Here is a Storify collecting the online conversations from the, “The Dark Art of Dark

We are extremely grateful for the generous support of our sponsors; SpotOn London would not be

In true adherence to the age old phrase 'let them eat cake' and its traditional application to the under-funded and under-fed masses, for SpotOn London cakes were duly provided much to the enjoyment of the delegates. Since this act generated its own hashtag, it also deserves a Story...

We want to make sure we have collected all of the conversations around this year’s

“Buckle up – we’re going to start with some physics” Our keynote at this year’s

What do you need to put together a successful public campaign about science issues? This

At this year’s SpotOn London, one of the most popular and widely tweeted sessions organised

TORONTO, ON — The G20 Research Group at the University of Toronto and the International Organisations Research Institute of National Research University Higher School of Economics (IORI HSE) presented their seventh G20 interim compliance report. At the halfway point between the St. Petersburg Summit in September 2013 and the Brisbane Summit in November 2014, the […]

TORONTO, ON — Media are invited to attend the official groundbreaking of the state-of-the-art, $54-million Jackman Law Building at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law on June 4, 2013, at 4 pm. This spectacular new facility will house spacious, modern, environmentally friendly classrooms, offices and collaborative areas for Canada’s pre-eminent law school. Please join […]

TORONTO, ON – The official countdown to back to school has begun. This September, U of T’s three campuses will come alive as new and returning students participate in orientation activities, attend their first day of classes and move into residence. Here are a few important dates to remember: August 15 • UTSC Green Path […]

Recruiter.com's new 2013 Recruiting Technology Trends Report is available today for free, with no registration required to download. This 29 page report offers HR and recruiting practitioners insight into the major tech trends for the year, and offers useful recruiting advice as well. This exclusive report is loaded with smart advice and intelligent commentary to keep you on the leading edge of our industry. Inside ...

 Bookings are now live for our Cineschool festival 2013 - find out what is playing near you

Film Education's Thinking Film, Thinking History: The Holocaust resource pack has been nominated in the 2013 Learning on Screen Awards

The latest edition of our Teaching Trailers resource for secondary schools is now available. Suitable for media, film and English students aged 11-19

This year, Cineschool offered young people a chance to hear from the directors of films screened in the festival. View the series of interviews on the Cineschool site.

The final eight entries to our student production competition are now on the Be Creative site. Winners, runners up and commended entries will be revealed after the Easter break!

Food Processing Suppliers Association attributes the success to work with its strategic partner Messe Düsseldorf.

It’s a brand new year. Did you resolve to be healthier at the start of the New Year? Perhaps your goal is to improve yourself in some way or to put aside bad habits that you may have picked up in the last year. Add one more resolution to your list - resolve to drive safe.

Forget the hype! A panel of working architects share their insight into the trends and technologies that will have the greatest impact on their work in 2013.

The panel of working architects discusses the trends, technologies, and other aspects of enterprise IT that will lose steam in 2013.

The panel of working architects discusses how the evolution of enterprise IT is profoundly reshaping the IT architecture profession.

CLICK TO PLAY J Class - St. Barths Bucket 2013. Five magnificent and gigantic J Class sloops race in the St. Barths Bucket Regatta. Beautifully photographed by Onne van der Wal and edited by Halsey Fulton with on boat, boat-to-boat, crew comments, and aerials. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV. Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

CLICK TO PLAY J Class - St. Barths Bucket 2013. Five magnificent and gigantic J Class sloops race in the St. Barths Bucket Regatta. Beautifully photographed by Onne van der Wal and edited by Halsey Fulton with on boat, boat-to-boat, crew comments, and aerials. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV. Sailing Documentaries from $2.99. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

Preliminary agenda of Q2/13 November 2013 meeting
Source: Rapporteur
Study Questions: Q2/13

GoToMeetings, Cavoon, AdobeConnect and Audio bridges during the SG17 meeting (17 - 26 April 2013)
Source: TSB
Study Questions: QALL/17

GoToMeetings, Cavoon, AdobeConnect and Audio bridges during the SG17 meeting (26 August - 4 September 2013)
Source: TSB
Study Questions: QALL/17

Ojalá se pudiera predecir con seguridad que un cometa vaya a aparecer por el cielo y convertirse en un verdadero espectáculo. Por más que llevemos unos cuantos años sin un Gran Cometa, a los aficionados a la astronomía no se nos pasan nunca las ganas. Y parece que 2013 puede ser ese año que se recordará en el futuro. Claro que al final podría pasar como en 2011 con el cometa Elenin. Los cometas son así, potencialmente impredecibles, aunque siempre apasionantes. Abran la agenda de 2013 que les acaban de regalar y apunten fechas, sobre todo a finales de año con el cometa ISON. O en primavera con el cometa PanSTARRS. Quién sabe...

