Category Archives: Genetics

48 Hours in AMU, then put on 'E'Bay for 4 days – Why I 'still' love the NHS

ct_pulmonary2If you watch programmes like 24 Hours in A&E then no doubt you’ve found yourself thinking what you would do if placed into similar scenarios, particularly if it was a close family member in a life threatening situation.

So it came as somewhat of a shock to find my own life threatened just over a month into 2015 and a couple of years before I’ve managed to reach at least my fiftieth birthday.

Obviously it’s only with the benefit of  hindsight that you come to understand the level of threat involved and I am sitting here now a week on from the original incident feeling very grateful I live at this time and place and for a succession of lovely people who did their respective jobs efficiently and effectively.

Anyway, in retrospect there were some warning signs during the previous few days before the fateful morning – an abnormal shortness of breath, particularly when going up stairs but put down to a cold bug that’s been going around the family.

On this morning it was a lot worse prompting me to call the local surgery in hope of a quick appointment. As luck would have it there was a virtually immediate slot available but I needed to get there within 15 minutes. It was during those frantic few minutes of getting ready to go out that I was a few short breaths away from asking my wife to call for a paramedic and it was also very clear that what I was experiencing was far from normal and that I was very much in unknown territory.

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Confessions of an amateur herpetologist

Throughout my childhood, if someone asked me what I feared most I would always say ‘snakes’. Contrary to this professed phobia, which is believed to be an innate fear in humans, I was fascinated by the idea of finding snakes in the wild and would spend hours in the fields close to my parents’ home and alongside the railway line, where they were believed to bask, hoping to see them. Despite the efforts however, sightings were rare; a glimpse of a grass snake in a field of thick grass once; the discovery of a dead grass snake on the side of the road from which I cut off the tail as a trophy; and the even rarer sight of an adder swimming across a pond and slithering into the undergrowth very close to my feet. Beyond such fleeting encounters, my fascination and curiosity remained limited to studying them through the glass of zoo and reptile centre enclosures and watching documentaries.

I was in my late twenties and married before I took the opportunity to handle a snake for the first time. I still remember the occasion well as it was during a ‘reptile encounter’ session at a zoo local to my home to which we had taken some young relations on a day out.  Recollections of the snake itself are a bit fuzzy but I seem to remember it being a young python or boa constrictor about a metre long. What I remember more than anything is my heart pounding and my hands shaking as I took hold of the creature for the first time. Typical of such scenarios however, that initial fear turned quickly to wonder and also the realisation that the experience was very different from the one I had perhaps imagined.

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Psychopaths need not apply

According to a fascinating Horizon programme last night, today’s business environment is ideal for psychopaths and, despite deep psychological flaws, they are often seen as charismatic leaders who know how to ‘talk the talk’.

Hmmm – who knew?

I won’t name names but I can think of a few such candidates for psychological evaluation from my time in the workplace over the last 25 years, most of whom come from across the pond.

The programme gave an excellent insight into genetic research over the last decade that shows a particular gene type (called the Warrior gene) is prevalent in psychopaths but made it clear that it is the environment in which they live that determines if or when psychopathic behaviour will manifest itself.   Continue reading →

Something well worth boasting about…

In contrast to my previous post about the self-congratulatory double page spread McDonalds had in The Times the other day, IBM took a more modest single page today to publicise their 100th anniversary.

As readers of my often cynical and sceptical blog posts about the murky activities of corporate organisations may know, I have deep respect and a bit of a soft spot for ‘Big Blue’. To say that it is an organisation with substance and authenticity is an understatement and just those few highlights of achievements in the advert below reinforce that view.

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The 100 Icons of Progress can be read more easily and in its entirety here. Here are my top ten from an organisation that really has changed the world for the better… Continue reading →

Information Management and the Theory of Everything

Information Theory was fundamental to NTL's work on digital compression in the early 1990s and also key to me being able to design and produce this industry guide using the early versions of Photoshop and Quark

The first time I became aware of the work of Claude E. Shannon and the landmark paper on Information Theory he published while working at Bell Labs in the 1940s was when I worked for NTL’s Advanced Products Division and had to try to understand the principles of digital video compression to promote the company’s innovations in digital broadcast technologies.

Shannon’s Information Theory was absolutely fundamental to the encoding, transmission and decoding processes used to make digital broadcasting a reality. It also became clearer to me at that time that Information Theory sat at the heart of everything I was involved in following the transition from analogue content creation and publishing processes to digital processes, that had begun, for me, with the desktop publishing revolution in the late 80s/early 90s and continued with the arrival and growth of the web.

Information Theory however is concerned with the mechanics of communication and the quantity and readability of the information transmitted. It is not concerned with the quality of that information, its meaning or its importance. For those processes we have what has become known as Information Management – as defined here by AIIM – a practice that has been going on in shifting forms for many decades now.

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