Consultant led A&Es work safest, cheapest and best for the same reason. If 111 call-handlers was a good idea emergency departments would be staffed by Boy Scouts with first aid badges.
If BA killed three passengers there would be hell to pay. But this is the NHS; no one will be blamed for this; no one will get the sack.
Controversies abounded throughout Hamilton’s career, most of them boiling down to being given a hard time by journal editors, reviewers of his manuscripts, and peers discrediting the novelty or general importance of his insights.
— From a biography in the journal Science of the late and great WD Hamilton. And BTW why biology needs its own Nobel.
Taxpayers have spent billions of pounds in interest costs through the private finance initiative to enable tens of billions of pounds to be taken off the government balance sheet – money that should have been spent on the schools and hospitals. When in opposition, the present government acknowledged the issues and committed itself to clarity and openness in presentation. But it seems the exigencies of office have proved too demanding. Why lose weight when you can reset the scales?
— John Kay on ‘fiddling’ (aka lying) by HMG
A Web built on the urinary tract infection business model: rather than getting your innovation in a healthy gush, every new feature must come in a painfully squeezed dribble, a few pennies if you want to link in directly to a specific timecode on the video; a few pennies more if you want to embed a link from the video to a web page, more if you want to move a video to another device or timeshift it, and so on.
— Not one I am familiar with yet. Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on the dangers of DRM on innovation
NHS disinform
I followed up what I wrote about yesterday by looking at other (Scottish) NHS sources of information and advice. I had seen NHS Inform previously (branded as ‘Health Information you can trust’), and wrote to them pointing out that the skin section of their site contained lots of inaccuracies. I have just looked again, and to put it mildly much of the section on skin cancer is misleading and some of it factually incorrect (note to students: do not you use this site as a source of factual advice). Wikipedia is much better or of course skincancer909. What comes across most strongly is that the content seems to have been written by somebody with no first hand experience of clinical practice, and with a political agenda. I can only grimace that the Scottish government thinks that patients with skin cancer are likely to meet their pathologist, and that SCC are derived from the outer (?dead cells) layer of skin.
There is a bigger issue here, one that impinges on my research. There is a widespread belief that putting ‘information’ out there, can only be good. Well, like drugs, the way you present partial views of reality, can have both good and bad effects. This is not a one-way bet.
Patients would be better looking at the CRUK pages for a start.
Also at
http://reestheskin.me/wp-admin/post.php?post=1359&action=edit&message=1
NHS 24 said it could not comment on individual cases due to patient confidentiality. It was also unable to give details of its protocol on heavy bleeding as the information was owned by its “clinical content supplier”.
— Quoted in the Scotsman. Blog post here. So, no, you cannot ask why we did something?
TarenSK: MIT/Boston memorial event: March 12, 4pm →
Next Tuesday, March 12, at 4pm, the last of the memorial services for Aaron that I’m attending will take place in Boston at the MIT media lab (where Aaron’s father works). Speakers will include Larry Lessig of Harvard reading a statement on behalf of Tim Berners-Lee, Joi Ito of the MIT media lab,…
(via lessig)
Harassment and insensitivity” are not things that university researchers seek to avoid. They are the normal conditions faced by the graduate student! If his or her job satisfaction is low then his or her remedy is to complete the research and turn in a PhD thesis so that the cycle can be repeated with the next crop of victims, usually immigrants. Maybe one day the government will require truth in labeling and universities will have to rename themselves “research plantations” and put graduate students into their SAP systems as “slaves”.
— Philip Greenspun ibid
“Being in the hospital is horrible. They woke me up at 4:00 am once to ask whether I was sleeping well.” I like the comment as well: hospitals are inhospitable places
— via Philip Greenspun, describing a fried with a terminal disease, and why he wanted to avoid chemo.
Kevin O’Rourke refers to the “cocooned elites in Brussels”, which gets to the heart of the matter. The dignity of office can be a terrible thing for intellectual clarity: you can spend years standing behind a lectern or sitting around a conference table drinking bottled water, delivering the same sententious remarks again and again, and never have anyone point out how utterly wrong you have been at every stage of the game. Those of us on the outside need to do whatever we can to break through that cocoon — and ridicule is surely one useful technique.
— Paul Krugman: Of cockroaches and commissioners
I cannot think of another professional who has 10minutes with a pt/client and can kill them in that time
— Anonymous on Pulse. He is referring to how little time GPs get to deal with increasingly complicated patients.
We conclude that the ENCODE Consortium has, so far, failed to provide a compelling reason to abandon the prevailing understanding among evolutionary biologists according to which most of the human genome is devoid of function. The ENCODE results were predicted by one of its lead authors to necessitate the rewriting of textbooks (Pennisi 2012). We agree, many textbooks dealing with marketing, mass-media hype, and public relations may well have to be rewritten.
— Citation here
This leaves Facebook, a company that has one billion products (called users) and earns its living by selling information about them to advertisers.
— John Naughton in the Observer
You can fix a clock, but you have to negotiate with a system.
Alan Kay
How well can you diagnose melanoma
If you are not a medic and reading this blog, and would like to take part in some research over the net into how to diagnosis melanoma, click here. The link is http://minaret.ppls.ed.ac.uk/somi/melanoma.php
You will be shown some pictures, and asked to judge whether they are melanomas or not. What you see is ‘randomised’ so you may or may not get some images or text to help you. What we are trying to discover is if the ‘aids’ really do help.
