“In the harshest single sentence of an otherwise gentlemanly book, he calls the French educational system “a vast insider-trading crime”.

An economist’s guide to the real world

The distinctive characteristic of academics, their DNA, is doubt.” 

Quoted in: An economist’s guide to the real world

Just as the fundamental business model of a university is truth, I would add. Yes, there are still some of us dinosaurs around.

Seems a nice term of phrase for what the academy might once have been (and still should be). But I guess the the definition of the Fourth Estate in a networked world is broad.

“De Correspondent” and the blueprint for a successful membership model

Recent years have seen a major drive by government, the NHS, and mental health charities to change attitudes towards mental health and to raise its profile in line with physical health. In a crescendo of media coverage, royals and celebrities have opened up about their own struggles.

Despite having welcomed Prince Harry’s interview about his mental health in April, Wessely believes we can have too much of a good thing: too much awareness. He particularly questions surveys in which most students report mental health problems. “We should stop the awareness now. In fact, if anything we might be getting too aware. One wonders what’s happening when you have 78% of students telling their union they have mental health problems-you have to think, ‘Well, this seems unlikely.'”

Simon Wessely quoted in the BMJ 23 September 2017 p433

Enrico Fermi was big on back-of-the-envelope calculations. I cannot match his brain, but I like playing with simple arithmetic. Here are some notes I made several years ago after reading a paper from Mistry et al in the British Journal of Cancer on cancer incidence projections for the UK.

For melanoma we will see a doubling between now (then) and 2030, half of this is increase in age specific incidence and half due to age change. Numbers of cases for the UK:

• 1984: 3,000 cases
• 2007: 11,000
• 2030: 22,000

If we assume we see 15 non-melanomas (mimics) for every melanoma, the number of OP visits with or without surgery is as follows.

• 1984: 45,000 cases
• 2007: 165,000 cases
• 2030: 330,000 cases

This is for melanoma. The exponent for non-melanoma skin cancer is higher, so these numbers are an underestimate of the challenge we face. Once you add in ‘awareness campaigns’, things look even worse.

At present perhaps 25% of consultant dermatology posts are empty (no applicants), and training numbers and future staffing allowing for working patterns, reducing. Waiting times to see a dermatologist in parts of Wales are over a year. The only formal training many receive in dermatology as an undergraduate can be measured in days. Things are worse than at any time in my career. It is with relief, that I say I am married to a dermatologist.

For example, graduate stipends at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are capped at $23,844 and are not adjusted for cost of living. To help out, universities often waive tuition fees, which can sometimes be more than a student’s income.

Editorial in Nature.

Many of us held down a summer job during our school days to earn a bit of cash. Some, such as those who attended the fictional Scumbag College, did everything they could to avoid work. Things look a bit more draconian over in Zhengzhou where, as my colleague Yuan Yang has revealed, thousands of students have been working 11-hour shifts to assemble the iPhone X. There is nothing wrong with a bit of hard work but this situation constitutes illegal overtime for student interns under Chinese law. Six students told the Financial Times that they were among a group of 3,000 from Zhengzhou Urban Rail Transit School sent in September to work at the local facility run by Apple supplier Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn. The mandatory three-month stint was called “work experience”.

FT

The growth of medical tourism in Poland has been mirrored in other central European countries. Hungary also has a reputation for specialising in dental services for foreigners, while Czech Republic has developed a market in cataract surgery. Poland is well known for its plastic surgeons as well as dentists.

Medical tourism on the rise in central and eastern Europe

Neurophobia’, a term first coined by Jozefowicz in 1994, describes medical students’ fear of neurology 2. It is a chronic illness that begins early in medical school 4. Physicians and medical students alike often state that neurology is the most difficult subject in the medical school curriculum, and that their knowledge about the subject matter is limited, leading to a lack of confidence in managing neurology patients 5, 6, 7. [link]

There are lots of other phobias, too. Pick one up as you check out of med school.

This is from John Naughton, although I haven’t the URL to hand. I read it five years ago.

Like democracy, public universities are also ‘inefficient’ — often, in my experience, woefully so. And only some of that inefficiency can be defended in terms of academic freedoms; much of it is down to the way university culture has evolved, the expectations of academic staff, poor management (rather than enlightened administration), and so on — things that could be fixed without undermining the really important values embodied by the idea of a university. The advent of serious tuition fees in English universities will have the effect of highlighting some of the more egregious deficiencies — poor (or at best uneven) teaching quality, little pastoral care, archaic pedagogical methods, etc. But any attempt to remedy these problems is likely to be seen as interference with cherished academic freedoms, and resisted accordingly. Already, however, students are beginning to ask questions: why, for example, should they pay £9,000 a year for crowded lectures, ‘tutorial groups’ of 50 or more, zero pastoral care and — in some cases — lousy social facilities? Why should complaints about the crass incompetence of a particular lecturer be ignored by the Head of his department? (These are gripes I’ve heard from students recently, though not at my university.)

Universities engage in different activities, with different norms and timeframes. You have to ’ship’ teaching, at least the ‘low-level’ teaching that makes up most of the bums on seats. Advanced teaching and research should march to a different pace, and the last thing you should be doing is ‘shipping product’. But John’s comments are spot on.