One of the better DC landscapes I’ve seen. And by a Serbian artist, no less. The painting hangs in the Residence of Serbia’s Ambassador to the United States, which just opened, and looks like it’ll be a nice venue for exhibits and gatherings.
Do you know about a horse named Jim? The one whose tetanus-contaminated serum was used to make diphtheria antitoxin that killed kids:
These failures in oversight led to the distribution of antitoxin that caused the death of 12 more children, which were highly publicized by newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer as part of his general opposition to the practice of vaccination.
There is a straight line from Jim to the creation of US FDA, in case you want to remove that particular Chesterton’s fence.
Bryan Vartabedian on the angry email:
The angry email is usually rooted in frustration over inefficiencies or some nagging problem that hasn’t been fixed. Ultimately, it’s about the fantasy of the willful imposition of change by the sender. […] The defining element of the angry email is that it’s ultimately regretted. Or it should be.
I’ve written thousands of angy emails in my head, a dozen or so on the computer, and sent zero to date. If there is a next one, I’ll write it in longhand.
One of the better DC landscapes I’ve seen. And by a Serbian artist, no less. The painting hangs in the Residence of Serbia’s Ambassador to the United States, which just opened, and looks like it’ll be a nice venue for exhibits and gatherings.
Seth Godin on the amateur presenter:
If you’re called on to give a talk or presentation, the biggest trap to avoid is the most common: Decide that you need to be just like a professional presenter, but not quite as good. Being a 7 out of 10 at professional presenting is a mistake. Better to stay home and send a memo.
This is exactly what happened last month at that medical conference. Colleagues, please stop.
I’ve been on bluesky’s wait list long enough for it to become irrelevant, so of course I received an invite code last night. If you want to see an empty profile that probably won’t see much use check out @miljko.bsky.social.
Our clinical trials course at UMBC is well under way, and we are getting some terrific questions from students. Here is one!
Q: Are outcomes surrogate endpoints or is there a distinction between the two?
The terms “outcome” and “endpoint” are not strictly defined and some people use them interchangeably. However:
It reminds me of the confusion between efficacy and effectivness, only it’s worse: there is no agreed-upon text that describes the distinction, so it is a really terminological free-for-all. Indeed, what I wrote above may end up not being true — caveat lector! As always, it is always best to ask people to clarify what they meant when they said this or that. Regardless, if someone tells you that “overall survival” (or, worse yet, “survival”) was the primary endpoint, it clearly can’t be the case. Endpoints need to be more specific than that.
Surrogate outcomes and surrogate endpoints are those which are stand-ins for what we actually care about. Here is a good video on surrogate endpoints in oncology.E.g. when we give chemotherapy to someone with cancer, we do it so that they would live longer and/or better. However, it is quicker and easier to measure if the tumor shrinks after chemotherapy (i.e. “responds” to treatment), and we believe that the tumor shrinking will lead to the patient living longer or better (which may not necessarily be the case!), so we use the response as a surrogate outcome for survival and quality of life (by how much did the tumor shrink? was it a complete or a partial response according to pre-specified criteria?). Study level surrogate endpoints would be the overall response rate, partial response rate, complete response rate, etc.
We have created so much confusion here that it is a small miracle we can communicate amongst ourselves at all.
Janice Kai Chen at the Washington Post on pigeons versus the internet:
At certain data volumes and distances, the pigeon is a quicker option for large swaths of rural America, where internet speeds can lag far behind the national average.
And not just rural America. As I write this from the nation’s capital, speedtest.net reports 24 Mbps up. Federal agencies should bring back pigeons for sending large files back and forth.
In my notes from Honolulu I downplayed how much better the food was there — for the price you pay — compared to what you can get back home.
Case in point: returning from Diamond Head (an easy trek, highly recommended) we took a Lyft ride back to our hotel. The driver, “L.J.”, turned out to be Ljubiša from Novi Sad, Serbia. Needless to say, we had a good conversation, which led to food, which let to us making a pit stop at “the best doughnut place on the island”. Selling Portuguese doughnuts, of all things.
The box, the interior, and the signage all screamed mid-century modern. Looking at when it was openned, it checks out.
I don’t know if they were the best on the island, but they were better than anything we’ve had in DC in our seven years here!
Nassim Taleb says it, and now James Fallows does to: predictions are worse than useless. Please pay attention to the worse than part.
Two blog posts of the old-school kind, as in people writing in depth about things they love:
And both out on the same day (I’m behind on my feeds!)