The only issue I faced is that I’m collecting photos from my camera and my phone: they both use different naming conventions. So when I look at my photos, I first have all the photos from my phone in chronological order then I am forced to go back to the beginning of the event and look at all the photos from my camera (again in chronological order).

The solution I applied is to take into account the EXIF tag concerning the date/time each photo was taken in order to rename the file accordingly. For that I use exiv2:

exiv2 -r'%Y%m%d-%H%M_:basename:' rename $(ls)

The result are names like: 20110515-1814_IMG_3704.JPG. This is easily sorted. Provided my phone and my camera date/time settings are approximately synchronised, it solves the issue mentioned before.

Now not all pictures are rotated. Most file managers and photo editing software take care of that and show you corrected photo if needed (Nautilus and Gimp do that at least). But some software do not take that into account (I think of Piwigo for instance). Here I use jhead with the following command:

jhead -ft -autorot *.JPG

Now in order to get some photos out of the computer,

• I just use a regular USB key to give the photo shop and print some photos ;
• I use a simple FTP client to upload some photos to our private photo gallery ;
• I use Postr (previously mentioned here) to upload some photos to my Flickr gallery ;
• I finally sometimes use the Picasa web interface to upload a few pictures there.

And you, how are you managing your photos?

P.S. By the way, I recently discovered a nice tip to transform all spaces in file names by underscores (or any other character):

rename ' ' '_' *

Out of curiosity, I was looking for mathematical models for the description of the epidemiology of epilepsy. But unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything. Probably because epilepsy is not an infectious disease for which tentative mathematical models have more predictive power (in terms of the population scale and time scale). The epidemiology of noninfectious diseases is primarily a study of risk factors associated with the chance of developing the disease. Nothing very fancy for a mathemarical model! (But if you find something, feel free to share! Thanks in advance!)

According to Wikipedia, the next World [Infectious Disease] Day is on APril 25th (malaria).

So today is just Valentine’s Day

Following my previous post on Jamie Oliver and the top 15 causes of death in the USA, I started to collect similar data from other countries. Linking this to cancers, the annual statistics on cancers in Belgium can be found on the Belgian Cancer Registry. The latest numbers are however from 2006. Here are the top 15 cancers in Belgium in 2006 (all sexes and regions mixed):

It’s interesting to note a few things:

• These figures represent cases of cancer and not deaths by cancer. Note also that prostate cancer is in third position but only concerns males.
• The latests data is from 2006. The website doesn’t seem to be updated since 2008 (and 2008 seems to be the year when data from 2006 are available ; if we follow the 2-years-gap logic, I guess the data from 2009 are available somewhere but not on this website)
• Data accessibility seems to be average. Data is there in Excel format (and PDF which is pretty useless if you want to reuse the data). On one side, these Excel files can be opened by almost every office suite. On the other side, some open format would have been preferred. And some direct interaction with the data on the website is now the norm (ok, I just wrote it doesn’t seem to be updated since 2008)
• The classification is quite good since it uses the “Classification Internationale des Maladies” which is the “International Classification of Diseases” in English better known as ICD-10 (online).

Btw, it is also featuring David McCandless whose work was already shown here before. Re-

This year, I wish you some wonderful holidays (under the snow for those in Northern Europe) and a Merry Christmas with again a 12 days of Christmas song. This time, it’s from Straight No Chaser Enjoy!

Note: this video is said to be available until January 16, 2011. It may not appear above after this date.

I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

Although I have a child and I’m obviously interested in his idea, I was also interested in the simple bar chart depicting the leading causes of death in the USA. In the tiny Flash video, the text is unfortunately barely legible and I was interested in knowing where he got his data from.

The answer is really easy: the leading causes of death in the USA are compiled every year by the (American) National Center for Health Statistics and the results are available on their FastStats website. So, for 2007 (the latest results at the time of writing), the 15 leading causes of death in the USA are (ordered by decreasing number of cases):

The exact ICD-10 codes are in this report ; you can find their exact meaning here. Causes with an asterisk are related to food intake, according to Jamie Oliver.

Now you have the numbers, the origin of the data and the methodology used to collect these data. You can watch the presentation:

You’ll find a critique of Jamie Oliver’s talk by Presentation Zen.