Category: Media

Why Britain might love its socialised healthcare to death

The National Health Service combines local heritage, British fair play and free, good-quality healthcare with the employment of more than one million people in England alone. That gives the NHS enormous popularity – and also makes it very difficult to reform.

Originally published on Beacon.

Continue reading “Why Britain might love its socialised healthcare to death”

Review: The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser – how to burst these bubbles

I referred to filter bubbles a while ago, and thought I should get around to reading the book of that name by Eli Pariser. Written in 2011, and subtitled ‘What the internet is hiding from you’, it is an interesting review of web personalisation and its dangers, current and future. It takes as its starting point Google’s announcement in December 2009 that it would personalise every search result, so trapping web users in an ‘Adderall Society’, where like users of that drug they become more focused and less curious.

It’s an interesting read, and Mr Pariser – who among other things has been executive director of the online campaigning service MoveOn.org and is now co-founder of viral-with-a-purpose social media firm Upworthy– has civic-minded concerns about people becoming ignorant of hard news, particularly from abroad, as the likes of Google and Facebook serve up only what someone is likely to click on.

However, while it’s good that The Filter Bubble includes a section headed ‘What individuals can do’, I think quite a lot remained unsaid. The section suggests you delete cookies regularly, and there’s a good comparison of Twitter and Facebook, the former with simple rules and lots of user control, the latter with complex, often-shifting ones which have been known to change a user’s semi-private data into public. Continue reading “Review: The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser – how to burst these bubbles”

What to read on Beacon, as well as the Ends of Britain

Beacon, which hosts my series the Ends of Britain – which last Friday looked at the controversy over whether an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK could share the pound – now has more than 70 writers. If you subscribe to one you get access to all.

To read the articles mentioned in this post in full, you will need to be a subscriber – but you can sign up for a 14 day free trial here. So why not do that, then come back and read the rest of the post? Continue reading “What to read on Beacon, as well as the Ends of Britain”

NHS news is now easier to search with the @ImpatientNHS news database

impatient-nhs-logo-2I set up the @ImpatientNHS Twitter feed of NHS news and comment articles in August 2012. It’s been running automatically ever since, now tracking more than two dozen specific sources and hundreds more through Google News, with 443 followers currently. It’s not perfect – in particular, stories from some sites have a habit of appearing more than once, possibly through them being republished. But it doesn’t miss much.

Updated: this concerned an online archive of these tweets. It has since been suspended due to technical problems. Continue reading “NHS news is now easier to search with the @ImpatientNHS news database”

Made it! The Ends of Britain starts later this week on Beacon

Thank you to everyone who has supported me to start The Ends of Britain series on the future of the UK on Beacon. With 25 backers and $463 pledged – including five subscribers in for a full year – it’s going ahead.

If you are one of those who backed me, you should receive an email from Beacon saying it’s all on. You should also get access to everything published on Beacon. I plan to blog here about some of the other writers on the service soon, although it’s easy to explore.

And it’s not too late to subscribe for the first article in The Ends of Britain series later this week – you can do so here.

Again, thank you!