Monthly Archive for May, 2009

Presentations

Useful guide to getting presentations right. I have to confess that a few slides at my last conference didn´t pass the squint test and several were bullet-only. But this is fixable, of course.

Fake tilt-shift photos

Given that you can do this online, I guessed that there must be instructions for doing it yourself.

Cooper’s Hill cheese rolling

Glad to see that English nuttiness has a following in Boston… a) the hill is really, really steep and b) what would have to possess you to do it nude?

My Phone

Useful Windows Mobile backup / sync service from Microsoft. Why not have your stuff backed up somewhere else, given that 200Mb is free?

Alpha Easter Eggs

Who knew that a computational engine could have a sense of humour? I liked the “Human discourse: additional functionality for this topic is under development” when asking it “Are you a robot?”. It was vaguely useful when trying to assess the impact of a rule change in Olympic Trench the other day (An angle-based rule became a distance and height based rule, so trigonometry told us we needed a table of arctangents, so you know).

Man flu still might or might not exist

More non-science. Shame; we were just looking for an excuse. Genetically-engineered mouse bacterial infection anyone?

Data blogs

One for future reading: 37 data-ish blogs. The topics are interesting, and I’m guessing the blogs will be as well. Can’t possibly read them all though, so some personal selection would be in order. Is there an opportunity for an aggregator/filter blog here?

Prepaid currency card

I’m not sure whether it is due to doing some work on pre-paid cards, but the Caxtonfx card seems like a very good idea for purchases abroad. Summary: you load money on the card and spend it abroad, without the FX fees you would normally attract. they also look to have about 1%-10% better exchange rates than other options. Seems like there must be a catch, but I can’t see it.

Rationale for electronic health records

There are some good examples of the benefits of shared electronic health records from the US. Why can’t we a) manage to avoid the data loss / sharing issues that everyone is convinced will occur here and b) why can’t we package up the benefits for the UK in similar language using stories?

The one that worked for me? Pre- and post-screening a GPs case list to trigger reminders, automate (e.g.) flu reporting, automate research material collection. I guess you could say: that’s the GP’s job, but why not create all this information as part of their working process, not force it on them in addition?

Wordpress plugins

Some useful additions here when I finally get round to getting a work site set up. Roll on June.