From an article in this week’s Economist:

• 1:4 students live in purpose built halls of residence
• in 2006, 82% were owned by universities; the figure is now 59%
• private halls are 40% more expensive
• London rent average is £220 per week ( in digs in 1978, in Newcastle,
• I paid a rent of £1:85 per week, although the building  was subsequently condemned)
• private halls have increased their rents by 20% since 2012.
• ‘UCL have put up rents by 56%’ since 2009 (UCL put the figure at 40%)

 

This article about a UK trainee who went to Brazil to increase his clinical experience in plastic surgery is worth a read. Several things caught my eye:

[He] gained more surgical experience during a two month elective in Brazil than during his two year foundation training

The Instituto Ivo Pitanguy runs a three year residency programme—separate from the national plastic surgery programme—with a focus on technical surgical training. [emphasis added]

Successful applicants need to have completed two years of general surgery before passing the entry examination. These residents pay a fee of 4000 reals (£700) a month for the duration of the residency and are not paid. This might not seem like an enticing prospect, but trainees usually support themselves through locum work, and in return they receive three years of outstanding training and operating experience.

The clinic is always busy, so the 60 residents have plenty of opportunity to perform operations as they progress through the programme. First year residents assist the surgeons and are responsible for closing wounds. Second year residents have a greater role during operations in preparation for the final year, when residents perform around 80 operations as lead surgeons, with an unscrubbed supervisor.

Nice post from Donald Clark:10 ways MOOCs have forced Universities into a rethink.

One morsel of clickbait, which just happens to be true, is:

A common question when MOOCs are mentioned is, “How do you monetise MOOCs? It’s usually delivered with a ‘Gotcha’ tone. The financial and business models in education are complex. However, we can be sure of one thing, the current University system can’t monetise itself. The whole structure is propped up by state spending and huge loan books.

It’s no secret that therapies that look promising in mice rarely work in people. But too often, experimental treatments that succeed in one mouse population do not even work in other mice, suggesting that many rodent studies may be flawed from the start. Nature

As it says, ‘no secret’. Science is usually self correcting, but the time period may vary. What has always puzzled me is how in the areas of biology I know something about, mouse work has been so informative; whereas in others, all is seems to be good for, is publication is high impact journals. For those interested in pigmentation, mice have been wonderfully informative, whereas for those other bits of skin biology I am familiar with (ahem), like inflammation, mice have been less helpful. A part of me wonders whether some of this is  due to whether you are trying to identify potential pathways, or whether you are trying to build interventions based on particular pathways. And finally, lest there be any confusion, I am not one of those who believes we haven’t learned a lot from animals.

This made me laugh. I have got used to MC1R mutations and red hair in Neanderthals, but this article (full research paper in Science here) brought a smile to my face, even if I am still a little hazy on the genetics.

JBS Haldane once commented ‘that God would appear to be inordinately fond of beetles’, based on the observation that the world was so full of different species of beetles.

I have long had similar thoughts about seborrhoeic keratoses. God must be inordinately fond of them. Seborrhoeic keratoses are benign skin tumours, some of which contain identified mutations: they generally attract little serious research interest (apart from yours truly, of course). However, their significance clinically is enormous. This is because they are incredibly common as people move into their fourth decades and beyond, and because they vary so much in their morphological appearance. They mimic everything, including melanoma. So, most things referred as possible melanomas in many clinics, will turn out to be harmless seborrhoeic keratoses. Of course, a more cynical view is that since seborrhoeic keratoses are such great mimics, they in effect create lots of work for dermatologists. I suppose I should say thank you, next time I bump into one of my distant cousins, but the basis of the link — if confirmed — also deserves some serious mechanistic thought.

But sounds great……

Nice  BBC radio programme. Impressed with the presenters, rather than yours truly.

I had thought I ‘got’ Open as in terms of OER, Creative commons and the like, but clearly I am missing something (and in truth I have suspected I am missing something, for quite a while). This is from Stephen Downes:

Your new word for the day is ‘copyfraud’. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia: “Copyfraud refers to false copyright claims by individuals or institutions with respect to content that is in the public domain. Such claims are wrongful because material that is not copyrighted is free for all to use, modify and reproduce.” In the current case, copyfraud also applies to materials that are license CC-by. As Peter Murray-Rust writes in the GOAL mailing list, “Springer took all the images published in its journals and stamped COPYRIGHT SPRINGER over all of them and offered them for sale at 60 USD. This included all my publications in BioMedCentral, a CC-BY Open Access journal…” In another post he notes that Oxford University Press is “charging large prices for re-use of CC-BY articles (e.g. 400 USD for use in an academic course pack for 100 students.”

Clearly my idea of what CC-BY meant is wrong. There are other issues however I don’t understand. You use material from the web marked CC-BY-SA in a lecture or video that is hosted on a private site (say a university VLE). How does this work?

Marvin Minsky has died. There is a wonderful description in Steven Levy’s ‘Hackers’ about Minsky and The Tech Model Railway Club and Midnight Computing Wiring Society at MIT. It is inconceivable now to imagine a university tolerating such a state of affairs: the state of affairs that was key to the development of the modern world. Rebellion and discovery are often of a piece.

The people in charge of the lab, particularly Marvin Minsky, were very understanding about these things. Marvin, as the hackers called him (they invariably called each other by last name, knew that the hacker ethic was what kept the lab productive, and he was not going to tamper with one of the crucial components of hackers. On the other hand, there was Stu Nelson, constantly at odds with the rules, a hot potato who got hotter when he was eventually caught red-handed at phone hacking. Something have to be done. So Minsky called up his good friend Ed Friedkin, and told him he had this problem with an incredibly brilliant 19 year old who had a penchant for getting into sophisticated mischief. Could Fredkin hire him?

Stewart Brand’s description nails it:

I think that hackers — dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers — other most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the US Constitution….. No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate America, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the end. The quietest of all the ‘60s subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and powerful. 

Professor Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Media Lab, says:

“Marvin talked in riddles that made perfect sense, were always profound and often so funny that you would find yourself laughing days later.”

And from the Economist’s obituary.

He also, almost by the way, did other things, such as inventing a confocal scanning microscope and robotic “seeing hands” for surgery. His own intelligence continually leapt between postulations and speculations, all delivered with an endearing smile: what a thinking machine would have to notice when it drove down the highway, whether robots could be made tiny enough to beat up aphids or dexterous enough to put a pillow in a pillowcase, what would happen if you wrote “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” to a different rhythm. Students flocked to his evening classes, never quite knowing what mental challenge he would toss out next.

 With a research budget increasing to $71bn in 2017, at a time when the overall defence budget is shrinking, new technology is a key part of US efforts to maintain its military edge over China and Russia.

FT [direct link to this aside]