I guess you could call this inverse dermatology.

 

Terrific interview with Alan Kay. Familiar memes, but I do not tire of them.

The business of a university is to help students learn contexts that they were unaware of when they were in high school.

His use of the word context encompasses intellectual creations such as reading, writing, printing etc. His oft quoted quip: a change in context is worth 80 IQ points

 

Jed Mecurio was on Desert Island Discs. He of ‘Cardiac Arrest’ fame. (ITU: they used to call it the ICU — intensive care unit — till they realised, nobody did). Something he said chimed with a conversation I had with somebody who knows a lot more about junior doctor training in the modern NHS than I do.

Mercurio, was the son of working class Italian immigrants. And, as is true of many immigrants, a child moving into the stable world of the professions is encouraged. Mercurio pointed out that the popular representation of medicine often does not match the reality. Those with family members already in medicine know this, whereas those without this, have to discover it (at least, I hope they discover it).

When I was trying to get a handle on some of the issues surrounding junior doctor training with my source, the very same point came up. Many junior docs idea of what medicine was like, he / she argued, was based on TV programs — and more Eastenders than West Wing. And this is a problem, he commented.

Cardiac Arrest may be showing its age, but for me it was more accurate than all the sanitised bumph that medical schools and the GMC produce. Fiction is sometimes more real than reality.

Someone once called Vieux Farka Touré the “Hendrix of the Sahara”.

Kinda cool… FT.

One of the important things I learned from reading Herb Simon’s ‘Models of my life’ was his view that seldom did reading the academic literature feed him with new ideas on what to work on. I do not mean to imply that reading the literature is irrelevant, but that in some domains of enquiry the formal literature is often unhelpful when it comes to  not so much thinking outside the the box, but realising the box needs throwing out and you need a chair instead. For instance, in med ed, I find most of the formal literature akin to chewing sawdust. It is dull and often the main motivation seems to be to advance one’s career rather than change the world. All of this came to my mind when I read the following:

It tells the remarkable tale of Athletic Bilbao, one of three clubs never to have been relegated from La Liga, the Spanish top division, despite having a policy of selecting only Basque players. Bilbao’s story emphasises a recurring theme of the book: the importance of development programmes for young players and the lengths that clubs go to in order to nurture footballers. Benfica, a Portuguese club, uses a 360-degree “football room”, walled by LED lights, to train players in over 100 scenarios. Targets appear for the players to hit with the ball; sensors measure the players’ effectiveness.

( a review in the Economist of The European Game: The Secrets of European Football Success. By Daniel Fieldsend. Arena Sport; 255 pages; £14.99.)

Now, readers will know that given the genes, I am more rugby than soccer, although I marvel at the skill modern footballers show. But what interests me and has interested me for a while is the relation between structured unnatural performance and fluency at performance. Now my phrasing may be a little ugly, and I do not think there is anything deep or new about what I am saying. Just take how we know you learn a musical instrument. How breaking up and sequencing of mini skills is necessary before you put it all together. People do not pay to listen to people play scales (although I will ignore, shred guitar aficionados), but rather they like songs or sonatas etc.

I would push this is the following direction. A real danger in undergraduate medicine is that we have become inured to the idea that learning situated in the clinic is the best way to learn medicine. At one time, I might have agreed. But out clinics have changed, but our ideas have not. One of the benefits of coaching and online learning is that we can make the offline — the clinic — work better. But also need it less, because it is not working well.

There are some interesting apparent paradoxes here. We need (pace the above quote) more ‘football rooms’, but as Seymour Papert argued, if you want to learn to speak French go to France and if you want to learn maths go to mathland. But are these real or virtual?

Despite this, less than half of developers consider their formal education to be “important” or “very important” to their jobs.

Well this is tech, but it is also true of any many fields of endeavour. But not all. We need to understand when and where the rules of the game change. This is not just about certification

In the context of her research about the implications of information technology she stated three laws:

• Everything that can be automated will be automated.
• Everything that can be informated will be informated.
• Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control.

Wikipedia. A lot of interesting links to her work. I never knew the origin.

Lots of money is spent on medical education in England – but very little of it goes towards teaching.

Says Philip Chan in THE. Yes, he is not the only one writing on this. I assume the sub-editor was having a poetic day.

 

Thanks to Betsy DeVos & Co., “school choice” has become a hot-button issue in the US. But across the pond in Germany, choice looks a lot less like private school vouchers and a lot more like…democracy. At Dolli-Einstein-Haus elementary school, kindergarteners exercise their voting rights weekly through “kids’ councils,” collectively choosing everything from class activities to what’s served at snack. The one limit on their civil liberties? Teachers reserve the right to decide when a kid needs a diaper change—to which we say, fair enough.

EdSurge.

“If we are really going to turn over our homes, our cars, our health and more to private tech companies, on a scale never imagined,” he wrote, “we need much, much stronger standards for security and privacy than now exist. Especially in the US, it’s time to stop dancing around the privacy and security issues and pass real, binding laws.

“And, if ambient technology is to become as integrated into our lives as previous technological revolutions like wood joists, steel beams and engine blocks, we need to subject it to the digital equivalent of enforceable building codes and auto safety standards. Nothing less will do. And health? The current medical device standards will have to be even tougher, while still allowing for innovation.”

Nice piece on Walt Mossberg from John Naughton.