Moblog: Madrid, Parque del Retiro. Epidemiology ist always a cost intensive enterprise. Only those epidemiologists have enough funds for doing research who are spending most of their time on fund raising, speaking into every microphone and smiling into every camera. Continue reading The fourth major problem in epidemiology
NetVibes, Protopage, iGoogle and my own dashboard
Having tried some of these nice web services, I would like to run it now on my own server for obvious reasons. Even after spending considerable time, I didn´t find so much useful out there. eyeOS or other web based OS produce a large amount of overhead while allowing for only one RSS reader window at a time. From the 23 or so widget management systems the only Open Source piece that I found was Posh from Portaneo who deposited at Sourceforge. I wonder why it has only 2,095 downloads so far as all other candidates (Cesar, Viewport, MuseStorm Desktop…) are demo applications only. Widgets for Posh are quite limited so far while the (most important) RSS feed widgets already work.
More useful pages are at gnetvibes.rubyforge.org.rubyforge.org, dev.netvibes.com, reblog.org.
Addendum
Dropthings: another Open Source core engine
Allergy immigrant studies
I am starting here a thread of immigrant studies – seems that there are now ~100 available in the medical literature. This could be the nice question for a meta-analysis: Does the move to a high prevalence country lead to more allergy, e.g. do your peers matter? Continue reading Allergy immigrant studies
Advertising on Pubmed
You don´t believe that? It is possible as you can see here Continue reading Advertising on Pubmed
How doctors think
I attended yesterday a video talk by Jerome Groopman as he had become too ill to travel from Boston to San Francisco. His speech was one of the highlights of this year’s ATS conference – basically a summary of his new book “How doctors think“. It tells you about MDs and how they make up their diagnosis. Mostly everything goes right but sometimes everything goes wrong. According to empirical research a working diagnosis is already being made within 18 seconds Continue reading How doctors think
Healthy Living Tip #42
This is what I have found while traveling California: “Tip #70: Knowledge is power. Read the nutrition facts panel on your foods so you can make a sensible, balanced choices throughout the day.” Continue reading Healthy Living Tip #42
The third largest problem in epidemiology
-moblog- In my view, epidemiology is not very flexible to adjust to new methods and new techniques. Following some discussion that I had today with STW about eQTLs (quantitative traits derived by RNA microarrays or metabolome profiles) and JMA about system biology, it is likely that we are facing huge changes. Phenotypes may no more called intermediary and we may soon forget old controversies of disease definition. We will instead use new system-terms like NonImm076Trig31Ste0098 or TLR9-096321-Auto5337. Yea, yea.
Delete until 16-May-2008 12:00:00
Süddeutsche Zeitung complains that data are permanently stored but never deleted. Even my irrelevant newsgroup comments have been stored (for 14 years) although they have never been intended to a larger audience. As humans we have no built-in timescale and are not particular good in judging the context of any data. This might be the reason according to SZ that Victor Mayer-Schönberger argues for meta-data when data should be deleted. I agree on this proposal and want this blog entry to be deleted until 16-May-2008 12:00:00 from any server in any world, yea, yea.
Lactase variants in Europe – any connection to allergy?
I will present this poster next Monday in San Francisco at the Annual Conference of the American Thoracic Society. Continue reading Lactase variants in Europe – any connection to allergy?
Genomics of common diseases
Genomics of common diseases organized by Wellcome Trust/nature genetics in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK
Every rule can be broken, but no rule may be ignored
.. is the central rule of typography but is it also valid in science? More on LaTeX writing and presentation at the blog above.
dbSNP users attention please
dbSNP has a warning that the assignment of functional class might be wrong in many SNPs:
Why we didn´t find the asthma gene
The J Int Med has a symposium series about the “origins of the developmental origins theory” scienceblog:doi:10.1111/j.1365-2796.2007.01809.x or the so called “Barker hypothesis” Continue reading Why we didn´t find the asthma gene
A sense for justice
Hans-Werner Bierhoff (in a recent ZEIT interview) believes that our ability to recognise a punishment as fair/just or not fair/just depends on social norms. The ultimate driving force to sense justice, however, seems to be an inborn trait. I even believe in a QTL – a quantitative trait that can clearly defined and even mapped some time to distinct genetic variants.
Monkeys reject unequal pay (scienceblog:doi:10.1038/nature01963:) in the famous Brosnan study – why should humans do?
More details may be found at tit-for-tat.
The third largest problem in epidemiology
Some people are writing their diaries on the web (“blogs”), other are sharing photos (“flickr”), their social background (“big brother”) or are broadcasting themselves (“YouTube”); others let you trace their current location (“twitter”) or look at their desktops (“wakoopa”) or computer files (“BitTorrent”). Why is it still so difficult to run an epidemiological study with an adequate response rate? Is that excessive profiling a minority habit only?