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Destine Literare, August 2013: In Memory of Ninos Aho

Assyrian Aid Society at the United Nations, May 2013

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,600 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people. Click here to […]

New Software and Curriculum Provides Next Generation of Design Leaders with a Career Advantage

Latest Release of Leading 3D Design Solution Enables Faster Model Creation, Optimized Performance, Enhanced Collaboration

Keynote sessions will inspire attendees to “Design Without Limits”

Prepares Students for the Real World: New 3D Design Application and Curriculum

Title: Health Highlights: Aug. 30, 2013
Category: Health News
Created: 8/30/2013 9:35:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/30/2013 12:00:00 AM

Title: Health Highlights: Aug. 29, 2013
Category: Health News
Created: 8/29/2013 12:35:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 8/30/2013 12:00:00 AM

Looking back over the last 40 years at FDA (as I have), there are three characteristics that create a more progressive environment at the agency: continuity of leadership, presidential support, and increased funding. For FDA in 2013 (as the saying goes): 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. In particular, medical innovation seems poised to flourish in an FDA environment where there is continuity of policy and leadership, instead of a new team learning the ropes. I explore this and other themes in the latest issue of Pharmaphorum.com. You can read my thoughts at: http://www.pharmaphorum.com/2013/01/29/fda-post-election-continuity-and-progress-likely-to-mark-2013/.

FDA is the only federal agency that touches the lives of every American several times every day. Despite this, FDA will probably not be mentioned when President Obama delivers his State of the Union (SOTU) address to Congress on February 12. Instead, FDA Matters provides its third annual “State of the FDA.” As reflected in last week’s column, I think that FDA did well in 2012. And 2013 is very promising. Potential funding cutbacks are the primary impediment to future successes.

Even by the already-painfully-embarrassingly-low standards of clinical trial enrollment in general, patient enrollment in cancer clinical trials is slow. Horribly slow. In many cancer trials, randomizing one patient every three or four months isn't bad at all – in fact, it's par for the course. The most
commonly-cited number is that only 3% of cancer patients participate in a trial – and although exact details of how that number is measured are remarkably difficult to pin down, it certainly can't be too far from reality.

Ultimately, the cost of slow enrollment is borne almost entirely by patients; their payment takes the form of fewer new therapies and less evidence to support their treatment decisions.

So when a couple dozen thousand of the world's top oncologists fly into Chicago to meet, you'd figure that improving accrual would be high on everyone’s agenda. You can't run your trial without patients, after all.

But every year, the annual ASCO meeting underdelivers in new ideas for getting more patients into trials. I suppose this a consequence of ASCO's members-only focus: getting the oncologists themselves to address patient accrual is a bit like asking NASCAR drivers to tackle the problems of aerodynamics, engine design, and fuel chemistry.

Nonetheless, every year, a few brave souls do try. Here is a quick rundown of accrual-related abstracts at this year’s meeting, conveniently sorted into 3 logical categories:

1. As Lord Kelvin may or may not have said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”

• Abstract e15572: Inadequate data availability on clinical trial accrual and its effect on progress in cancer research

Probably the most sensible of this year's crop, because rather than trying to make something out of nothing, the authors measure exactly how pervasive the nothing is. Specifically, they attempt to obtain fairly basic patient accrual data for the last three years' worth of clinical trials in kidney cancer. Out of 108 trials identified, they managed to get – via search and direct inquiries with the trial sponsors – basic accrual data for only 43 (40%).

That certainly qualifies as “terrible”, though the authors content themselves with “poor”.

Interestingly, exactly zero of the 32 industry-sponsored trials responded to the authors' initial survey. This fits with my impression that pharma companies continue to think of accrual data as proprietary, though what sort of business advantage it gives them is unclear. Any one company will have only run a small fraction of these studies, greatly limiting their ability to draw anything resembling a valid conclusion.

• Abstract TPS6645: Predictors of accrual success for cooperative group trials: The Cancer and Leukemia Group B (Alliance) experience

CALGB investigators look at 110 trials over the past 10 years to see if they can identify any predictive markers of successful enrollment. Unfortunately, the trials themselves are pretty heterogeneous (accrual periods ranged from 6 months to 8.8 years), so finding a consistent marker for successful trials would seem unlikely.

And, in fact, none of the usual suspects (e.g., startup time, disease prevalence) appears to have been significant. The exception was provision of medication by the study, which was positively associated with successful enrollment.

The major limitation with this study, apart from the variability of trials measured, is in its definition of “successful”, which is simply the total number of planned enrolled patients. Under both of their definitions, a slow-enrolling trial that drags on for years before finally reaching its goal is successful, whereas if that same trial had been stopped early it is counted as unsuccessful. While that sometimes may be the case, it's easy to imagine situations where allowing a slow trial to drag on is a painful waste of resources – especially if results are delayed enough to bring their relevance into question.

Even worse, though, is that a trial’s enrollment goal is itself a prediction. The trial steering committee determines how many sites, and what resources, will be needed to hit the number needed for analysis. So in the end, this study is attempting to identify predictors of successful predictions, and there is no reason to believe that the initial enrollment predictions were made with any consistent methodology.

