Es ist nicht intuitiv, dass man die Benachrichtigen über eingegangene Emails nicht direkt in den Optionen des Mailprogramme ausschalten kann. Continue reading Yosemite Mail: Benachrichtigungen ausschalten
Category Archives: Software
OS X 10.10 Yosemite update breaks PHP in Apache localhost
Unfortunately the recent system upgrade overwrites all your local web server installation. As the Apache versionnow also increased to 2.4 in Yosemite, it is not a good idea to get your former http.conf from the backup.
computersnyou.com nicely explains the repair procedure but this still did not work for me as there is another configuration change necessary.
# needs to be uncommented LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so # needs to be added <IfModule mime_module> AddType application/x-httpd-php .php ..
I am still struggling with the GD graphics library. It looks enabled from phpinfo() while ferrotype functions like imagettftext() are still not working. But there is a solution at stack overflow
curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.6
If you had just one question… Yeah, yeah
Better figures
A recent paper identifies 10 rules for better pictures. As I have also given several lectures on that topic, I was excited what the authors think…
1. Know your audience. This is trivial as you never know your audience.
2. Identify your message. True and not true at the same time. True as it makes your findings more evident – not true if you are allowing a reader to find his own message.
3. Adapt the figure to the support medium. Trivial. May be very time consuming.
4. Captions are not optional. Absolutely true, I also suppport good captions – mini stories for those who can’t read the whole text.
5. Do not trust the defaults. Trivial. No one does.
6. Use color efficiently. Not really, avoid colors for those of us who are colorblind and to avoid expensive page charges.
7. Do not mislead the reader. Why should I?
8. Avoid Chartjunk. Absolutely. Most frequent problem.
9. Message trumps beauty. Sure, form follows function.
10. Get the right tool. Maybe correct while the further recommendations look like a poor man’s effort to make his first graphic at zero cost: Gimp, Imagemagick, R…
Mapfactor Navigator: Convert you POIs
I am currently switching to Mapfactor Navigator mainly to use now also offline Open Street Maps.
The main problem is to get all those old waypoints converted. Unfortunately it is confusing what developers but users are reporting on different forums. MN obviously used different tools at different times and even different directories.
Before you start, get the most recent version Continue reading Mapfactor Navigator: Convert you POIs
Warum Radhelmpflicht mehr schadet als nützt
Es ist leider öfters so, dass sich der gesunde Menschenverstand irrt. Vordergründige Logik ist eben doch nur vordergründig. Was habe ich nicht alles an Unsinn gelesen zu dem Thema Radhelm im Zusammenhang mit dem unsäglichen OLG Schleswig Urteil, das der BGH glücklicherweise nun aufgehoben hat. Unter anderem seien auch die Zahl der Kopfverletzungen in Neuseeland zurückgegangen. Logisch eigentlich, wenn niemand mehr Rad fährt… Im Original liest sich das so
The New Zealand helmet law (all ages) came into effect on 1 January 1994. It followed Australian helmet laws, introduced in 1990–1992. Pre-law (in 1990) cyclist deaths were nearly a quarter of pedestrians in number, but in 2006–09, the equivalent figure was near to 50% when adjusted for changes to hours cycled and walked. From 1988–91 to 2003–07, cyclists’ overall injury rate per hour increased by 20%. Dr Hillman, from the UK’s Policy Studies Institute, calculated that life years gained by cycling outweighed life years lost in accidents by 20 times. For the period 1989–1990 to 2006–2009, New Zealand survey data showed that average hours cycled per person reduced by 51%. This evaluation finds the helmet law has failed in aspects of promoting cycling, safety, health, accident compensation, environmental issues and civil liberties.
Vielleicht nochmal zum Mitschreiben: Radfahren führt zu einer sehr viel höheren Lebenserwartung, selbst unvermeidliche Unfälle eingerechnet. Die Helmpflicht hat die Häufigkeit des Radfahrens halbiert, damit natürlich einige Kopfverletzungen vermieden, aber vor allem die ansonsten durch das Radfahren gewonnene Lebenszeit halbiert.
