Category: Articles

Election 2015 for Beacon: it’s looking like no overall control

After the score-draw Cameron-Miliband clash of last week, and the seven-way leaders’ debate last night, I have rounded up Election 2015 for Beacon readers with five weeks to go, concluding:

What all this means is Britain may well be about to elect no government, or at least not a stable one: as Jon Stewart used to brand US election campaigns, we’re heading for Indecision 2015. When in Britain no party gets a majority of seats on a local authority, the council concerned is said to belong to ‘no overall control’. On 8 May, we may have to hoist that sign over the whole country.

The full article is here.

Continue reading “Election 2015 for Beacon: it’s looking like no overall control”

NHS 111 & decision-support software for ComputerWeekly.com

My latest piece for ComputerWeekly.com looks at the use and limits of decision-support software in healthcare. It certainly has a role; the question is how much it can do, and how much needs to be dealt with by medical professionals.

NHS Direct‘s replacement NHS 111 has, at least initially, made heavier use of software, but is now making greater use of medical professionals. But any software-driven service is likely to be overly cautious, according to my interviewees. “It wasn’t known as NHS Redirect by the ambulance service for nothing,” says Janette Turner of the University of Sheffield.

Continue reading “NHS 111 & decision-support software for ComputerWeekly.com”

Marconi on The Lizard: article on radio history for The Register

Following my article on Goonhilly Earth Station in December, The Register has published the other piece I researched while visiting Cornwall last autumn: on how Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian working in Britain, transmitted a signal from Newfoundland to Cornwall and changed the world.

The article is based on two sites on The Lizard peninsula, the southernmost part of Great Britain: the Lizard Wireless Hut, right on its southern edge, and the Marconi Centre and Wireless Field, just above Poldhu Cove on the peninsula’s western coast. Continue reading “Marconi on The Lizard: article on radio history for The Register”

For Beacon: what links the British constitution and ridicule?

The answer, in my piece today on Beacon: neither have their rules written down, which makes them flexible. The British constitution is whatever Parliament decides it to be; and the rules on ridicule have become basically that you can make fun of people based on what they choose to do, not what they were born as.

That means making fun of someone on Fox News over what he chooses to say about Birmingham is absolutely fine, as is Boris Johnson saying this: Continue reading “For Beacon: what links the British constitution and ridicule?”

Article on NHS IT and The blunders of our governments

ComputerWeekly.com has published an article by me on the options for NHS organisations on bringing in electronic patient record (EPR) systems, such as big bang (Cambridge University Hospitals and Epic), open source, linking up through a portal and improving imaging (both PACS/RIS and scanning paper records). You can read it here, with copious links to more detailed coverage by ComputerWeekly.com including my piece on Cambridge University Hospitals from December.

The blunders of our governmentsHowever, the clearest lessons I have passed on come from The blunders of our governments, a detailed study of government idiocy by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. They describe the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), which failed to provide EPRs to most of England’s trusts, as “the veritable RMS Titanic of IT disasters” and “doomed-from-the-beginning”. As they point out, it was started at a meeting “between a prime minister [Tony Blair] who knew next to nothing about computers and a clutch of computer enthusiasts”; it was “wildly overambitious”, “far from being essential” and was apparently never subjected to “a serious – or even a back-of-the-envelope – cost-benefit analysis”. Continue reading “Article on NHS IT and The blunders of our governments”