2. If you don't know, maybe ask somebody?

• Abstract 8592: Strategies to overcome barriers to accrual (BtA) to NCI-sponsored clinical trials: A project of the NCI-Myeloma Steering Committee Accrual Working Group (NCI-MYSC AWG)
  
• Abstract 1596: Rapid online feedback to improve clinical trial accrual: CODEL anaplastic glioma (AG) (NCCTG/Alliance N0577) as a model

With these two abstracts we celebrate and continue the time-honored tradition of alchemy, whereby we transmute base opinion into golden data. The magic number appears to be 100: if you've got 3 digits' worth of doctors telling you how they feel, that must be worth something.

In the first abstract, a working group is formed to identify and vote on the major barriers to accrual in oncology trials. Then – and this is where the magic happens – that same group is asked to identify and vote on possible ways to overcome those barriers.

In the second, a diverse assortment of community oncologists were given an online survey to provide feedback on the design of a phase 3 trial in light of recent new data. The abstract doesn't specify who was initially sent the survey, so we cannot tell response rate, or compare survey responders to the general population (I'll take a wild guess and go with “massive response bias”).

Market research is sometimes useful. But what cancer clinical trial do not need right now are more surveys are working groups. The “strategies” listed in the first abstract are part of the same cluster of ideas that have been on the table for years now, with no appreciable increase in trial accrual.

3. The obligatory “What the What?” abstract

• Abstract 6564: Minority accrual on a prospective study targeting a diverse U.S. breast cancer population: An analysis of Wake Forest CCOP research base protocol 97609

The force with which my head hit my desk after reading this abstract made me concerned that it had left permanent scarring.

If this had been re-titled “Poor Measurement of Accrual Factors Leads to Inaccurate Accrual Reporting”, would it still have been accepted for this year’s meeting? That's certainly a more accurate title.

Let’s review: a trial intends to enroll both white and minority patients. Whites enroll much faster, leading to a period where only minority patients are recruited. Then, according to the authors, “an almost 4-fold increase in minority accrual raises question of accrual disparity.” So, sites will only recruit minority patients when they have no choice?

But wait: the number of sites wasn't the same during the two periods, and start-up times were staggered. Adjusting for actual site time, the average minority accrual rate was 0.60 patients/site/month in the first part and 0.56 in the second. So the apparent 4-fold increase was entirely an artifact of bad math.

This would be horribly embarrassing were it not for the fact that bad math seems to be endemic in clinical trial enrollment. Failing to adjust for start-up time and number of sites is so routine that not doing it is grounds for a presentation.

The bottom line

What we need now is to rigorously (and prospectively) compare and measure accrual interventions. We have lots of candidate ideas, and there is no need for more retrospective studies, working groups, or opinion polls to speculate on which ones will work best.  Where possible, accrual interventions should themselves be randomized to minimize confounding variables which prevent accurate assessment. Data needs to be uniformly and completely collected. In other words, the standards that we already use for clinical trials need to be applied to the enrollment measures we use to engage patients to participate in those trials.

This is not an optional consideration. It is an ethical obligation we have to cancer patients: we need to assure that we are doing all we can to maximize the rate at which we generate new evidence and test new therapies.

[Image credit: Logarithmic turtle accrual rates courtesy of Flikr user joleson.]

Oklahoma Tornado Update

So it's here. School Report News Day 2013 is upon us - and about 1,000 schools are due to take part, making the news that matters to them.

They will appear across BBC News - on TV, radio and online and on regional news programmes.

The project is now in its seventh year, and is bigger than ever. School reporters are in Canterbury to witness the enthronement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, and we also return to the Olympic Park in London to examine the legacy from the 2012 games. And there's more - the BBC School Report website has full details of the range of topics being covered.

It is all a far cry from when we began. A small team started School Report with the aim of giving teenagers the opportunity to make the news they thought mattered. Giving them hours of BBC airtime was nerve-wracking, but it proved to be a success.

In that first year - 2007 - we worked with 12- and 13-year-olds in 120 schools. What I most remember from that year is seeing school reporters on the Six O'Clock News and thinking that this partnership between schools and the BBC had developed into something bigger than we ever thought it could be.

Fast-forward to 2013 and we are able to reach even further, both in geographical terms and into the BBC's output. We'll be broadcasting live from Radio Foyle in Londonderry, and taking over the flagship Radio 4 programme Woman's Hour.

There will also be a dedicated School Report Live channel accessible through the Red Button. We'll be updating a live news feed on our website and our @BBCSchoolReport Twitter feed throughout the day, so please follow what our school reporters are doing and let us know what you think.

Helen Shreeve is editor of BBC News School Report.

Friday’s 5.07 billion Australian dollar (US$5.3 billion) ports deal has set several milestones.

[France] : uniFrance films, [2015]

Suneet Singh Tuli: creator of India's groundbreaking £25 Aakash tablet computer. The entry-level model of the Aakash budget tablet, which is revolutionising education in the developing world, should be available to buy online in the UK for £29.99 by the end of the year.

Companies that took on lease or bought amphibian aircraft either closed down or went bankrupt as they counldn’t start service