Was soll man nur zu dem Thema noch sagen wo Einstein schon alles gesagt hat? Ansonsten gibt es vernünftige Kommentare auf Fahradhelm kurz & bündig und Sinn und Nutzen von Fahrradhelmen Das nicht ganz unlogische Fazit – ich bin gegen Helmpflicht aber fahre meistens mit Helm. Ach so, und nirgendwo sind die Menschen so dick wie in Australien:
Australia: the world’s fattest nation. A public health crisis
Australia is now the fattest nation in the world, with more than 9 million adults rated as obese or overweight. (Stewart et al, 2008)
It is predicted that this will lead to 123,000 premature deaths over the next two decades and that an extra 700,000 people will be admitted to hospital for heart attacks, strokes and blood clots caused by excess weight. The costs will exceed AUD 6 billion.
Weitere Kommentare auf http://blog.zeit.de/…/#comments
Snow (den) ball effect
Hello Matthias,
….
As it turns out, many people were listening when Edward Snowden mentioned SpiderOak. As a result, we’re seeing the highest rate of signups in our history. This has caused a dramatic increase in server load and customer inquiries. It’s been all hands on deck, around the clock to deliver the kind of service and response we feel is appropriate for such an occasion. By way of managing expectation, we plan to be fully adjusted within the week.
…
With ‘Zero-Knowledge’,
~ Your SpiderOak Team
I can confirm, that SpiderOak is working well on several platforms at least for internal purposes. The only function that I missed so far is the data upload in the Android client.
Science for glory, the fun and the money
This is the world how it should be:
What to do with an old Aldi Medion (Dell Inspiron 1520) laptop?
It turned out to be super easy
- download Elementary OS Luna and create a CD ROM from the downloaded ISO by using OS X’s Disk Utility (Luna is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (“Precise Pangolin”)
- press F2 at the Medion and let it boot from the CD, then install Luna right away
- follow the instructions at ubuntuforums.org ( now askubuntu.com ) to install the wireless driver
- go to to the admin panel, replace the Luna browser with Chrome, get Light-zone and add also Libre Office. Several more changes are also recommended.
I guarantee you a brand new machine 1 hour later that will boot in less than 30s, sleep in another 3s, start Chrome in <1s and render a Facebook page in 1s. Incredible. Something Microsoft was dreaming of for decades. Microsoft even wants us to trash these old XP machines by ending any support. That would be another incredible waste as look and feel with Luna is better than ever.
Formula or extra character in Keynote
Some Mac users will know it for decades – the easiest way to set scalable formulas into your Keynote document is by having a small LaTeXit window.
Quickly type there what you need and drag it to the Keynote window – here I needed a curly bracket }.
Optimizing until we die
The German Ärzteblatt reported recently a study that is directly online accessible and
confirms the existence of safety tipping points for in-hospital mortality using the discharge records of 82,280 patients across six high-mortality-risk conditions from 256 clinical departments of 83 German hospitals. Focusing on survival during the first seven days following admission, we estimate a mortality tipping point at an occupancy level of 92.5%. Among the 17% of patients in our sample who experienced occupancy above the tipping point during the first seven days of their hospital stay, high occupancy accounted for one in seven deaths.
So there is an optimum if NOT every room is occupied and NOT all time spent for filling out forms.
Der Betreiber einer Internetsuchmaschine ist bei personenbezogenen Daten, die auf von Dritten veröffentlichten Internetseiten erscheinen, für die von ihm vorgenommene Verarbeitung verantwortlich
Der Gerichtshof der Europäischen Union schreibt in einer neuen Pressemitteilung
Urteil in der Rechtssache C-131/12 Google Spain SL, Google Inc. / Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González
Der Betreiber einer Internetsuchmaschine ist bei personenbezogenen Daten, die auf von Dritten veröffentlichten Internetseiten erscheinen, für die von ihm vorgenommene Verarbeitung verantwortlich
Eine Person kann sich daher, wenn bei einer anhand ihres Namens durchgeführten Suche in der Ergebnisliste ein Link zu einer Internetseite mit Informationen über sie angezeigt wird, unmittelbar an den Suchmaschinenbetreiber wenden, um unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen die Entfernung des Links aus der Ergebnisliste zu erwirken, oder, wenn dieser ihrem Antrag nicht entspricht, an die zuständigen Stellen.
Das Urteil hat ziemlich lange gedauert, 20 Jahre, oder? Leider, so gut das Urteil auch ist, es wird umgehend instrumentalisiert
Jane Wakefield reports at BBC that a man convicted of possessing child abuse images is among the first to request Google remove links links to pages about his conviction after a European court ruled that an individual could force it to remove ‘irrelevant and outdated’ search results. Other takedown requests since the ruling include an ex-politician seeking re-election who has asked to have links to an article about his behaviour in office removed and a doctor who wants negative reviews from patients removed from google search results.
