Fortnightly Mailing

Using a mobile phone for disease diagnosis

The 17 May Economist has  a piece about how simple accessories can turn mobile phones into useful medical devices. The prompt for the article is work led by Dan Fletcher at the University of California. Here is an extract from the Telemicroscopy for Disease Diagnosis web site, with a picture of the prototype mobile phone microscope and an image of a blood sample taken with the device. (Seeing these pictures led me successfully to use some small binoculars as a telephoto lens for the camera on a phone.)

"The goal of this project is to bring modern diagnostic testing to remote regions cheaply and efficiently with telemicroscopy. The ability to capture images of, for example, malarial blood samples, infected skin, or ulcerous lesions, and then to send those images for remote diagnosis could drastically reduce both the cost and time of performing critical disease diagnosis – as well as provide early warning of outbreaks – in poverty stricken regions of the globe. In many developing countries with the greatest health needs, the infrastructure for cellular phones is expanding rapidly, opening the door for greater use of cell-phone-based healthcare devices. The project is actively developing a second-generation device for field testing in 2008."

 

What to advise a student about using the Web

Towards the end of April I got a call from a Harriet Swain, a freelance journalist who writes an advice column aimed at students for the Guardian Newspaper. What advice should students be getting about how to use the Web?

What I sent her was rather a rush job, and is in the continuation post below. For comparison purposes, here is Harriet's The art of being virtual.

Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?

Last September, just prior to Google switching to its own statistical machine translation system for all the language pairs it offers, I set up a crude comparison between the rules-based and statistical methods used at that time by Google for different language pairs. The crudity stemmed in part from my use of the "round trip" comparison method (defects outlined below), from the use of only one sample text, and from the inherent drawback of comparing translation methods across different language pairs, each of which presents different translation challenges.

Alan Becker's Animator vs Animation is not to be missed

Thanks to Julia Duggleby and Jan Leatherland for this link to a wonderful 2006 animation by Alan Becker.

Nothing is miscellaneous

Ring remover. A circular saw blade on a pair of pliers?  These pliers are for removing finger rings when their owners had gained too much weight.  The slim tongue of the lower jaw is slipped between the ring and finger.  The small circular saw blade is turned with the handle, while light pressure is applied. Source: Hawley Collection web site.

Ken Hawley, now in his 80s, ran a Sheffield tool shop for many years and has amassed a huge collection of edge-tools, hand tools, cutlery and measuring tools, tool catalogues etc, mainly from Sheffield, and now housed in a University of Sheffield building.

http://www.shef.ac.uk/hawley/index.html

When I visited my uncle in Uruguay in 1986 I took him some chisels bought from Ken, and with my uncle visiting Sheffield this week I was lucky enough to be shown the collection by Ken.

Ken expounded on (for example) the 5000 different types of butcher's knife that one Sheffield knife company used to produce, and the hundreds of different kinds of plough-blade. I learned about the process of forging a spade from a single T-shaped block of steel, about file cutting, about the skills of saw-straightening, and about the design of modern vibration-reduced hammers. I'd not realised that there is extensive re-use of the steel from old tools - for example saw-steel is good for spurs, or for wide flat blade production generally; old files make excellent knife blades.

The collections consists of an upstairs in which there are hundreds of boxes of tool catalogues and related printed material (was that a handwritten sign on the door to the catalogue-area saying "nothing is miscellaneous"?), a downstairs where there are shelves of hundreds of numbered cardboard boxes full of different types of hand tools, knives, files, drill-bits, artist's pallet knives etc, and racks of saws, scythes, sheep-shears etc, roughly organised by class. (I was tempted to call this post "Heidegger would have had a field day", given his interest in what qualifies a tool as a tool.) There are also two locked lorry containers on the carpark which are stuffed with a large quantity of as yet unsorted tools.

Ken Hawley seems to have the catalogue in his head, moving effortlessly between the shelves to grab a box of tools to illustrate a point. I was struck by the way that the meaning of an artefact like a tool is so dependent on either knowing how to use it, or by having someone on hand to explain its use, design, manufacturing process etc, and by the way that these old hand-made tools embody such a lot of tacit undocumented know-how on the part of the men and women who made them. (Is this the "meta-data of artefacts"? If yes, how can it be recorded? Here is a partial answer.)

Anyway, the main purpose of this piece is to say that if you are ever in Sheffield, and can arrange it, you should make a point of visiting the Hawley Collection. You'll not get a better example of an old-style categorisation and cataloguing challenge; alongside this the collection is intrinsically fascinating in its own right.

See also: The externalisation of meaning about David Weinberger's "Everything is miscellaneous".

What is a professor's body for?

You will find the answer between 10 and 12 minutes into this TED talk about creativity and the education system by Sir Ken Robinson.

With thanks to Nicky Ferguson for the link to the whole talk.

Baboon Metaphysics - the Evolution of the Social Mind

Photograph by Keena Seyfarth of baboons making a water crossing

Over Christmas I read Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth's Baboon Metaphysics - the Evolution of the Social Mind,  a wonderful long term field study of baboons in Botswana's Okavano Delta. I did not know that baboons make capable goat herds, successfully matching a couple of dozen kids to their mothers, with strong motivation to keep mother/kid pairs together; nor that a baboon named Jack the Signalman had a long and successful career in the late 1800s working the signals on the railways in Uitenhage between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, with an official employment number and a daily allocation of rations from the railway company.

These stories provide a backdrop to the book proper which works step by step from a description of baboon life to an analysis of baboon thinking, self-awareness, and motivation, based on complex observations and on experiments in the wild. (The experiments are well-described in Frans de Waal's review linked to from the bottom of this post.) 

Patent litigation haiku; and "steaming mounds of pleonastic arguments"

Inequitable Conduct

hid the piece of art
cheated the examiner
attorneys' fees paid

There are a few more of these on Michael Smith's Eastern District of Texas Federal Court Practice blog, where, on 20/11/2007, Smith also comments on the turn of phrase of Judge Ron Clark, who is presiding over the Blackboard Inc. v Desire2Learn patent infringement case:

"The parties in this case have, between them, filed 48 motions, responses and replies in less than 14 months, which, including attachments and exhibits, consists of no fewer than eleven thousand pages. They seem to share the misconception, popular in some circles, that motion practice exists to require federal judges to shovel through steaming mounds of pleonastic arguments in a Herculean effort to uncover a hidden gem of logic that will ineluctably compel a favorable ruling. Nothing could be further from the truth."

A tempting idea for Christmas

It is a pity that the small cheap device to jam your train-companion's mobile phone, described by Matt Rudd in jammer's revenge in the 18/11/2007 Sunday Times on-line, is not legal in the UK.

Thinking like a vegetable: how plants decide what to do

Terrific 1 hour talk [link to IPTV Archive] given in London on 24/10/2007 at the Royal Society by Ottoline Leyser, which explains, clearly and engagingly, how brainless plants process information about their environment, and use hormone signals to integrate information and regulate their behaviour.