Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Meat Life
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The Guardian today reports that Britain’s top 50 state-funded comprehensive schools and academies have become more unequal over recent years, and are not reflective of the social composition of their surrounding areas, or of the remainder of the schools in England. Those of us from more equal societies might think this is not a big…
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Friday’s Guardian editorial featured a spit-flecked rant against internet pornography, starting and finishing with a demand to ban all of it. At the same time, the Daily Mail was putting up a strident demand for more efforts to police child porn. These articles are both profoundly wrong on facts and science, and breath-takingly hypocritical, not…
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I am finally away from my Greek Island and the “five star” resort with no internet access, so I am able to resume blogging. Yesterday evening I arrived in Athens for a three day stay, and as is my wont in a new city, the first thing I did was go out for a wander.…
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Recently a major economics paper was found to contain basic excel errors, among other problems, and an amusing storm of controversy is growing around the paper. The controversy arises because the paper was apparently quite influential in promoting the most recent round of austerity politics in the western world, and the authors themselves used it…
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Historians often struggle to come to grips with the more pathological eras of human history. The holocaust, world war 1, Stalin’s terror and the history of slavery are terrifying periods that are difficult for ordinary people to grasp. Why did people do these things? How did whole populations get caught up in frantic social movements…
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This week a student and I published an article in PLOS ONE examining the relationship between healthcare-related expenditure and financial catastrophe in Bangladesh. Because PLOS ONE is an open access journal it is possible to read the entire article free online, here. Our study was a statistical analysis of data from a probability-sampled survey of…
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Next week sees the release of the Ken Loach movie The Spirit of ’45, which describes the UK’s attempts to implement socialism through the ballot box between 1945 and 1951. Ultimately a failed project, this revolution has left one enduring and much-loved symbol, the UK National Health Service (NHS). In the same month as the…
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On Monday I was required to monitor at the Tokyo University undergraduate entrance exams. I shepherded 60 terrified 17 year olds through a 2.5 hour Japanese language test and then a 100 minute maths test. These tests were part of a two day examination process for those want to enter the humanities faculty of Tokyo…
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I received a very interesting hospital dataset recently, in excel format and containing some basic variable names and values in Japanese. These included the sex of the patient, the specialty under which they were admitted to hospital, and all variable names. Initially this would be reasonably easy to convert to English in excel before import,…
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Today’s edition of PLOS Medicine contains an article describing a possible cap-and-trade scheme for global health investment, designed around a cap-and-trade carbon permit scheme. Built on the assumption that health is a global public good, it proposes that all countries sign up to a centralized system of permits based on disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). If…
Compromise and Conceit 