Archive for the ‘English’ Category

Fully Psychedelic

Friday, June 5th, 2015

According to mashable.com, this photo posted to social media Thursday shows a woman stripping off the black garb required by the Islamic State to reveal a colorful dress underneath.

It Begins With Emotion

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015

Change isn’t a plan.

It’s not a list of things to do.

It isn’t logical.

Change is a series of emotions.

It starts in your heart, when you feel the need to go after something better.

Change is the fear things won’t work out. The frustration when they start to fall apart, the doubt that creeps in when you start to wonder if you made the right choice.

Change is the feeling that, no, dammit, I’ve got to see this though.

In the end, change is the profound feeling of satisfaction that you get from walking through the fire and coming out the other side.

Perhaps not entirely unscathed, but perhaps all the better for the scars.

Image and text by @gapingvoid

The UX Designer Paradox

Monday, June 1st, 2015

Where user experience designers start and where they finish are rarely the same place. However, as long as they keep the user in their considerations and iterations, UXers can at least ensure they end up in the right place.


A comic by Brady Bonus (@bradybonus)

When you do work that matters…

Sunday, May 24th, 2015

When you do work that matters, the crowd will call you a fool.

If you do something remarkable, something new and something important, not everyone will understand it (at first). Your work is for someone, not everyone.

Unless you’re surrounded only by someones, you will almost certainly encounter everyone. And when you do, they will jeer.

That’s how you’ll know you might be onto something.

From Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog) on May 24, 2015

Cartoons

Sunday, May 24th, 2015

From The New Yorker, May 25, 2015 issue.


You can’t list your iPhone as your primary-care physician.

 


That’s what I love about social media. I can have connections with thousands of people and yet still be completely isolated and alone.

 


The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience.

Elyx by YAK sailing the Mediterranean sea

Saturday, May 23rd, 2015

Elyx by YAK (@ElyxYak)

Life is Beautiful

Thursday, May 14th, 2015

Our old buddy, Steve Clayton, GM, Microsoft storytelling, sends out a super cool private email every Friday-ish to friends and family (he’ll add you if you email him here – we’re all family, right ;) .

Last Friday, Steve linked to a great post.

Life advice from a young tech entrepreneur turning 30.

I wish I had my s**t together like Sam does at 30.

The gist of the post is, stay out of your comfort zone at work, and in it as much as you possibly can with your family.

Coming up in the age of the internet and social, even more so.

Sam pretty much nailed the whole work/life thing.

Well worth the read. :)

Image and text by @gapingvoid

Managing Oneself

Saturday, May 2nd, 2015

Sketched by Sacha Chua

We are all mortal until…

Monday, April 13th, 2015

A prototype is worth a thousand meetings

Saturday, April 11th, 2015

Motto on the wall at +1stbuild at the #HacktheHome hackathon, picture by Dustin Kirkland (@dustinkirkland)

Prime Factorization

Friday, April 10th, 2015

In a blog post, John Graham-Cumming (@jgrahamc) explains how to draw a nice visual of the 100 first integers when factorized.

Change everything from the ground up – except for…

Wednesday, April 8th, 2015

Welcome to the human condition: we want everything to change; yet we still want to be able to carry the old baggage around with us.

i.e. We say we want to change everything from the ground up – except for all the old habits that dominate our lives completely.

St. Augustine had a prayer about this: “O Lord, make me chaste. Just not yet.”

Any leader in business is going to run into this with his or her people, from the beginning, every day, forever and ever. It isn’t ever going away.

It’s like the Higgs Field of humanity; it’s just there.

Image and text by @gapingvoid

Against the elements

Wednesday, March 25th, 2015

Image from Dominic Roy at National Geographic.

This great picture is both funny and worrying. The posture of this owl fighting against the wind seems to me like the perfect evocation of the usual entrepreneur in France.

Apple Engineer Talks about the New 2015 Macbook

Thursday, March 12th, 2015

Beyond Transactions

Friday, February 13th, 2015

There’s what you do. And then there’s who you are.

Remembering this is terribly important. Maybe the most important thing of all.

This image for Zappos is about that transition, about bringing larger meaning to the work they do.

Because if you don’t have that big picture, it makes it hard to get excited about the day to day.

But if you do – if you have that deep sense of purpose – work becomes joy.

Image and text by @gapingvoid

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, take a look at the sky…

Thursday, February 12th, 2015

A street art worth 100 poems by Ernest Zacharevic.

How to prevent overdiagnosis

Thursday, February 12th, 2015

A recent article by the title How to Prevent Overdiagnosis, published in Swiss Medical Weekly, accurately sums up the issues about overdiagnosis.

