More Americans now die from drug overdoses than from car crashes or gun violence, and more than 26m are being treated for addiction, according to CDC figures.

FT

If you want to pick at the cracks of modern medicine, you look at psychiatry. This is not a criticism of psychiatry or psychiatrists (some of my best friends are….). If you want to do similar things with the academy, look at economics first.

For my studies I moved to Berlin and later to Innsbruck in the Tyrolean Alps. Innsbruck was a great place to study: The teaching in both philosophy and economics happened in small groups and the professors were fantastic teachers. Geoscience was a very broad course and had the advantage that we traveled a lot and spend quite some time out in the field.

Max Rosen

This weekend, my wife and oldest daughter visited her first-choice college, the University of Tennessee. There was one curious moment in an otherwise wonderful weekend. The tour guide noted that the university was there to help students get through the trauma of exams. It brought in masseuses to massage away the stress. It rolls out a sheet of paper, passes out crayons, and lets the students express their rage against algebra. Oh, and it vowed to bring in puppies, so students could cuddle something cute to take the edge off their anxiety.

Quote on Memex from Tyler Cowen’s new book, ‘The Complacent Class’.

This is the title of a piece in Nature, discussing how much evidence is needed before you bring a drug to market, and how much information you should gather after the drug is available. The reality is possibly more nuanced that is made out here, and knowing how regulation has changed and was different between countries is worth factoring in. But I think the key issue is that many people do not trust drug companies, and they are right not to do so. It was in the FT of all places, that the comparison between public perceptions of pharma and ‘the bankers’ was made. Trust has a value, a value to both parties in any exchange. And really, why do you need advertisers to get involved?

Refreshing to read an article in which I can find something to disagree with in almost every sentence. And the title — in the print edition only —‘Taking your research to the real world” was probably the work of the subeditor. But the tired trope of academia versus the real world is like a red rag to a bull (self-reference intended). Most of all, I find the belief that unless you are changing health care in the short term is some distant country, you are somehow deficient as an academic, conceited.

Capitalism has helped lift more people out of poverty than most public health researchers; economists basic work on how societies work may do the same; and I am not certain how Watson and Crick would have fared under this self-congratulatory humbug. The real danger is that we are forgetting that universities are some of the few places left to do genuinely transformative and generative work. There are plenty of alternatives for much other ‘close to market work’: private corporations; NGOs; national health agencies; consultancies. Delivery and revolutionary science belong to different scales and cultures (mostly).

One of my mantras is that unless we do the online better, we cannot make use of the offline opportunities. Online, should allow us to make better use of the bedside. The following are some quotes from an FT article on MBA degrees.

The great thing about a virtual classroom is that your students are already in a digital format, which means you can run algorithms that recognise patterns in facial expressions to assess understanding and identify students’ emotional state and levels of attention in your class,” says Prof Boehm. Analytics can be used in real time to address students whose attention is wandering or later to improve teaching plans or faculty performance, he adds.

Teaching staff also find students to be more engaged in the virtual classroom. “Because of the way students are positioned on the wall, a headshot from the chest up, it’s very difficult for them to text on their phones or work on their PCs,” says LizHess, managing director of HBX. “It’s very easy for faculty to see if people are distracted — they joke that there’s no back row any more.”

The technology looks terrific in the images shown. But there are other factors at play. Note the group sizes are small in comparison with what many undergraduates receive, and the investment in technology is focussed on those who pay most (upfront). If you look at the money apparently going into medical education, this should be the norm for most undergraduate medical students.

‘Some diversity training-programs, for example, are like blistering — they are somewhat painful to endure and have no beneficial effects.’

Timothy Wilson in Redirect, the book that nobody from HR seems to have read.

 

As if by a miracle, once up and running, the Mark 1 telescope was the only instrument that could both detect the first Soviet and American satellites and transmit instructions to them. Amazing as it now seems, the need for such a telescope had escaped both the telecommunications industry and the military leaders of both superpowers.

Despite its spectacular success, which included tracking the Sputnik 1 satellite mission in 1957, the government did nothing to alter the remaining debt, being bound by the iron restraint of Treasury rules. It was Lord Nuffield who did so, thereby demonstrating the superiority of aristocratic, rather than state support, to science – and indeed to all intellectual activity, a view which Lovell expressed frequently and forcefully to the end of his life.

Sir Fred Hoyle’ obituary of Sir Bernard Lovell. I fear Hoyle is right — at least if we realise we need more Fred Hoyles. Now, they are not aristocrats, but US philanthropists.

 

Not a literal quote, but an impressionism.

You are a participant in whatever happens… and there is chaos.

You are not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic

Optimism and pessimism all together. Joi Ito here.