Are you being dumb on purpose? Why would you read my post and think I don't understand about anti-women violence in Islam? I said, as you appear to be hard of reading, that the problem is pervasive. Ie fixing on Islam is giving the rest of the world a free pass. Seems to me you're more interested in hating on Islam than sorting out violence against women. Which is unsurprising, but depressing nonetheless.

You know, I am absolutely disgusted by domestic violence, which is almost always men beating and killing women. But the plural of anecdote is not data, and plucking out a story about an abusive imam to make an anti-Muslim argument is an excellent way of blinding yourself to the true pervasiveness of this violence. Just look at the terrible story that emerged at the weekend about Nigella Lawson.

The developer was one of these three guys, I can't remember which one said it:
Barry Meade, co-founder Fireproof Studios
Professor Anthony Steed, co-founder Chirp
Max Whitby, co-founder & CEO Touch Press
They are hardly incompetents!
He was quite clear that there were about 50 handsets on which he needed to test Android apps to capture 90% of the market. The other 1450 is the long tail. He was also clear that irascible users with obscure handsets posting negative reviews because the app doesn't support their device well is something that has damaged the commercial success of quite a lot of apps. 50 handsets is a manageable number, but clearly is also a major PITA compared to 3 to 4 handsets for iOS.

I'm really not sure why you're arguing this point. It's well established that Android's flexibility has a downside of significantly more complexity for developers to manage. Tradeoffs are pretty fundamental to engineering, you really don't need to die in a ditch defending Android for making one.

I wasn't arguing the rights and wrongs of developers' decisions to go with either Android or iOS; I was asserting that many developers still do choose to go with iOS first. I think that's an observable and fairly inarguable fact. Perhaps it's changing, but for the moment it's certainly true. I can think of half a dozen "big" (ie significant, revenue-generating apps) that went iOS first -- Hailo, AddLee, many UK banking apps. I deliberately chose these as examples as they are free-to-download apps that still drive significant commercial value.

BTW, I think you made a very interesting assertion in your second section: "if you are trying to reach the maximum number of people with your app, I would suspect Android is already a clear winner". Developers of commercial software will be interested in reaching the maximum number for the minimum effort. That's the point about designing for 3 or 4 iOS devices vs 50+ Android models (out of 1500+ out there). I have heard developers say precisely this: they can build a nice Android app that breaks on someone's relatively obscure device and then they get bad reviews and sales fall off a cliff. It was on Evan Davis's excellent programme The Bottom Line (only available in the UK).

This irritated me enough to do a quick look for pubmed and Cochrane articles:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20088678

I'm going to quote from the Cochrane Review:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD005186.pub3/pdf
"Description of the condition In England, 8.2%of patients admitted to hospital develop healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) (Hospital Infection Society 2007). HAIs cause 5,000 deaths and cost £930 million annually (National Audit Office 1998). In the United States (US), an estimated 5% of patients develop HAIs, at a cost of 4.5 billion USD per year. This translates to an estimated two million cases of HAIs per annum, accounting for nearly 100,000 deaths (Klevens 2007). In Canada, an estimated 220,000 HAIs occur each year, with 8,000 related deaths (Zoutman 2003). Infection control experts everywhere are working to identify and correct factors that contribute to these rates. Although hand hygiene has long been regarded as the most effective preventive measure (Teare 1999), numerous studies over the past few decades have demonstrated that compliance with hand hygiene recommendations is poor and interventions are not effective long term."

I suggest you spend some time learning what Cochrane is *before* responding, to ensure you don't make an even bigger public fool of yourself.

Gawande traces the history of checklists. He starts with surgery but expands the applications well beyond there. His work to push the takeup of checklists is amazing, and will save many lives.

Time pressure is a problem across the entire developed world, but it's not the major driver of failures in reliability. The major driver is the cognitive complexity of the task. Checklists tend to *save* time, not take time, because you don't have to try to remember what to do next, and because they drive towards a more standardised approach.

I beg your fucking pardon? The evidence that hand hygiene is a major transmission route for nosocomial infection is extensively documented and not just a marketing survey. I put that link up so that you could see some of the evidence for yourself. Are you going to bleat on about the survey, or are you going to look at the actual evidence about hand hygiene? You are sounding like a complete prat, arguing that there is no link between hand washing and lowered rates of HCAIs. It's on a par with arguing there's no link between smoking and lung cancer.

