”Davos specialises in projecting a future from a recent past that took it by surprise,” Edward Luce quoting himself

This reminds me of a proof of calculus I learned all those years ago: infinitesimals, and all that.

This article in the NEJM gets to the kernel of one of the major problems in medicine: the increasing dysfunction of doctor-patient interaction fuelled — in part — by awful IT, and a systematic ability to admit that it is no longer possible to actually do what is required within the ‘allocated’ time. In many industries the goal is to match task with skill and, wherever possible, to reduce costs by allocating low skill tasks to those who cost less: ‘right person at the right time’. There is a variation of this in medicine: those charged with ‘support’ or undertaking ‘low skill tasks’ have just been removed, meaning all tasks — both high and low — are done by the same practitioner, but without any change in time allocated. This is akin to asking the pilot of a plane to serve you snacks and check you in, but keep the schedules the same.

In terms of medicine, that this happens is not so much a manifestation of a managerial view that places little value on ‘care’ (true), nor where business innovation (sic) is viewed as synonymous with sacking people (true), but a complete failure to understand their own business and what their own product is. In an ideal world businesses like this should go bust. The problems are when: they are run by the government; there are third party payers; or there is actively created informational asymmetry. Sometimes all three apply.

TIJABP

This is from the obituary of Ben Barres [link]

An utterly committed researcher, Professor Barres would regularly work until 2am or 3am. He “slept on the floor of my small office”, recalled Professor Raff. “Every morning when I arrived and opened the door, it would whack him in the head – he eventually learned to sleep facing the opposite direction.”

Somewhere, I cannot remember where, after one of his seminars, his intellectual depth (Ben Barres) was judged more favourably to that of his ‘sister’. His sister was his his former ‘self’, Barbara Barres. Such a neat experimental design to tease apart causality.

I too worked somewhere where people slept overnight in the lab, although I think the deciding factor there was an inability to find or pay for a suitable flat, rather than enthusiasm

Not the usual stuff Nobel Laureates spiel, but take a look. An article in Quartz is here and Wikipedia is useful on him

I like the ‘biogibberish’ epithet. And cannot help but suspect he would agree with David Hubel’s line that reading most papers now is like chewing sawdust. But you can see the fire still burns: you have to be dissatisfied with the state of the universe. How polite or angry you are is a question of personal style.

As each year passes, the once celebrated barriers between man and the other animals become less secure. Once we were the only tool makers, once we were the ones who discovered drugs or used technology. This report is about how finches commandeer cigarette butts for a new purpose.

That idea has been around, though never proved, since 2012. This was when Dr Suárez-Rodríguez showed that nests which had butts woven into them were less likely to contain bloodsucking parasites than were nests that did not. What she was unable to show was whether the nest-builders were collecting discarded cigarettes deliberately for their parasite-repelling properties, or whether that parasite protection was an accidental consequence of butts being a reasonably abundant building material.

Economist.

And finches, again! Where would  biology be without Darwin’s finches?

The value of your mountains of data is becoming obvious, especially as you continue to push into new areas that collect more information about consumers while binding them closer to you, such as the home microphones you are careful to call home speakers. Link

Remember your physics 101: when is a speaker a microphone? And of course this is not all new — see the Intercept article (with great graphics) here

The OU’s vice-chancellor, Peter Horrocks, says it must adapt to a world where Facebook or LinkedIn could start doing degree courses on a global scale

[Link]

I think this is just silly. There are lots of things universities do badly, and there are a lot of things they have done well. And it is true most seem to be unaware of how they need to change, and what they need to hang onto.

The problem in my neck of the woods is that many of the proposed solutions to these problems risk making things worse. A lot worse. And in any case, using Eblen Moglen’s terminology, how long do you think the thug with the hoodie will be running things.

I am not a big fan of lectures. The single best piece of advice I received at medical school was not to attend. I therefore skipped lectures for three years (although I got the handouts). It is not that all lectures are bad, they are not. It is just that often they are used for ‘content delivery’, much as we think about delivery of a takeaway. They are ill suited to this role, now that we can write and distribute text cheaply. Good lectures serve a different purpose, but you don’t need too many of them and, in my experience of medicine, there are very few people who lecture well. Lecturing well means choosing those fragments of a domain that lend themselves to this media type. Lectures are (and should be) theatre, but the theatre of the mind needs more.

By chance, I came across the following thoughts from the preface to the Ascent of Man (the TV series and the book). Bronowski understood many things, and I still marvel at how prescient his ideas were.

If television is not used to make these thoughts concrete, it is wasted. The unravelling of ideas is, in any case, an intimate and personal endeavour, and here we come to the common ground between television and the printed book. Unlike a lecture or a cinema show, television is not directed to crowds. It is addressed to two or three people in a room, as a conversation face to face – a one-sided conversation for the most part, as the book is, but homely and Socratic nevertheless. To me, absorbed in the philosophic undercurrents of knowledge, this is the most attractive gift of television, by which it may yet become as persuasive an intellectual force as the book.

The printed book has one added freedom beyond this: it is not remorselessly bound to the forward direction of time, as any spoken discourse is. The reader can do what the viewer and the listener cannot, which is to pause and reflect, turn the pages back and the argument over, compare one fact with another and, in general, appreciate the detail of evidence without being distracted by it.

Then there was PowerPoint and lecture capture.

As Bryan Caplan points out in his new book, The Case Against Education, most of the earnings differential associated with college does not reflect stuff colleges teach their students, but rather the already-existing advantages that college graduates possess (more intelligence, greater discipline, more ambition, more prior learning, etc.) that a diploma reveals to employers. The Sheepskin Effect is real. We expend enormous resources in producing pieces of paper (diplomas) conveying labor market information. The move toward getting a master’s degree—more diplomas—aggravates an already hugely inefficient system. [link]

This of course is the debate about what is valuable about the HBS is not what they teach you, but their ability to recognise those who are already likely to succeed. Many years ago, Paul Graham wrote a great essay touching on so many key issues that Higher Ed wants to wish away.

Luis von Ahn, somebody who has changed the world on more than one occasion, has also been awarded a teaching award from his own university. Take  his tips seriously ;-)

• Pick great TAs. Over the years, I’ve had the most amazing set of TAs, and this teaching award is more than 50% due to them. If you’ve TA’d for me,I would like to give each of you part of the cash prize associated with this award. Too bad there isn’t one.
• When you don’t know the answer to a question say it’s outside the scope of the course.
• Teaching evaluations are highly correlated with the grade the students think they will get at the time of filling out the surveys. Make your course easy, then crush them on the final.
• Never, under any circumstances, disclose the exact grade cutoffs at the end of the semester. Somebody has to get the highest B, and they won’t be happy. “You’re lucky you got a B, dude.”
• Finish lecture 10 minutes early every time – they love this (and they’ll never know you love it even more).
• Easiest way to get rid of whiners without yielding: “I’ll take that into account when calculating your final grade, dude.”

[link]