free, accounts not necessarily linked to Yahoo! (at least in the beginning)

And now what can be added to make it better?

  • free license (e.g. Affero)
  • free access to dataset (the whole dataset, not just your dataset ; so compliance with OSSD))
  • decentralised system while maintaining interoperability (à la Jabber)

And for the rest of your digital life, what if the service provider decides “that there is not a strategic fit” for it at the parent company? Self-hosting seems to be the only viable alternative.

The Joy of Stats

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- 🙂

WikiRebels, the documentary

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.

Jamie Oliver: Teach every child about food

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.

Leading causes of death in the USA from Jamie Oliver's TED talk

The answer is really easy: the leading causes of death in the USA are compiled every year by the (American) National Center for Health Statistics and the results are available on their FastStats website. So, for 2007 (the latest results at the time of writing), the 15 leading causes of death in the USA are (ordered by decreasing number of cases):

Rank Cause Number
1. Diseases of heart * 616,067
2. Malignant neoplasms (cancers) * 562,875
3. Cerebrovascular diseases * 135,952
4. Chronic lower respiratory diseases 127,924
5. Accidents (unintentional injuries) 123,706
6. Alzheimer’s disease 74,632
7. Diabetes mellitus * 71,382
8. Influenza and pneumonia 52,717
9. Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis 46,448
10. Septicemia 34,828
11. Intentional self-harm (suicide) 34,598
12. Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis 29,165
13. Essential hypertension and hypertensive renal disease 23,965
14. Parkinson’s disease 20,058
15. Assault (homicide) 18,361

The exact ICD-10 codes are in this report ; you can find their exact meaning here. Causes with an asterisk are related to food intake, according to Jamie Oliver.

Now you have the numbers, the origin of the data and the methodology used to collect these data. You can watch the presentation:

You’ll find a critique of Jamie Oliver’s talk by Presentation Zen.