Opec may have done the world a good turn for once: It is not often that the interests of an industry cartel and the global environment are aligned, but the Opec agreement to limit oil production may prove to be just one. The agreement, for the first cut in eight years, had an immediate impact on the...
Source: independent.co.uk
OpenTrials API information: Since our beta launch last week, we’ve had a steady stream of technical questions about how to use and interact with the data that powers OpenTrials. Good news! Right now we have a public API avail…
Source: opentrials.net
Good read - The Path. A quick overview of 5 Chinese philosophies making them relevant to how we should think about how we live today. I've not read much about them and assumed they were pretty much ancient and irrelevant, reduced to one-liner aphorisms, but Michael Puett has been teaching a popular...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Good read. The most good you can do by Peter Singer. This is about effective altruism. If you are going to give away your money how can ensure you give it to the most effective resources? More than that if you've decided to give away money what is the best job that you can do? There are some extreme...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Why people block ads ... and no they won't turn their adblocker off. "Here’s how people who block ads justify it: Convenience, control, and avoiding slow load times: Here's some good news and bad news for publishers losing sleep over the rise of adblocking: The good news is that most people don't...
Source: niemanlab.org
Good read. "Humanising healthcare" by Dr Margaret Hannah. Great ideas briefly and clearly explained. The book outlines an approach in Fife to reduce winter pressures on beds by encouraging patients, staff, and community to seek better health care. The ideas are based on Alaska's Southcentral Foundations's...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Watch the world’s first 360° VR surgery live stream on Thursday: VR operations: it’s all about stitch ‘em up, not shoot ’em up. "On May 22 2014, Mr Shafi Ahmed, consultant general colorectal, and
laparoscopic surgeon at Barts NHS trust was in the news for bringing his
craft a good deal...
Source: arstechnica.com
Just read the "Happy Life" story - saving abandoned children on the streets of Nairobi. This is about a children rescue centre in Nairobi started 14 years ago and has now expanded to caring directly for around 100 children across two sites. They have offered for adoption over 170 children. The city...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Good read. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. A powerful book on animal rights written 40 years ago (updated 20 years ago and re-issued recently with an introduction by Yuval Hariri) and having stood the test of time and debate. It is called 'the bible' of the animal rights movement and rightly so ......
Source: amazon.co.uk
Good read. Obliquity by John Kay on behavioural economics. "The world is complex, imperfectly known, and our knowledge of it is incomplete, and these things will remain true however much we learn and however much we analyse it." That is why we need to be 'oblique' or muddle through rather than be direct...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Good read. "Life on the Edge" by Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden covers the fascinating world of quantum biology. Could life be a delicate balance that organic molecules can provide to enable quantum coherence? The efficient quantum mechanisms of photosynthesis, magnetoreception, and enzymes are...
Source: amazon.co.uk
The Google search terms 'diabetes' and 'recipe' have contrasting patterns repeated each year over the festive period covering November to January. Could this be evidence of human behaviour from big data? I'm on a Big Data MOOC #FLbigdata and was introduced to this tool on Google. I've shown in the...
Source: google.com
eLearning Modules will Die… and 702010 will hold the Smoking Gun: "When talking about technology and learning it’s hard not to think about elearning modules. They’ve been the bread and butter of digital learning solutions for decades and the industry behind them has helped many, including myself,...
Source: learnnovators.com
Just finished reading Enabling Collaboration - a book on "achieving success through strategic alliances and partnerships" by Martin Echavarria (@coherence360). Getting things done invariably involves working with others and when those others are themselves complex organisations it requires some thought....
Source: enablingcollaboration.com
Printed Sensors Evaluated for Glucose Measurement in Exhaled Breath. Very interesting approach to measuring glucose using nanotechnology printing. The key to all these alternate sites (and methods) is how rapidly they track true blood glucose. Fingerprick capillary blood is just so good at that.
Source: medgadget.com
The rise of the robots
Excellent read but of a gloomy dystopian future where robots and software take over manual tasks (as they already have done) and also skilled labour displacing even highly skilled jobs in time. Healthcare might survive a little longer but physicians assistants empowered by...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Ofsted calls The Cornwall College Group a ‘catalyst’ for raising skills levels: STAFF and students across The Cornwall College Group are celebrating after the group was rated good in all categories by Ofsted. The report praises the expertise of teachers on all the campuses, the...
Source: westbriton.co.uk
Professor Nowotny's book (The Cunning of Uncertainty) celebrating the edge of what we know and the inevitable uncertainties around us. Touches on current issues such as finance, climate change, and terrorism. Written by a former president of the European Research Council the book covers many aspects...
Source: wiley.com
The 'Good Right' isn't caring. It just knows what's good for you: Each term, my 12-year-old daughter’s class has a “topic”. The topics display the interests of her teachers. Last term it was “poverty in our back yard”. This term they are lamenting the plight of girls around the world who do...
Source: independent.co.uk
State of Care 2014/15 from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) - room for improvement. "Demands are increasing on health and social care. State of Care – our
annual overview of health and social care in England – looks at the
trends, highlights examples of good and outstanding care, and identifies
...
Source: cqc.org.uk