As a project manager for MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders), a medical emergency humanitarian agency, I attended this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, in the company of a friend and collaborator from Google who is involved in crisis mapping. We gave a presentation on some mapping work we had done […]
Tag: technology
Andrew Jones: Transforming patient care using technology
A search on one fantastic piece of technology, the internet, suggests that technology can be defined as “…the application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives.” When I think about it, other than talking to our patients, most of what we do in medicine involves some use of technology. In fact, increasingly communicating with […]
David Kerr: TV dinners
Almost every home in the country has one and unlike the background population they have tended to become slimmer and slimmer over recent years. The television set has managed to hold onto its place as the epicentre of home entertainment, despite the assault from the personal computer and the ubiquitous iPod, iPhone, and iPads. One […]
David Kerr: 2012, technology and all that
January is the month that heralds the end of procrastination. The New Year is traditionally the time that individuals and organisations look ahead and plan for the future. Among the usual resolutions to do more, eat less, and be more productive, there is also the ubiquitous past-time of predicting the near future. For healthcare the […]
David Kerr: Consumerism and the lost tribe in diabetes
Bad news makes good press. Last week the main medical news item was the release of the National Diabetes Audit figures for England and it made grim reading. The audit collected data from 152 Primary Care Trusts covering almost 70% of the population of people living with diabetes. The bottom line was that there are an […]
Tony Delamothe: TED Day One: The Return of the Human
The night before the TED conference began, “The King’s Speech” beat “The Social Network,” four Oscars to three. A friend with a stake in the outcome had argued that a story revolving around 21st century technology (Facebook) should have had an advantage over a story revolving around a 20th century one (radio). […]
Richard Smith: Will we follow Easter Islanders into extinction?
What contrary creatures we humans are. I begin the year convinced that our civilisation will collapse soon but at the same time enjoying the continuous Mozart on Radio 3, abandoning alcohol for the month with enthusiasm, and committing myself to three runs and 70 000 steps a week. As my wife, who also thinks that […]
Trish Groves: More from TED 2009
Bill Gates’ talk on the first day of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference got huge coverage, and within just a few hours some wag had turned Gates’ stunt of releasing mosquitoes into the audience into a Terry Gilliamesque game. […]
Trish Groves at TED 2009 – 4 February
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a movement as much as conference. It started 25 years ago with a couple of hundred technology experts and enthusiasts. Last year it attracted more than 1000 people and outgrew its home in Monterey, so it’s moved to Long Beach, California. Long term TEDsters say it’s broadened in the past […]
Julian Sheather on paying attention to art, science and nature
It is a long time since I studied art history, but if I remember rightly the invention of photography is said to have contributed to the exhaustion of the realist impulse in the visual arts. It sounds plausible: the documentary impulse, the desire faithfully to record what is actually there, which has always been close […]