RxISK

Making Medicines Safer for All of Us

RxISK Prize: Campaign & Challenge

9 Comments

The RxISK Prize campaign took off 3 months ago. The generosity of donors from all walks of life – many out of work because of the impact of these conditions on them – has been astonishing. There have also been substantial anonymous donations.

While many of those affected have lost faith in doctors and pharmaceutical companies, seeing the donations come in has restored a certain amount of faith in human nature in those of us in RxISK.

We are one third of the way to the monetary target, but we only have ten per cent of the 197 countries on earth and less than half of US States, and Canadian provinces.

Plenty of targets out there for You to aim at. Investing sweat is as important as investing money. There have been major investments of sweat from several people – both affected and not affected.  It would be wonderful if some of you reading this took it on yourself to get a donation from a country not currently listed on the RxISK.org/Prize page – even a few cents to put Burundi or Malawi or Yemen on the map.

Some of those who have been able to get friends or others to donate have reported that the impact on them of someone else donating was very affirming.

We have had replies from several pharmaceutical companies and have engaged in a conversation with two of them, centred on the issue of when is it reasonable to say a treatment has caused a problem. This is the topic of yesterday’s post on DH.org – Pandemonium and Pandemrix.

We have written to many major organisations in mental health, primary care and urology – see RxISK.org/Prize.

We have also emailed close to a thousand urologists and therapists in the sex and relationships field.

There has been an outreach to journalists but few of them have picked up the story. They may be caught between desire and a fear of coming to harm – as people are before they take the plunge. Or maybe the media G spot has just gone numb.

Tower of Babel Competition

Google has made something else possible for the campaign. It has enabled us to put together four three-minute videos. The PSSD and Prize videos were uploaded three weeks ago and the Map and PGAD ones two weeks ago. The latest statistics on downloads are below.

But even more interesting is that if you look closely at the image above, Google allows us to subtitle these videos and it also auto-translates the subtitles.

We have begun emailing them to Italy, Spain, Brazil and elsewhere and an intriguing option has opened up which we invite everyone reading this to participate in, whether you are from Poland, Argentina, China, Mauritius or anywhere English speaking.

Go into You Tube and access each video in turn.

We were alerted to the intriguing possibilities of an international competition by a colleague in Brazil who said the Portuguese translation makes no sense.

So here’s the competition. We want to see what language produces the strangest translation. It won’t be the entire translation that is strange – just key bits.

Here are the links:

PSSD – http://youtu.be/Ke9Q5i97PHE

RxISK Prize – http://youtu.be/GJrRemX5Q-c

PGAD – http://youtu.be/PLUODoDaNBs

RxISK Map – http://youtu.be/mTs_KMg1vZI

Translate and tell us what you find. We will run a feature on the strangest outcomes. At the moment the in-house betting is on German producing the oddest outcomes.

We also need suggestions for the best title for this Lost in Translation feature – it could be To Really Mess Things up Leave it to an Algorithm or it could be Google, Gurgle, Gag – or anything else.

Finally when you get over having fun, you can help us by picking out key words in the original English which if changed would make people in Sri Lanka, Greece, or Mexico figure this Irishman is not quite as crazy as he looks right now.

Thanks to Google, which shows where videos are being accessed from, we can show the difference your efforts make. Can you get Iceland or China on the map?

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Good response from (ex)user and survivor group in Denmark, after comment byJohn revealed which groups were members of so called european health parliament and David helped with the message which was too long when taken from the attached rxisk blog. They will put it on facebook and yahoo with thanks to Olga. Only one out of about 10 groups replied so far which is par for the course but some were a very long shot and as described in the blog maybe there isn’t a translation on google for the other countries which i was assuming there would be – goodness knows what the message was saying in Croatia…When I write anywhere Am
    adding asking if people could put a comment on the blog now , and adding it can be anonymously with no e mail address shown

    Reply

  2. Oh, my word – have read through the Welsh subtitles such as they are. To say that they are a load of rubbish is an understatement. It is disgraceful that whoever translated them has the face to put up such nonsensical tripe.
    Whilst I am absolutely delighted to see the Welsh language getting its due status, I am horrified that this standard is considered (by someone, somewhere) as being acceptable. There are numerous incomplete sentences, several English words for which the Welsh version is widely used and the whole that is present has obviously been ‘translated’ word by word. Translating is an art – one that goes way beyond giving the translated words in the same order as presented in the English version.
    If I was presented with the Welsh version without having ever seen the English version, I wouldn’t have a clue what they were all about. I certainly will not be telling anyone to switch these subtitles on. I bet someone has claimed a hefty amount for such rubbish.
    Most disappointingly, there are no absolute misunderstandings as such there. Some such translations can be hilariously funny – nothing like that here!
    I feel totally deflated – and extremely glad that all Welsh speakers are bilingual!

    Reply

    • Mary

      Can you write them out and translate back into English to give Wales an early lead in this new international competition

      David

      Reply

      • Yes, by all means I would do that – except that, in doing so, they will look right! Welsh, like French etc. puts the adjective after the noun whereas English is the opposite – the Google version has used English rules in the Welsh language which just doesn’t work. ( Of course, it would show up the missing parts etc. but that’s only part of the problem!)
        Would it make more sense if I did as you say and then added a corrected version? I’ll get cracking and see what can be done to show the poor quality!

