To some extent, many UK governments have trialled their plans for much of medicine on dentists and dentistry. To some extent, fear of what the ballot box may say, has limited their wishes. But here is a well written piece about dentists and dentistry that should be read by many medics, both as a warning, and a guide to action. Dermatology and dentistry share many genes.

Students pay $300 or more for textbooks explaining that in competitive markets the price of a good should fall to the cost of producing an additional unit, and unsurprisingly regurgitate the expected answers. A study of 170 economics modules taught at seven universities found that marks in exams favoured the ability to “operate a model” over proofs of independent judgment.

The teaching of economics gets an overdue overhaul

Just last week, when faced with a report that its advertising numbers promised an American audience that, in certain demographics, well exceeded the number of such humans in existence, judging by U.S. Census Bureau numbers, Facebook told the Wall Street Journal that its numbers “are not designed to match population or census estimates. We are always working to improve our estimates.” Facebook’s intercourse with the public need not adhere to the so-called norms of so-called reality.

Make Mark Zuckerberg Testify

There is perhaps too much Machine learning/AI hype in this article — or at least for my taste, but it is well worth a read. The problem the authors are grappling with is perhaps the central intellectual problem modern medicine faces: how formal can our methods become? And how can we use a variety of cognitive prostheses to guide clinical behaviour.

Asking doctors to work harder or get smarter won’t help. Calls to reduce “unnecessary” care fall flat: we all know how difficult it’s become to identify what care is necessary. Changing incentives is an appealing lever for policymakers, but that alone will not make decisions any easier: we can reward physicians for delivering less care, but the end result may simply be less care, not better care.

Informatics — using the term in the broadest possible sense — and the management of expertise, is the central challenge facing medicine and medical care. It is where the action should be. The authors are right about this, but their caution is also true: “The state of our health care system offers little reason for optimism.” Amen. And spare me ‘realistic medicine’.

NEJM

It was 40 years ago when Carwyn James warned of the dangers of what he called crash-ball centres, players who were being encouraged to feel rather than think. “The boring, unthinking coach continually preaches about mistakes,” he once said. “The creative coach invites his players to make mistakes. This new midfield ‘crash-ball’ is a disaster – hunks of manhood with madness in their eyes, battering-ram bulldozers happy to be picked off on the gain-line by just-as-large hunks from the opposing side. For what? Just to do it all over again.”

Which just shows that Welsh fly-halves (Carwyn James) can be as majestic with their words as their feet. But then if you look at his Wikipedia page, you see he was special in all sorts of ways.

Quoted in the Guardian.

Public Domain, Link

I dislike LMS (learning management systems). There are lots of reasons for this, but chief is that the ones I have seen are ugly and don’t entice. Universities are increasingly employee facing, rather than student facing (they claim the opposite). LMS are ‘management’ tools, not tools to help you learn. Fit for widgets, not humans. When you go back and look at Gutenberg’s bible or the great illuminated manuscripts you feel the power and pleasure of what the authors intended transmitted via the scribe. The monks understood this — they shared the passion. The web and nascent industry of informal learning for autodidacts is also full of great design (here is an example from Highbrow), even if it usually designed as part of a ‘pop culture’. But not the dismal corporate LMS.

No, I could not run, lead or guide a pharma company. Tough business. But I just hope their executives do not really believe most of what they say. So, in a FT article about the new CE of Novartis, Vas Narasimhan, has vowed to slash drug development costs; there will be a productivity revolution; 10-25 per cent could be cut from the cost of trials if digital technology were used to carry them out more efficiently.

And of course:

(he) plans to partner with, or acquire, artificial intelligence and data analytics companies, to supplement Novartis’s strong but “scattered” data science capability.

I really think of our future as a medicines and data science company, centred on innovation and access (read that again, parenthesis mine)

And to add insult to injury:

Dr Narasimhan cites one inspiration as a visit to Disney World with his young children where he saw how efficiently people were moved around the park, constantly monitored by “an army of Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained data scientists”.

And not that I am a lover of Excel…

No longer rely on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides, but instead “bring up a screen that has a predictive algorithm that in real time is recalculating what is the likelihood our trials enrol, what is the quality of our clinical trials”

Just recall that in  2000 it would have been genes / genetics / genomics rather than data / analytics / AI / ML etc

So, looks to me like lots of cost cutting and optimisation. No place for a James Black, then.

I now add the phrase “learning outcomes” to the list of words and phrases that should never be used, along with “stakeholders,” “imbricate,” “aporia” and “performative.”)

Here.

It was not deliberate policy; it simply seemed to be only men who applied, usually refugees from the twin miseries of academia: low salaries and high tables.

Ah, those were the days…

The Fear Index, Robert Harris

If you don’t like how careless Equifax was with your data, don’t waste
your breath complaining to Equifax. Complain to your government.

Surveillance capitalism fuels the Internet, and sometimes it seems that everyone is spying on you. You’re secretly tracked on pretty much every commercial website you visit. Facebook is the largest surveillance
organization mankind has created; collecting data on you is its business model. I don’t have a Facebook account, but Facebook still keeps a surprisingly complete dossier on me and my associations — just in case
I ever decide to join. I also don’t have a Gmail account, because I don’t want Google storing my e-mail. But my guess is that it has about half of my e-mail anyway, because so many people I correspond with have accounts. I can’t even avoid it by choosing not to write to gmail.com addresses, because I have no way of knowing if [email protected] is hosted at Gmail.

Bruce Schneier