Journal of Allergy
Being spammed by a company called Hindawi for many years, I tried to find out a bit more about one of their journals called “Journal of Allergy”. The website http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ja says
Journal of Allergy is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles, review articles, and clinical studies in all areas of allergy. Journal of Allergy currently has an acceptance rate of 43%. The average time between submission and final decision is 59 days and the average time between acceptance and final publication is 34 days.
According to their own description, they are located in Cairo and employ some 200 to 1,000 employees. Hindawi seems to be the name of one of their founders. In some other web sources they claim 410 Park Avenue, 15th Floor, New York, USA, as their address. Google Streetview shows at that address a 11+2 floor building with Chase Manhattan Bank located at the ground floor.
Only 40 or so of the 500+ Hindawi journals have any impact factor associated with.
Declan Butler at Nature already wrote about these kind of journals:
Open-access publishers often collect fees from authors to pay for peer review, editing and website maintenance. Beall asserts that the goal of predatory open-access publishers is to exploit this model by charging the fee without providing all the expected publishing services. These publishers, Beall says, typically display “an intention to deceive authors and readers, and a lack of transparency in their operations and processes”.
At the moment, the Journal of Allergy is not being black listed by Beall (while Hindawi had been in the past). “Journal of Allergy” should not be confused with “The Journal of Allergy”[Jour] that has 1514 PUBMED entries while the “Journal of Allergy”[Jour] has only 157 entries so far. Is this an “intention to deceive authors and readers”?
The most recent issue appears as of “Epub 2014 Apr 6”, the first one as “Epub 2009 Jul 2”, so the company basically publishing 2-3 papers per month.
The Pubmed Analyzer are not very informative here. The whole “Journal of Allergy” has accumulated only 135 citations in the past 5 years (not an impressive figure as I have authored more than a dozen single papers that have received all more citations than the whole journal).
The extreme low citation rate and the missing impact factor may not be taken as an indicator that all papers are of poor quality but raises serious doubts.
The next question therefore is: Does the journal run a state of the art review process? The website list the following 24 scientists on the review board:
William E. Berger, University of California, Irvine, USA
Kurt Blaser, Universität Zürich, Switzerland
Eugene R. Bleecker, Wake Forest University, USA
Jan de Monchy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Frank JP Hoebers, MAASTRO Clinic, The Netherlands
Stephen T. Holgate, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
S. L. Johnston, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Young J. Juhn, Mayo Clinic, USA
Alan P. Knutsen, Saint Louis University, USA
Marek L. Kowalski, Medical University of Lodz, Poland
Ting Fan Leung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Clare M Lloyd, Imperial College London, United Kingdom
Redwan Moqbel, University of Manitoba, Canada
Desiderio Passali, University of Siena, Italy
Stephen P. Peters, Wake Forest University, USA
David G. Proud, University of Calgary, Canada
Fabienne Rancé, CHU Rangueil, France
Anuradha Ray, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Harald Renz, Philipps University of Marburg, Germany
Nima Rezaei, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran
Robert P. Schleimer, Northwestern University, USA
Massimo Triggiani, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy
Hugo Van Bever, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Garry M. Walsh, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom
Unfortunately this list is not identical to the editor names that are being listed directly on the PDFs ( eg the academic editor RM is not being listed at the web front). The above editor list includes indeed some well respected scientists but there are also others that show their Hindawi affiliation as their first hit on Google only. As I know 7 of the 24 persons, I decided to email them a short 6 item questionnaire via Surveymonkey.
When did you start your role as an editor?
2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
2. What is your role there?
Leading editor- supervising associate editors
Editor – assigning papers to reviewes, holding final decision Reviewer – reading and scoring papers
Sonstiges (bitte angeben)
3. How many papers have you been dealing with?
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or more
4. How many papers did you accept?
nearly none, about half, most, all
5. Are you being paid for that work?
no, yes, don’t want to tell
6. Is this a serious journal?
no, yes, don’t know
2 of my 24 emails bounced- some of the members of the editorial board are already retired.
19 did not respond. I believe they will show the same behaviour when being addressed by Hindawi.
1 editor sent me a personal email saying that he will resign from the board. It will be interesting to see when the list of editors will be changed, I already started a change detection.