On the point about whether the use of video cameras to influence hand hygiene behaviours is the right or wrong approach, you're also being a complete tosser. You have assumed that this is seen as some kind of Orwellian view. But it's the implementation that counts. It turns out that actually, most hospitals using this technology are using it to help staff learn how they actually behave, compared to how they think they behave. Because most staff tend to believe they wash their hands consistently, and most staff don't, due to cognitive overload and other factors. So it is in fact a *learning* tool, not a coercive tool. As well as reading the Checklist Manifesto, you need to read Gawande's article on spreading innovation, which talks about the use of remote coaching in healthcare.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/13/120813fa_fact_gawande

This isn't about bad micro management, it's about putting systems in place to help humans achieve 100% reliability, which is innately difficult for us.

I patronised you because you acted as though you had all the answers, when you clearly haven't remotely researched the topic. This isn't about malicious compliance. It's about you having a preset narrative that you wanted to impose on the story, even when the facts do not support your narrative.

Scale and network effects are clearly very important, and Android obviously poses a really serious challenge to Apple. However, I think you are wrong to assert that Android has become the standard software platform. It's clear that Android and iOS are the standard software platform*s*. Many app developers go with Android first, but plenty more go with iOS first, preferring to develop for a limited range of devices (3 to 4 variants vs testing on 50+ devices) and cognisant that app usage is much higher on iOS devices than on Android.

Could you please crawl back into your sanctimonious moralising box and take a copy of "The Checklist Manifesto" with you. When you've understood a bit of the theory of safety management, you could crawl back out and apologise to the families of the many thousands of patients who have died or been seriously hurt as a result of HCAIs.

http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/InfectiousDiseases/InfectionsAZ/HCAI/EpidemiologicalDataHCAI/hcaimandatorysurveillanceresults/

You're wrong about "British subjects", which says a lot about you. You are overconfident with your facts. It takes all of a few seconds on the Web for you to check them before you hit post.

If you believe there are valid comparable crime statistics from today and 100 years ago, and that you can isolate all other changes in British society apart from gun ownership in your analysis, do go ahead and post it. I fancy a laugh.

The comment about the Queen is risible. A frequent trope of interviews with people who have had armed bodyguards is about the restrictions on their freedom that this entails. It might be necessary, because the alternative is worse, but it's hardly more free than not requiring armed bodyguards in the first place.

It is not theoretically impossible under British law for those men to have held guns, although I doubt they were held legally. Again, this is a simple fact that would have taken you seconds to discover if you'd have bother using the web.

As well as getting your facts wrong, your logic is pretty shoddy too. You're focused on people being defenceless. I'm focused on the fact that most criminals in Britain don't use guns in their crimes, and so there are far fewer gun deaths and gun woundings than there are in other countries where guns are more prevalent. Plus, obviously, the rate of accidental gun deaths and woundings is tiny, and the rate of deaths due to incompetent attempts to use guns to defend against attackers or perceived attackers is again tiny. You're looking the wrong way through the telescope. If you do that with a telescope, I hope you don't have a rifle with a sniper scope, or things are apt to end very messily.

Why do we get stories that make this comparison? Because there are other factors at play, which if you wiped the dribble off your chin and focused on reading the story could have been apparent to you, too. The apples-to-apples comparison here is how the same prosecutor dealt with two cases involving minors, which happened a week apart. That seems a perfectly reasonable basis for comparison, addressing the question: is she being consistent and proportionate in the eyes of a reasonable observer. To which the answer is "no, she is not, on the face of it".

It's not exactly rocket science, is it?

I wanna know when they're going to create artificial mantis shrimp eyes. That I can put on and use. That would be cool, given that they are the most impressive eyes on the planet. I remember reading Fragment by Warren Fahy and being blown away by what they are capable of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes

It's not *that* risky, though, is it? You can break a leg running. Happens to kids playing soccer all the time. Balls can smash through windows, shattering glass on screaming children and causing a cut. Also happens. Not sure it needs expulsion to manage it, however.

Risk = severity * frequency. And severity isn't that high, and the frequency isn't that high either.

Really? *Really*? Don't:
- look at a patch of ground and examine the diversity of insect life
- see how to hold a magnifying glass to set a piece of paper on fire
- sit on the grass and conduct a thought experiment

That is an impoverished world

Erm, there may be a whole host of differences, but there's no point ignoring the fact that:
- the proportion of black kids locked up is much higher than the proportion of white kids
- it's pretty easy to find lots of pairs of cases where the circumstances are very similar, but the punishments are different, and the black kid gets the more severe punishment

So it's hardly surprising that race is a starting point here, especially given that this is a columnist, not an academic.