        Reply

      • My program consists of a single 250mg T shot at the very beginning to either stop the endocrine crashes from happening again or prevent them from happening in the first place.

        After that it is then down to diet, exercise, hot baths, meditation and semen retention.

        The program consists of

        Heating up the kidneys everyday. This can be done by taking a hot shower to your back for about 20 mins, a hot bath or with cardio exercise. I find that gentle cardio exercise on a cross trainer with a sweat jacket for 45 minutes every day works the best for me. If you are taking a hot bath or hot shower to your kidney region, you will notice that your heart will start beating faster after about 20 mins or so. It will calm down again as soon as you finish. No need to worry about it. I also keep a hot water bottle placed at my lower back when i am watching T.V. for about 1hr also. ( Seriously try this yourself to see if it works for you.)

        I practice meditation everyday, i generally do 45mins in the morn and 45mins at bedtime. I also practice mindfulness and say mantras to myself if my emotions are getting to strong in either direction, good or bad, it doesn’t matter. Another thing that works for me if my emotions are running high, i just sit still in a chair and close my eyes for 10 to 15 minutes. It is important to keep your mind as calm as you can to progress your recovery each day. Mood management is really important for your recovery.

        Diet is important for your recovery each day also. There are certain things that you must avoid such as alcohol, spicy food, caffeine and sugary foods. High fiber foods and fruit and vegetables are good to combat constipation. Give your body foods that are not too taxing for your digestive system. If your daily stools are quite lumpy or type 2 on the Bristol Stool Chart, you need to add more fruits and vegetables and also drink plenty of water.

        Semen retention. I limit ejaculations to twice a month.

        Acupuncture is also very good , but not mandatory, if you do enough meditation you can get by without it.

        I have seen great progress with this and have seen dramatic improvements mentally, physically and sexually and continue to improve.

        When doing the program correctly i can get up to 10 spontaneous erections daily as well as really good morning wood along with good sleep with dreams. As well as a good mood and increased ability to deal with stress.

        It took me a long time to build up to this level in my recovery, that is because i had so many crashes.

        If i just got the T shot right away when i lost all wood ( morn, daytime, evening ) and had watery ejaculate, i would have saved myself a lot of time and not had to experience those horrible crashes.

        My crashes were all the same , major panic attack for about 45 mins so severe that i was struggling to breathe followed by severe suicidal depression for about 72 hrs and the feeling that my head was stuck in a vice afterwards for about 2 weeks.

        These endocrine crashes are to be avoided at all costs. They will just add years to your recovery.

        Reply

  3. Martin BenjaminLexicographer, Anthropologist, Tati
    Swiss

    Google Translate is based on something called “statistical machine translation”. This means that they gather as much text as they can find that seems to be parallel between two languages, and then they crunch their data to find the likelihood that something in Language A corresponds to something in Language B.

    This method works to some extent for language pairs where a lot of more-or-less parallel data is available, for example English-Spanish. However, it fails completely when such data is paltry or non-existent, as is the case with most language pairs. For most pairs in the Google Translate set of 80 languages, they go from Language A to English, then from English to Language B, with predictably unintelligible results.

    The other way that you could say Google Translate “works” is that it often meets its users’ expectations. If you feed something into the program, you are not expecting to get a perfect translation. You are expecting to get something that will clue you in to the intent of the original. Since you are getting something for free that gives you better understanding than you would have had otherwise, the translation often “works” for you. However, if you were to use the service for translations that your business depended on, without post-editing, you would run far too much of a risk of total failure – the people receiving your translations would not be reading them with your same mindset of “better than nothing”, and would therefore wonder why you were sending them sometimes incomprehensible gibberish.

    On the question of whether they have a database of all the words in a particular language, the answer is a firm “no”. In fact, many basic translations are missed entirely. “I will be unavailable tomorrow” is translated as just the opposite in French and many other languages, for example. Buyer beware.

    Auto-Translate Jumbles, Mumbles, Bumbles – Just Like a Doctor – Who Doesn’t Rumbles or Tumbles ..

    Auto-Translate

    Support our Rxisk Prize Campaign

    German translation

    Unterstütze unsere Rxisk-Preiskampagne

    Back to English

    Support our Rxisk pricing campaign

    Estonian

    Support our Rxiski Prize Campaign

    Scottish

    Support our prizeball campaign

    Punjabi

    ਸਾਡੇ ਰੈਕਸਿਸਕ ਇਨਾਮ ਦੀ ਮੁਹਿੰਮ ਦਾ ਸਮਰਥਨ ਕਰੋ

    Support our Racquet Reward campaign

    Perfect – Pun jabi ..

    Reply

  5. A great rapid response in Thebmj from the wonderful Stavros Saripanidis – which received no support from other respondents – In response to article published 1st December ‘NHS advises GPs Not to Prescribe Low Value Drugs’ Stavros S says he hopes anti depressants will be included in this advice. ‘Recent evidence reveals that administered anti depressants actually increases suicide risk by 2-5 times. A recent meta analysis level 1 clearly demonstrates that SSRIs double the risk of suicide and violence. Anti depressants can increase all cause mortality by 33%! Another meta anlysis in the the british journal of psychiatry found even patients with most severe depression can get as much benefit from CBT as those with less severe symptoms. Even behavioural activations decrease depressive symptoms . Refs given in response. Twitter : @drsaripanidis.

    Reply

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