bazaar

A bazaar that coincides with the pagan worship of materialism clouded in a shroud called love. Anyway, it is the most innovative one I have seen to date that resides in this obscure corner of the uni.





Also, notice the empty stalls? Saturday wat?? Didnt take yesterday bcs too many people milling about and also note the new open look outside LT 25/24? Nice huh? They also extended the prep room for LT24 for the jokers from Science Club (okok,... I was a member there too before).

summer cleaning

Department getting rid of stuff from today onwards, gearing towards the big revamp thats due anytime now. So the first part is getting rid of the old unwanted stuff. Old rotor heads and an old chest freezer today, and who knows what tomorrow.

Know thy reviewer

Nature 439, 642 (9 February 2006) doi:10.1038/439642b
Journal lays bare remarks from peer reviewers
Emma Marris

Abstract
Cloak of anonymity shed by new publication.

Editors of a journal launched this week are out to revolutionize peer review. By publishing signed reviews alongside papers, they hope to make the process more transparent and improve the quality of the articles. But although journal editors seem intrigued by the experiment, most say they'll take some persuading to change the traditional, anonymous system.
At Biology Direct, an open-access journal launched by BioMed Central on 6 February, manuscript editors and peer reviewers will, in effect, be merged into one editorial board. Prospective authors will approach board members and if three agree to review a paper, it will be accepted. Reviewers' comments will be signed and published with the final paper, along with responses by the author. An author has the right not to make suggested changes, but the suggestions will be there for anyone to see. An author who disagrees with the comments can retract the paper.
Several journals, including the BMJ (British Medical Journal) and the Medical Journal of Australia, have experimented with naming peer reviewers, but Biology Direct is going further by routinely posting those reviews as part of the paper.
"I like the direct relationship the author can have with a reviewer, and the transparency of the end result," says David Lipman, director of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information and one of the journal's lead editors. He believes readers will get a more nuanced picture of science.
"We don't have that artificial, black-and-white situation where, because it got through peer review, it is all fine," Lipman says. "It will be those interactions with the peer reviewers that make it interesting."
Responses to the idea have been positive. "I love the fact that David Lipman is doing this," says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "I have always felt that the only ethically sound system of review was one where everyone knew everyone's identities."
Diane Sullenberger, executive editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says she'll be watching Biology Direct with interest, although her journal will not open its peer-review system any time soon. "If there was evidence in the literature that open peer review really had a significant advantage over blind review I think we'd see more of it," she says.
Lipman says that the new journal's policies are likely to evolve. "It is an experiment," he says. "But I think the overall approach can't help but succeed. If we are really successful, the better journals will take what they think works from it."

Question

Dear Flaviguy,
Flaviguy has a question; there are supposedly 5 other authors for this blog, but only the sixth ever placed an entry. What happened to the rest? Do they actually exist? Flaviguy is getting tired of blogging to himself.


Yours whatever-ly,

Flaviguy

tar pau

If you were observant enough or maybe free enough to come along to the hospital these days, you would see the whole of the service block's flat roof like head thingy wrapped up in plastic, like when you tar pau food from the canteen. So "what's up?" you may ask. This entry serves to educate my dear readers on what the heck NUH is trying to do. And no, to dispel the myth, the building didn't turn religious and wore a turban.

Once upon a time, a short short time ago, in a hospital near near away, there was a block, whose name is Service Block. Now this block was not very old, it was young; if you can imagine some of the historical buildings that went back as far as the 1800's are still standing today. So it was that one day, a person with a name, who will remains nameless here, was walking along the corridor when suddenly he saw! Gosh! a piece of concrete reinforced with steel structures and granite! Falling down!

Actually he deduced that the piece of the roof fell down, because he was the jaga going on his rounds early one morning and found a slab of the concrete jungle on the floor. Sorry, must dramatise abit because blog readers ONLY want to read sensational stuff.

So anyway, the hospital people got very excited. They sat together (on different chairs of course) and figured that the main building that was more than 10 years older than Service block would come tumbling down soon. So everybody got involved. There was the 'Save our Roofs' campaign, the 'Sky's falling' sect, the usual 'it's the government's fault' propaganda, and the 'puzzled student'. I (an intellectual being of the highest order of consciousness) of course, hate to discriminate but would have to admit this one time, that I for a season before last week belonged to the last group.




So the hospital people called in lots of engineers who came to inspect the building and to patronise the Kopitiam there. They found no fault with the main building but their report on the food has not been archived. So the 'sky's falling' sect got extremely dissapointed with this turn of events. The engineers had a second report, especially for Service Block, this time it was a poor prognosis. The building had innate structural defects. Call it genetic, call it environmental: soemthign had to be done.
So that explains the huge amounts of plastic bags around the roof. But they dare not put up any BIG signboards (actually they didnt put up any small ones as well: see first pic) for fear that the vast majority of the (regular class) human population will become paranoid of the hospital. That's why the 'puzzled students' group who suddenly found their path to the staff canteen suddenly blocked remains puzzled to this day.

I hope you have been enlightened.

Fake fakes and Real fakes

Placebo Showdown
By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News2 February 2006

Not all placebos are created equal, according to a new study.

In a rare trial pitting two fake treatments against each other, researchers have found that a sham acupuncture technique provided more pain relief than a dummy pill. The two nontreatments also caused different "side effects."
Placebo effects have been reported with pills, injections, and even surgery. Previous research hinted that some treatments might elicit stronger placebo effects than others, but the idea hadn't been rigorously tested, says Ted Kaptchuk, the researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston who led the current study.
Kaptchuk and colleagues recruited 270 people with repetitive strain injuries (such as the aching arm that results from pushing a computer mouse around a desktop day after day). Half the volunteers took a cornstarch pill once a day; the rest received a fake acupuncture treatment twice a week. Both groups were told they would receive either a placebo or real treatment during the trial and that they could receive real treatment afterwards free of charge. The needles used in the procedure looked identical to real acupuncture needles, but the point retracted into a hollow shaft instead of penetrating the skin. The vast majority of people can't feel the difference between the sham procedure and the real deal, Kaptchuk says.
People in both groups reported less pain after two weeks of treatment, Kaptchuk and colleagues reveal in the 1 February issue of the British Medical Journal. But in the following weeks, those who continued with the sham acupuncture experienced greater pain relief than those who stuck with the bogus pills. Kaptchuk suspects that the increased doctor-patient interaction in the acupuncture group--or possibly the procedure's mystique--may account for the difference. "It tells us that the ritual matters in health care," he says. The team also found that patients in the two groups reported side effects similar to those they'd been told to expect, including pain during and after treatment in the acupuncture group and drowsiness and dry mouth in the pill group. "We had people [taking the pills] calling up, too groggy to get out of bed," Kaptchuk says. Three patients in the pill group even withdrew from the study due to side effects.
The work provides an interesting illustration of how patients' expectations influence the outcome of treatments, says Leora Swartzman, a psychologist at Western Ontario University in London, Canada. But George Lewith, a clinical researcher at the University of Southampton, U.K. says the sham acupuncture technique may not be sufficiently fake. Certain Japanese acupuncture techniques also involve light taps to the skin without penetration by needles, Lewith says. Kaptchuk counters that such techniques haven't been shown to have any physiological effect, and he sticks to his conclusion: There's a real difference between bogus treatments.