Caroline Jarrett

Today’s episode of #FixTheForms is an unexpected one.

The UK government attempted to prevent disclosure of a *blank* form - one that had not been answered.

Fortunately, a judge refused to accept their argument.

I'm running my course on Advocating for UCD in government online in October.

In this course, we will look at the biggest barriers to UCD in government and how to navigate them.

www.tickettailor.com/events/clara...

On this, the 12 month anniversary of the start of my cancer treatment (with 4 months still to go) can I urge everyone who is eligible to have every cancer screening they are offered. My cancer was only found because of a routine mammogram. I was bloody lucky.

Clara is GOOD at this - this will be great

Fully agree.

… when doing their own shopping and food prep.

Plus, participants could consume alcohol but were asked to keep consumption within guidelines. No word on that either, so I assume they think there’s no nutritional or diet impact of alcohol.

Hmm.

Not as clear-cut as results claim.

Plus I also noticed that all the participants were provided with all their food during the trials. Would they get all their food for the entire year to support the projections?

There’s not a word in the paper about whether participants would find these provided diets difficult to sustain …

Oh and by the way, the upper BMI limit for exclusions is 40. Someone with BMI 39 could be in this trial.

They could go to their GP with 13% reduction in body weight - the maximum projection - and they’d be regarded as majorly overweight …

Essentially it explored a short term intervention and then hoped that long-term effects would be consistent.

Highly unlikely in dietary changes which are notoriously hard to sustain in the long term.

But hey, it’s in Nature so what do I know?

(Cough) guessed (cough) “extrapolated” to a year. Clearly a year that excluded typically high UPF temptations such as holidays, birthdays, Christmas etc

And that excluded short or long bursts of ill health, or changes in circumstances …

You would have been rejected from this trial. They excluded 52 out of 135 recruits because those 52 already ate very little UPF.

Also:
- each trial period was only 4 weeks.
- More than 10% drop out
- experiment lasted 4 weeks, results were …

... to let people self-describe. If all the ratings are after the open box, then at least you'll know what they really want to tell you. And the ratings may help to speed up the analysis too.

"Have your menstrual periods stopped permanently?" answers include
"Yes, I have no menstrual periods"
Could it change do: "Do you have menstrual periods?" with options including "Yes, I do have periods" and "No, I do not have menstrual periods"?

Fully support your plan to have an open text box ...

Gosh, so many sympathies with this thread.

The suggested questions seem to me to have good and more worrying areas.

Good: openly available and referenced
More worrying: trying to condense variable and complex symptoms into simple rating scales (especially: pain)
Some strange wordings such as ...

Are you looking to develop your workshop planning and facilitation skills?

Do you have a workshop coming up soon that you're not sure about, or you'd like some help with?

Come to my new, short, online workshop facilitation training and clinic!

www.tickettailor.com/events/clara...

Mark's fundraiser for Sands Help Mark Thompson raise money to support Sands

I am running the London Parks Half Marathon in memory of our first son Olly who died at the age of 9 months in 2012.

SANDS has been a wonderful support to us and we want to raise money for the charity to help others. Anything you can give will be welcome. Thanks.

www.justgiving.com/page/mark-th...

Congratulations England and India for a gripping Test series in the #cricket

Not exactly the result I hoped for but the fairest result overall

Things that make this photographer happy part one..

Symmetry

Not yet decided on day to return. Probably the Friday evening.

In better news,maybe: if your train is 30min - 59mins late, you can get 50% of that journey repaid. If it’s 60mins late or more, it’s 100%.

I’m now going to jinx myself and say that recently I’ve had fairly good luck with trains … but who knows.

I’m planning to do KGX->EDI on the Monday.

You can get on an overloaded train - the risk is that you may not get a seat. If it’s excessively overloaded due to extreme disruption, they “declassify” it anyway so it’s a free-for-all and seat booking get disputed anyway.

It depends on the day of the week and also whether there is any disruption on the day in question or the day before.

On that route, I book the train I want and aim to turn up early. If I’m in time for the train before, I hop onto it after assessing whether the earlier train looks overloaded

Possibly a culture of clearly giving credit, acknowledging contributions?

Years ago when the Society for Technical Communication was still a vibrant organization, I instituted an “honor roll” page for people who contributed to the Body of Knowledge. It did help.

Life is where it’s at [534] Greetings from The Borders...

Ask me the worst sound I’ve ever heard and I can now tell you. It’s my daughter screaming as she was swept out to sea... open.substack.com/pub/document...

Under previous administrations, all US government work was free of copyright.

Whether this is still true, I don’t know.

Knowing the context certainly helped me to grasp it

I had a similar experience in the Museo del Risorgimento in Rome, the only visitor and I was a non-Italian-speaking teenager too

I recall being trapped in a guided tour of which I basically only understood one word: Garibaldi

Just because people work in sprints and think they are ‘ #agile ’ doesn’t mean that they work iteratively.

It’s pretty impressive with what level of confidence government colleagues insist they work in such a way, while their practice remains pretty waterfall-like.

Ah. Not as much of a myth as I thought. @deanvipond.bsky.social knows about this - they did a lot of research for the NHS website to determine that a slightly off white background was easier to read.

Because it looks beautiful to a young person with the best vision they will have in their whole life.

Be thankful it’s not the medium grey text on a light grey background, which was their first choice.