The Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2011/12/britain-and-eu-summit
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Cameron on EU seems inconsistent
Sunday, December 11th, 2011What’s Occupy Wall Street about?
Saturday, December 10th, 2011“let me tell you about what they’re talking about. They’re complaining that Wall Street wrecked the economy three years ago and nobody’s held responsible for that. Not a single person’s been indicted or convicted for destroying twenty percent of our national net worth accumulated over two centuries. They’re upset about the fact that Wall Street has iron control over the economic policies of this country, and that one party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and the other party caters to them as well.” Grayson, L.
Money (xkcd graphic)
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011Excellent graphic about alarmingly large numbers of whatever money is
I suspect money is fungible promises, and states get into serious trouble when people doubt promises against them will be delivered.
UK GP Computing as an exemplar
Thursday, November 17th, 2011Ewan writes a historical view on why it worked.
I think:-
Too many of the factors allowing or encouraging success have been subsumed by the administration of the NHS now.
The time to move from closed source proprietary systems with what the NHS managers keep calling “silos” of information they encourage came a while back, and the opportunity remains to be seized, in the UK.
How to make a Drachma out of a Crisis?
Wednesday, November 9th, 2011The Euro is on the whole a good thing, I think, but Greece is looking shaky. Actually Capitalism in its rapacious instantiation is looking shaky, although the problem of how better to solve accumulating surplus value still looks harder.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Sunday, November 6th, 2011Well worth reading.
Good photographs.
Stallman lacks tact, and many people like to misquote and exaggerate or extrapolate, but he has not said anything ill of the dead he has not many times said ill of the living.
Jobs was a great man, few of these have been unflawed or wholly beneficial in all ways.
Qantas Troubles
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011The lockout following wildcat strikes is a nuisance for anyone caught in it but the airline does seem likely to need changes against the current economy.
GMC Cocked up.
Thursday, October 20th, 2011Panel Members:
Dr A Morgan, Chairman (Medical)
Dr Sheila Willatts (Medical)
Mr J Campbell (Lay)
Legal Assessor: Mrs A Black
Secretary to the Panel: Ms J Smith
“Ruling on the appeal, Lord Justice Girvan added:
“The internal inconsistencies in her previous version of events …”
“The finding by the panel that the patient presented as a consistent, reliable and credible witness is one that no tribunal properly directing itself on the evidence could have made in the circumstances.”
The GMC is currently presenting a series of questions on Facebook about how doctors should be regulated. Perhaps a useful exercise would be for them to ask how regulators should be regulated, and how they should work. The GMC has escaped the control of the profession it purports to protect and supervise, and has not demonstrated that it does not need to be controlled and supervised. It lacks the confidence of the profession which when we elected it it possessed.
Federate PACS with FLOSS
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011PACS – picture archiving systems used to stroe and retrieve xrays and other medical images. Each xray department gets one as it give up film.
FLOSS – Free (Libre) and Open Source Software. The UK.gov abbreviation for stuff such as Linux, Apache, WordPress and of course this.
“Dicoogle is a Open Source project that aims (for now) to index DICOM repositories. Thus, you can search in every field that the image contains. Moreover, Dicoogle is a distributed repository. You can have several repositories in your intranet and they communicate with each other, creating a federate view of the repository.”
This appears to be a sensible approach to the problem asserted to exist and to be solved by sucking the whole country’s medical images into a single separate and of course new and additional storage system.
It is an easy and well-enough understaood problem that I expect the implementation to be adequate, and the design means it fails gracefully, of course.
And is philosophically satisfactory.
We need more nuclear power generators
Saturday, October 8th, 2011Otherwise it is lights out in the hothouse.
Getting in the way at Hinkley Point doesn’t help. Encouraging molten Fluoride reactors and Thorium use may help.