Painting over humanity

Robert Jenrick has cartoon murals painted over at children’s asylum centre | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

Murals of cartoon characters including Mickey Mouse and Baloo from The Jungle Book painted on the walls of an asylum seeker reception centre to welcome children have been removed on the orders of the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick.

The murals were painted over because he thought they were too welcoming and sent the wrong message — to children…

Doctors, medicine and the NHS 1966

Like many of my colleagues I no longer try to dissuade my juniors from leaving to work in the United States. Medicine is more important than nationalism and will outlive the indifference of governments: it is better that a good man should work where he can make the best contribution to the advance of medicine than that he should stay to be frustrated by a society too myopic to appreciate his potential. A dead patient presents no economic problem.

It would be naive to express surprise at the equanimity with which successive governments have regarded the deteriorating hospital service, since it is in the nature of governments to ignore inconvenient situations until they become scandalous enough to excite powerful public pressure. Nor, perhaps, should one expect patients to be more demanding: their uncomplaining stoicism springs from ignorance and fear rather than fortitude; they are mostly grateful for what they receive and do not know how far it falls short of what is possible. It is less easy to forgive ourselves…..Indeed election as president of a college, a vice chancellor, or a member of the University Grants committee usually spells an inevitable preoccupation with the politically practicable, and insidious identification with central authority, and a change of role from informed critic to uncomfortable apologist.

Originally published in the Lancet, 1966,2, 647-54.(This version in Remembering Henry, edited by Stephen Lock and Heather Windle).

Henry Miller was successively Dean of Medicine, and VC of the University of Newcastle. No such present day post-holder would write with such clarity or honesty.

G-g-generation

Went to see The Who last night at Edinburgh castle. Great show, and the weather blessed us. First time I had been to a concert in the open air since seeing Van Morrison at Stirling castle over a decade ago. Playlist here.

Two ‘wee guys’ sat in front of us. The seats were not made to measure. The two of them must have weighed in close to that of the French front-row. They were both thirsty, requiring frequent radiator top-ups; leakage was not marginal.

They were close, perhaps brothers or cousins. Each time a song started they would turn to each other, make  eye contact, smile, and then start what I can only describe as star-jumping within a combined space. When they looked around, if they saw that somebody else too had guessed the song from the first bar they would beam big smiles. I was so honoured.

Towards the end of the show, one turned around, facing me, and said The Who was his Dad’s favourite band. Eyes full of tears, he wanted to say more but, unlike Roger Daltrey, choking up, his voice couldn’t manage it.

Plain silly

Economist Daron Acemoglu: ‘When mistakes involve powerful technologies, you’re going to have trouble’ | Financial Times

He imagines a day when teachers could use AI to create individual lesson plans for every student, or nurses might be able to take on much greater roles in, for example, diagnosing diseases. “Why is it that nurses cannot prescribe medications? Why must everything go through this very hierarchical approach where you have to call a doctor [to do that]?” As it is today, the people who spend the most time with patients — nurses, not doctors — are those who are paid and valued the least. Using technology to empower such workers would raise overall productivity and quality of care while also raising wages.

Why not? Simply because doctors and nursing are complementary professions. If you do the prescribing and diagnosing, you become the doctor. The danger is that the whole ethos of ‘caring’ — what was once so central — is being lost. I remember the teaching point: nurses sat on beds talking to patients without seemingly doing anything else are working.

The book the FT is reviewing (Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity) has been well received but the argument behind this quote seems to me very superficial.

Boris Johnson exits as he entered, with deceit and contempt

Boris Johnson exits as he entered, with deceit and contempt | Financial Times

Truly, nothing in his public life exposed him like the leaving of it.

Robert Shrimsley

Governments can do it too.

Crypto-gram: June 15, 2023 – Schneier on Security

Now, tech giants are developing ever more powerful AI systems that don’t merely monitor you; they actually interact with you—and with others on your behalf. If searching on Google in the 2010s was like being watched on a security camera, then using AI in the late 2020s will be like having a butler. You will willingly include them in every conversation you have, everything you write, every item you shop for, every want, every fear, everything. It will never forget. And, despite your reliance on it, it will be surreptitiously working to further the interests of one of these for-profit corporations.

There’s a reason Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other large tech companies are leading the AI revolution: Building a competitive large language model (LLM) like the one powering ChatGPT is incredibly expensive. It requires upward of $100 million in computational costs for a single model training run, in addition to access to large amounts of data. It also requires technical expertise, which, while increasingly open and available, remains heavily concentrated in a small handful of companies. Efforts to disrupt the AI oligopoly by funding start-ups are self-defeating as Big Tech profits from the cloud computing services and AI models powering those start-ups—and often ends up acquiring the start-ups themselves.

Yet corporations aren’t the only entities large enough to absorb the cost of large-scale model training. Governments can do it, too. It’s time to start taking AI development out of the exclusive hands of private companies and bringing it into the public sector. The United States needs a government-funded-and-directed AI program to develop widely reusable models in the public interest, guided by technical expertise housed in

I worry the UK government will sell all of the rights to NHS image libraries and raw patient data, rather than realise that the raw material is the gold dust. The models and tech will become a utility. Unless you steal, annotation of datasets is still the biggest expense ( the NHS considers it ‘exhaust’). Keep the two apart.

Acute myeloid leukaemia – The Lancet

Acute myeloid leukaemia accounts for over 80 000 deaths globally per annum, with this number expected to double over the next two decades. The 5-year relative survival for patients in the USA diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia is currently 30·5%, improved from only 18% in the year 2000.5

Sometimes raw numbers — rather than rates — are appropriate. But not often. Instead, I suspect authors quote raw numbers to bolster ‘importance’. I have even see figures projected into the next quarter century. Why stop there, why not the next century?

In general and in this case the authors should have quote mortality rates. The standard, which usually works is per 100,000 of population. In the case, AML, a truly dreadful disease has a mortality rate of close to 1:100,000. The rate figure allows easy comparisons with other causes of death without having to check on the population numbers of the world population or other denominator.

It just bugs me. The Lancet is full of this sloppy editing. And how much of the projected increase is due to changes in the age structure of the world population? Yes, it all matters, but the frequent coupling of partisanship and hype needs a polite divorce.

Shared something or other

Techno-Narcissism | No Mercy / No Malice

As Sacha Baron Cohen said: “Democracy is dependent on shared truths, and autocracy on shared lies.”

2001 as metaphor

New Bayer chief plans a radically different style to cut bureaucracy | Financial Times

Anderson wants managers to overcome the traditional top-down approach and allow a team to develop a life of its own.

He likes to compare the situation of senior managers with that of the astronaut in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 — A Space Odyssey”. In the science fiction movie, the scientists aboard a spaceship gradually find out that the computer had taken over the mission.

In one of his first meetings with Bayer managers, Anderson played a clip from the film. His message was that “the astronaut is us, and we are no longer in control” but at the same time, the system “often is fundamentally flawed”.

Which reminds me of the doctors and nurses stuck within the hull that is the NHS, directed in this case by the political masters who lack the guts to actually even set foot on the ship.

On discovering the truth

Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92 | US news | The Guardian

‘I’ve never regretted doing it’: Daniel Ellsberg on 50 years since leaking the Pentagon

In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.

“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”

On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.

He was 92….