3 editors answered the mini survey: Editor #1 started in 2010, has been dealing with more than 5 papers, accepted most, is not paid and believes it is a serious journal. Editor #2 started in 2009 with all other responses being identical. Editor #3 started also in 2009 but accepts only half of the papers.
It doesn’t come unexpected that these 3 motivated editors believe in a regular review process. I fear, however, that most editors either do not work for the journal (anymore) or are not motivated to spend even 3 minutes for the quality control of their work.
Without any transparent review process like that at the BMC journals, we can not judge from the outside if there is any review process. The names of the individual reviewers are unknown, and even contacting the authors would not help as they don’t have an interest to reveal that they get a paper published without any review process.
As a library one could order printed copy ( e.g. 20 articles per year for $395 ) although I could not locate any library in the world that has any subscription to this journal.
As an author I would be charged $800 per PDF. There seems to be no major text editing included in the publication process, what you get for your $800 is a quickly reformatted text, a PUBMED entry and a PDF sitting at a cloud server for an unknown storage time. My estimate for that service is $10.
Declan Butler developed a check list of serious publishers and journals. So we can now use that check list to judge this journal.
Check that the publisher provides full, verifiable contact information, including address, on the journal site. Be cautious of those that provide only web contact forms.
FAILED (PARTIALLY)
Check that a journal’s editorial board lists recognized experts with full affiliations. Contact some of them and ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.
FAILED (PARTIALLY)
Check that the journal prominently displays its policy for author fees.
PASSED
Be wary of e-mail invitations to submit to journals or to become editorial board members.
FAILED (SPAMMER)
Read some of the journal’s published articles and assess their quality. Contact past authors to ask about their experience.
FAILED (POOR QUALITY)
Check that a journal’s peer-review process is clearly described and try to confirm that a claimed impact factor is correct.
FAILED (NO IMPACT)
Find out whether the journal is a member of an industry association that vets its members, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org).
PASSED
Another set of guidelines for fake journals is available at Wikipedia. Complaints that are associated with predatory open-access publishing include
Accepting articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control, including hoax and nonsensical papers.
CAN NOT BE DECIDED YET
Notifying academics of article fees only after papers are accepted.
FALSE
Aggressively campaigning for academics to submit articles or serve on editorial boards.
TRUE
Listing academics as members of editorial boards without their permission, and not allowing academics to resign from editorial boards.
UNCLEAR
Appointing fake academics to editorial boards.
FALSE
Mimicking the name or web site style of more established journals.
TRUE
Verdict: The journal does not pass the Butler criteria of a scientific journal.
Comment: I do not see any major problem if an open access journal is publishing all manuscripts it receives, leaving the final decision of being good or bad science to a post-publication review process. I see, however, a major problem if any pre-publication review process is being assumed for Pubmed listed papers (and paid for) while being never documented in a transparent way.
Addendum: Change log editor page
How our personal data are being traded
Tom Brewster had an interesting idea: selling hsi own data. Why should anyone else make money with it?
When I decided to sell the secret details of my personal life, I had high hopes I’d get a willing buyer. It didn’t go well.
I had been curious to see if I could make money from my online information – something that data brokers across the world are doing every day; collecting it, combining it with others’ information and flogging it to marketing firms or anyone willing to pay. So I put myself on eBay.
The article is really interesting to read, yea, yea.
ChipMe
I am excited to be part of a new COST action So far only the EU description has been online while now also the brandnew website can be reached at chipme2.promoscience.com (twitter channel is @IS1303CHIPME).
From the official project description
The falling cost of genome sequencing is making genetic information more easily accessible to the ordinary citizen. The proliferation of different actors in COST countries and beyond, engaging with the generation and interpretation of genetic data represents a tremendous opportunity but also a new challenge for society. The public health care system will increasingly be asked to provide interpretation and counselling relating to genetic information that has been generated privately and to satisfy the legitimate curiosity of participants in large-scale population genetic research. Existing ethical and regulatory frameworks may not be suitable to allow an efficient and ethical meeting of demand and supply of genetic knowledge and health, as well as a virtuous interaction between public and private actors. This Action aims to improve the state of the art by creating a community of researchers and stakeholders and linking existing initiatives which bring critical expertise in bioethics, social studies of science and technology, genetic technology, information and communication technology, stakeholder deliberation, and patient centred initiatives (PCI).