"Transfer time is less than 109 minutes with a 28.8 modem"

This was the message I was presented with, when I was sending a file to a friend of mine through Microsoft Messenger (v6.0.3 for Mac). This kind of messages is what I consider to be an interesting point of discussion about how interfaces are designed and often forgotten.
Of course this kind of message was always there, either in this application or in another, but the fact that I never payed too much attention to it makes me think that this kind of message was never relevant in the first place (at least for me). It would be considerably more interesting if the information was appropriate and adapted to the current situation, i.e., if it wants to go further and guess how much time it will take to perform a file transfer, at least should do it by using any of the following strategies (in my opinion):

• "Learning" the connection speed from past transfers;


• Simply calculating the speed based on connection settings specified by the user (like many video/audio streaming or P2P software);


• "Asking" the operating system how fast is the connection speed;


• By giving some sort of estimation using a connection speed as a base for comparison.

Messenger decided to follow the last option, and unfortunately either the persons who did it, already understood how useful that message was that they even forgot it is still there... or they still use 28.8 modems in 2007...

Of course this was only a starting point of discussion, and many follow this example. There are many software applications nowadays that are very feature-rich but so feature-fat that developers often forget about the user interface designing challenges and issues. Developers often focus on how their software is so feature-rich that if they applied a GUI profiler to analyze the user interaction with their software, like web developers do with web loggers, they would notice how many mistakes are performed and how much (big) the part of the software that is completely unused due to the lack of interest and effort on how interfaces are designed.
Some people say software should be feature-rich, if it is to be useful; others say that it should be simple, and easy to use; and others, like myself, think that it should be a mix of both worlds: it should be feature-rich, yet hiding all that is unnecessary for the current condition of use.

Diabetes classification

The purpose of my current assignment at university is to correctly find an automatic way to perform a diagnosis based on some patient attributes and test results. The field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining has always fascinated me namely the challenges that are imposed to us when we decide to take an analysis like this first of mine.
The diagnosis is about Diabetes Mellitus, a common disease which affects millions of people in the whole world. Much is already known about it and much is already scientifically documented by the World Health Organization, so there's no big deal what we are to discover except the fun we get by looking at the results.

The most interesting rule I got because of its simplicity, and the one I would like to share with you, may be taken as a "warning" (or a joke if you wish) and I can only speculate if the rule is true or not. The rule states the following:
If your Body Mass Index (BMI in SI units) is higher than 27.3 and you're at least 29 then you are diabetes positive.

For reference, the formula for BMI is simply to divide (your weight (kg)) for your (height (m) raised to the power of 2)). For instance, if you are 1.7m and 65kg the result should be approximately 22.49.
Additionally, the table that maps ranges to categories is the following:

Category - BMI range
Starvation- less than 15
Underweight - from 15 to 18.5
Normal - from 18.5 to 25
Overweight - from 25 to 30
Obese - from 30 to 40
Morbidly Obese - greater than 40

Of course this rule is very simple, and you shouldn't take it seriously, of course.
It is interesting however that it yielded an accuracy of 70% in my data set and the only thing I can speculate is that it may be revelatory of a pre-diabetic state or even a natural tendency for most (?) patients.