Status-Q

I'm about half-way through Ben Goldacre's splendid book 'Bad Science', which talks about clinical trials, homeopathy, the subtleties of the placebo effect, the supposed benefits of antioxidants, and a range of other topics, and does so in a most enjoyable way. He exposes some of the real science, and some of the nonsense, behind what is reported in the media.

Ben is a doctor who works for the NHS, has a column in The Guardian, and a web site at badscience.net. To get a feel for his work, have a look at his analysis of some recent feel-good reports in the papers and, worryingly, in Parliament. He begins:

""Seven hundred British troops seized four Taliban narcotics factories containing £50m of drugs"" said the Guardian on Wednesday. ""Troops recovered more than 400kg of raw opium in one drug factory and nearly 800kg of heroin in another."" Lordy that is good. In the Telegraph, British forces had seized ""£50 million of heroin and killed at least 20 Taliban fighters in a daring raid that dealt a significant blow to the insurgents in Afghanistan."" Everyone carried the good news. ""John Hutton, defence secretary, said the seizure of £50m of narcotics would 'starve the Taliban of funding preventing the proliferation of drugs and terror in the UK'."" Well.

Amazon have just released the Kindle software for the iPhone/iTouch. It's only available to US customers, but I have a US credit card so was able to download it. This means I can now get any of 240,000 books on my iPod, within a few seconds.

And the reading experience is pretty good: there's not much text visible at once in the standard font size, but a slight swipe of thumb or finger is all that's needed to turn the page. Mmm. This could prove expensive.

No prizes for guessing which book I downloaded first, though! (Kindle version)

Nice quote from Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science:

But these are just stories, and the plural of anecdote is not data.

If you're like most normal people, you've probably never heard of 'digital signage'. My family, certainly, looked at me in a puzzled but caring way when I first told them that was what I was doing. Digital signage, in general, is the name for systems that drive those big, expensive, boring displays in airports that tell you that your flight is delayed by an hour and a half. And part of the reason we started Camvine is because we believed that a system for distributing dynamic, glowing pictures to dozens of screens didn't have to be big, complex, boring and expensive... it could be small, easy, fun and affordable.

Perhaps this is why, as we started to develop an API which would allow our CODA system to integrate with other things, we didn't immediately focus on controlling it through a strategic leveraging of your enterprise-wide SAP installation. Instead we focused on bunny rabbits.

So here is our new experimental user interface for controlling your digital signage system. It reminds me a bit of Monty Python.

TIM: There! ARTHUR: What, behind the rabbit? TIM: It is the rabbit.

You can read more about it on Michael's blog and on the Camvine site.

The traditional concept of a 2D home page is so 2008....

You can get the beta here... thanks to Michael for the link.

Excitement here last week... the first copies of Rose's next book arrived on Friday.

The UK launch is in 10 days' time and it's available to pre-order from Amazon.co.uk or your local bookshop. American readers can also pre-order it but they will need to wait a few more months, unless they get it from over here...

Stick it on your iPod for your next train journey. Most inspiring.

A simple but great idea: turn your phone into a magnifying glass.

Sadly, it only works on the Nokia N95, N82 and E90. Now, if I could only find that tiny little icon that starts it up...