When your kitten won't load properly because of a "Cast Member Not Found" error, here's how to perform emergency surgery on it.

  1. Open the kitten with a text editor such as notepad (probably in Start|Programs| Accessories|Notepad).
  2. You will find some stuff that looks fairly inexplicable, example below: 
kitten therapy
globals random single no no 
threepartq 1 
In pts with hepatic failure following paracetamol overdose, does N-acetylcysteine decrease the risk of death?
searchterms 2
paracetamol and overdos* in MEDLINE; 
I also searched the Cochrane but found nothing
  1. See the bits that say "threepartq 1"? and "searchterms 2"? That's what tells CATmaker where to put the text in the next line. So, CATmaker has a field called "threepartq" which stores your question. When CATmaker reads the kitten, it comes across this word and knows that there's some stuff on the next line to put into that field.
  2. The number (1) tells CATmaker how many lines of text there are (i.e. how many line breaks, carraige returns, whatever you call them) to put in the "threepartq" field, so any text after those lines will be treated as a new field name.
  3. So, CATmaker reads the single line under "threepartq 1", sticks it in the field called "threepartq", then looks for a field called "searchterms". Now, it knows that searchterms has 2 lines, so it sticks the next 2 lines into that field. And so on.
  4. It's possible that, somewhere in your kitten, this number has got out of synch with the number of lines of text which has been read in.
  5. If you go through the kitten making sure that, for example, there are no extra carriage returns in the text which might make CATmaker expect only one line of text when there's two (or vice versa), that might fix it.
  6. (Note that text wrapping, where a word processing or text editing program displays a line ending and continuing onto the line below, is not the same as a line break. What you are looking for are proper carriage returns)
  7. Save your Kitten from the text editor and have another go at loading it.
  8. Oh, and please let us know where the error occurred.

Back to the CATmaker FAQ

Please note that, while using the term "know", we at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine recognise that this is a metaphorical anthropomorphism and are fully aware that the CATmaker software is just a dumb animal.