Overdiagnosis, as defined in the summary is the diagnosis of an abnormality that is not associated with a substantial health hazard and that patients have no benefit to be aware of.

In their conclusion, the authors, mainly from the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (IUMSP), Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland, provide a perfectly concise 5 bullet points overview of overdiagnosis issues:

  1. Overdiagnosis is mainly the consequence of a technology-driven medicine that aims to improve patient outcomes by detecting disease in its earliest form.
  2. Overdiagnosis is of growing relevance in population dominated by chronic conditions having long pre-clinical stage.
  3. Although early detection has been shown to be beneficial for several conditions, it also increases the probability of finding insignificant abnormalities, whose treatment is not associated with any benefit but can harm the patient.
  4. Moreover, overdiagnosis diverts healthcare professionals from caring about other health issues and generates costs.
  5. The increase in healthcare costs, the over- and underutilisation of some care, the debates about the effectiveness of several screening, and the growing role of patients in medical decisions require concern about overdiagnosis.

22 Things Amiss in Medicine Today

Sunday, January 25th, 2015

A column from Sep 6, 2011 by Dr. George Lundberg and Dr. Clifton Meador about a set of 22 false assumptions, practice failures, and everyday clinical errors that they believe are common in modern medical practice:

  1. Lack of appreciation of the phenomenon of physician persuasion and its hidden power. The placebo effect is scientific, potent, and worthy of use.
  2. Lack of understanding of the power of prevalence or pretest probability in the diagnostic process, leading to frequent false positives and “overdiagnosis” of nonexistent diseases.
  3. Lack of understanding that many disease processes are gradual and progressive — not "on or off" signals; analog and not digital. This leads to great confusion about when to diagnose and treat. For example, at what percent stenosis is an artery "diseased" and in need of treatment?
  4. Incorrect assignment of reductions in death rates and increasing life expectancy to curative medicine rather than to preventive efforts.
  5. Medicine has a tendency to remove many physicians from relying on direct experience and personal observations and replace this with a reliance on indirect information. This leads to an over-reliance on lab and imaging findings by both patients and doctors.
  6. Lack of long-term clinical outcome data, stratified by gender and age, leading to an inability to obtain a truly informed consent.
  7. The mind-body dichotomy, present since René Descartes in the 1600s, holds erroneously that the mind and body are completely separated. This false separation leads us to believe that the lack of evidence for disease in the body of a symptomatic patient confers a diagnosis of mental disease: Thus the non-helpful statement to the patient, "Don’t worry, it’s all in your head."
  8. Lack of appreciation for what is scientifically established versus what is still in the thought stage of development.
  9. A failure of medicine to recognize what it can effectively treat and what it cannot, and admitting that some diseases have no effective treatment.
  10. Failure to recognize that the fields of human biology and clinical medicine overlap but do not coexist. Schools of medicine are becoming more schools of human biology and less schools of clinical medicine.
  11. Absence of a test that will distinguish well from sick. The lack of a test leads to the erroneous assumption of sickness as the rule of thumb for almost all patients.
  12. Lack of a blood or urine test that can measure mental status. Dementia can be missed in up to 20% of admissions to hospitals.
  13. Lack of full understanding of the intense secondary gain of illness.
  14. Fallacy of the first lesion found being assigned importance, whether or not it is the cause of the symptoms.
  15. Fallacy of any lesion found being sufficient to explain symptoms.
  16. Failure to stop a drug or treatment when it is not helping.
  17. Failure to identify what abnormality or test result is to be followed to determine success or not, when someone is being treated.
  18. Failure to look for little signs of improvement and stick with the treatment rather than change it too soon.
  19. Failure to know a patient well enough to know what their wishes are in terminal or hopeless situations.
  20. Failure to recognize and advise the family when a condition or situation is futile and should move to palliation and comfort care.
  21. Failure to keep the number of drugs to a minimum.
  22. And, number 22, perhaps the most important to today’s society:

  23. An exaggerated and unfounded fear of malpractice suits with abdication of professional responsibility just to avoid any chance of being sued.

Many of the false assumptions listed here can be found in Clifton Meador’s book "A Little Book of Doctors’ Rules" published in 1992 by Hanley & Belfus, out of print, but still available at Amazon.

#JeSuisCharlie #EtTaSoeurElleBatLePavé?

Sunday, January 11th, 2015

Stupid…

Stupids…

Genealogy of the Black Swan Problem

Friday, January 2nd, 2015


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