Worth a glance #20

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  • 25/08/2015

    Surgical trainees seem unhappy (with good reason). Financial burden of surgical training  and  Why a career in surgery is no longer the golden ticket and Training to be a surgeon takes too long in the UK

    In Students’ Minds, Textbooks Are Increasingly Optional Purchases. See this quote : Publishers are pushing a new model, called an “integrated learning system,” in which students buy access to an online system that mixes reading materials, multimedia, and quiz and homework tools. I think some universities  are asleep.

    IBM Adds Medical Images to Watson, Buying Merge Healthcare for $1 Billion. I don’t know what to make of this, even though I have spent quite a few years trying to develop automated and semiautomated diagnostic systems. The old diagnostic melanoma systems looked promising, but they went no where — they were too brittle and lacking in robustness. And the size of training sets was far too small (by several orders of magnitude). On the other hand, if the total workflow is digital datasets can grow cheaply. A not in my lifetime moment? And Geoff Norman had some very cogent criticisms of the Watson approach to diagnosis, I remember.

    [Stop] US Universities From Hoarding Money ‘While nobody has suggested that quid pro quos were involved in these cases, these gifts highlight the symbiotic relationship between university endowments and the world of hedge funds and private equity funds.’

    Bullshit. FT article. Alive and well in my professional life