Four short links: 25 June 2012

Public Spending Links, Telemedicine Questioned, Comments Re-examined, and Informed Consent

  1. Stop Treating People Like Idiots (Tom Steinberg) — governments miss the easy opportunities to link the tradeoffs they make to the point where the impacts are felt. My argument is this: key compromises or decisions should be linked to from the points where people obtain a service, or at the points where they learn about one. If my bins are only collected once a fortnight, the reason why should be one click away from the page that describes the collection times.
  2. UK Study Finds Mixed Telemedicine BenefitsThe results, in a paper to the British Medical Journal published today, found telehealth can help patients with long-term conditions avoid emergency hospital care, and also reduce deaths. However, the estimated scale of hospital cost savings is modest and may not be sufficient to offset the cost of the technology, the report finds. Overall the evidence does not warrant full scale roll-out but more careful exploration, it says. (via Mike Pearson)
  3. Pay Attention to What Nick Denton is Doing With Comments (Nieman Lab) — Most news sites have come to treat comments as little more than a necessary evil, a kind of padded room where the third estate can vent, largely at will, and tolerated mainly as a way of generating pageviews. This exhausted consensus makes what Gawker is doing so important. Nick Denton, Gawker’s founder and publisher, Thomas Plunkett, head of technology, and the technical staff have re-designed Gawker to serve the people reading the comments, rather than the people writing them.
  4. Informed Consent Source of Confusion (Nature) — fascinating look at the downstream uses of collected bio data and the difficulty in gaining informed consent: what you might learn about yourself (do I want to know I have an 8.3% greater chance of developing Alzheimers? What would I do with that knowledge besides worry?), what others might learn about you (will my records be subpoenable?), and what others might make from the knowledge (will my data be used for someone else’s financial benefit?). (via Ed Yong)
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