In case you were wondering whether the traditional book publishers were as clueless about the digital age as the MSM and the recording industry the answer is YES. AppleInsider reports that the publishers are complaining that they do not get enough profit from e-books.
Publishers get roughly half — $13 — of the selling price of [...]
Yes, I know it is almost impossible to fathom such depravity, but some pharmaceutical advertisers make unsubstantiated claims in medical journals! (/SARCASM OFF) Such is the conclusion of Ben Goldacre of the Guardian, writing on the Bad Science Blog. Goldacre is writing about a recent research article in the Netherlands Journal of Medicine “Are claims of [...]
Back from South Africa, anyway. Jet lagged out of my gourd as well.
After a decade away (15 years since emigrating), South Africa now feels like a foreign land to me. The South African government claims that crime has dropped since the Apartheid years but I doubt very much that that is true. Absolutely everyone I [...]
The Auckland DHB say that Labtests has improved significantly over the past few months.
The Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia had come in to assess areas of concern, the health board itself had instigated intensive monitoring and there had been a “radical reduction” in complaints about the service, both from the public and the clinical [...]
The Herald is running this demented campaign at the moment to change the New Zealand flag. Clearly, anyone with a halfway-decent-functioning brain cell would realise that the best time to design a new flag would be if and when we decide to become a republic. Redesigning a flag at the moment is a meaningless exercise [...]
The Dominion Post writes yesterday about the looming shortage of oncologists. Four cancer doctors have resigned in a very short space of time. The article explores all the usual reasons why doctors leave, particularly the worrying ones of overwork, which can only be fixed by employing more hard-to-get doctors. What struck me, though, was the [...]
I noticed that Whale Oil was moaning about the short comings of the new iPad in a post the other day and a number of other people I have spoken to have decried it in a similar vein. No USB, no Camera, no 1080p playback, no flash etc.
That’s OK, whale. You are not the consumer [...]
Dr Tim Parke, the clinical director of the adult emergency department at Auckland City Hospital, puts his concerns into an article in the Herald today. He writes that, in his opinion, the proposed use of public facilities for extra private procedures will produce a two tier system where, eventually, richer patients will have better medical [...]
This is the section on health from the 2025 Task Force summary:
10. Health:
a. A funder-provider model should be reintroduced in the hospital sector, allowing much greater private sector involvement in the provision of taxpayer-funded services.
b. Universal (unrelated to income or health status) subsidies for doctors’ visits should be abolished.
c. Subsidies for prescription pharmaceuticals should be substantially reduced, with [...]
The left’s pointless inquiry into bank rates has now been released and can be accessed here. It says it is the Report of the Parliamentary Inquiry into Banking but it is not, of course, an official parliamentary inquiry, it is a Labour/Jim’s Vanity Party/Green inquiry and has no official government sanction as far as I [...]
