Clinical trials are broken

Clinical trials are broken

In the same spirit as the Placebo story, Ben Goldacre reports on a significant breakage in the way we run clinical trials. NB this doesn’t mean that the theoretical construct is broken, merely that we are human in its implementation and let other factors...
Ten years of e-Government

Ten years of e-Government

A valuable reminder of what was going on in the e-Government era (and funny to see fishinglicence.co.uk there – I joined just after the service had been squashed). The summary is that we started well, but maybe without direction, and then lost our way a little...
Space-time-travel data from mobiles

Space-time-travel data from mobiles

Interesting thought: how would the phone companies replay to you the analytics from the vast amount of spatiotemporal information they gather every day on you? Fascinating thought if you could see that they implicitly know your home, work, friends, favourite...
National Information Exchange Model

National Information Exchange Model

The NIEM is a new undertaking in the US, predominantly for emergency situations. However, the general idea of a shared language and categorisation to support sharing between organisations is spot on and a larger version of what we are trying to do in the NHS.
Placebo effect

Placebo effect

Pharmaceutical-based medicine will be transformed when we work out how to utilise the placebo effect fully. It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.I guess there will be...