Interestingly, Ofcom have reserved sets of numbers within existing area codes. For London, numbers in the range 0207 946 0xxx can be used, so it’s possible for the Eastenders cast to phone their acquaintances within London and eagle-eyed pedants like me are less likely to notice the fake number. (I’d say friends rather than acquaintances, but from the little I’ve seen of the show that would be presumptuous.) A lot of other major cities have reserved numbers too. Failing that, there’s a fallback area code of 01632.

I’m especially impressed to see that there are reserved numbers for non-landline numbers, including mobiles, freephone numbers, and even premium rate numbers for TV characters who like sex chat lines and the like.

Good work, Ofcom.

One man, meanwhile, has been diligently collecting his personal computer-based data for over 20 years, right down to the number of keystrokes. The results are fascinating, and hint of the possibility of deep analysis in the future. The article is long, but well worth reading.

Stephen Wolfram Blog: The Personal Analytics of My Life

How many keystrokes do you type each day?

*At the time of writing I haven’t been updating this due to an insane workload.

Note that I don’t have any beef with Skype per se – I use their service all the time.

Original.

The people who installed this door thought were open-minded people, and decided that a bit of Braille could be useful to the blind community. Unfortunately, they put it in the one place where it would be least useful:

That’s right, they put it on the sign next to the door. It’s hard enough to blind people to navigate around and find doors as it is, and finding the correct door is frankly beyond my comprehension. But if I were in that situation, I’d guess that any indication of what lay beyond the door would be on the door itself, either in the middle or somewhere in the handle (or push-plate in this case). In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what the good people at StockSigns were expecting too. What neither I nor (I hope) StockSigns would expect of blind people is to flail around the wall near the door in the hope of finding some information that’s of use to them.

In another part of the same building, there’s a cafeteria. There are four or five signs beside the door of this nature, pointing the direction to various other campus facilities. Not only are the signs equally hard to find, but someone had the brilliant ruse of putting the condiment stand in front of them, thereby making absolutely certain the Braille is completely useless.

Good work from the university on thinking of getting signs to help the blind. Complete failure in using them as such.

As always, you can find it on the Linux Icons page.

A new book is about to be published with the title Homeopathy in Healthcare: Effectiveness, Appropriateness, Safety, Costs. From the title alone it’s hard to say whether it’s a load of rubbish (i.e. pro-homeopathy), or scientifically rigorous. Luckily, Amazon have provided the blurb from the back cover:

This volume includes the full Health Technology Assessment (HTA) report on effectiveness, appropriateness, safety and costs of homoeopathy in health care. The report was commissioned by the Swiss health authorities to inform decision-making on the further inclusion of homoeopathy in the list of services covered by statutory health insurance. Other studies carried out as part of the Swiss Complementary Medicine Evaluation Programme (PEK) caused a massive stir due to their schematic and exclusively quantitative (negative-)outcomes for homoeopathy. The present report, in contrast, offers a differentiated evaluation of the practice of homoeopathy in health care. It confirms homoeopathy as a valuable addition to the conventional medical landscape – a status it has been holding for a long time in practical health care.

There’s a few choice parts of the above text that tell us everything we need to know about this book. First, it claims to “[confirm] homoeopathy as a valuable addition to the conventional medical landscape”, which is at odds with study after study showing that homeopathy is no more effective a treatment than placebo. Of course, homeopathists seem incredibly reluctant to take note of those studies, so it’s hardly surprising that they should be ignored once more.

We can also look at the raison d’être for the book to understand the motivations of its authors. Apparently, it presents the results of an assessment commissioned in response to previous studies that consistently gave “(negative-)outcomes for homeopathy”. In essence, many previous studies found homeopathy to be ineffective; the commissioners here weren’t happy with those results, so set up a study of their own. A study being instigated with this mindset can only lead to a strong suspicion that its instigators were far from impartial regarding of the outcome they desired.

It also pays to look at why the authors decided that the previous studies did not meet expectations. Apparently, those studies were “exclusively quantitative” in nature. How this can be perceived as a negative trait is a mystery. If you’re going to assess whether a particular treatment is effective, you treat a number of people with that treatment, another set of people with a placebo, and count how many people got better. That’s the only way you can tell if a treatment is effective – by counting patients. And guess what? That’s what quantitative means – counting results and comparing them. Apparently, this wasn’t good enough for the authors of this book – simply working out who got better and who didn’t and whether or not the treatment had any effect on those patients is no way to assess the quality of homeopathic remedies.

Unfortunately, the snippet from the cover doesn’t state what methods the authors used to reach their conclusion, but since they dislike quantitative experiments on general principle it’s pretty certain that their approach is unlikely to impress the more rigorous scientists in the healthcare profession. For the sake of the Swiss public, let’s just hope the people holding the reins of their healthcare feel the same way.

(Image taken from Hirotoshi’s DeviantArt page.)