Month: June 2020

Postscript

We are warned these days that everything one commits to digital communications can be accessed and seen by hackers and other cybersecurity experts. I have come up with a way that secret or intimate information which one wishes to remain confidential can be conveyed from one individual to another. This is an exciting prospect – and one which offers both a commercial opportunity and the prospect of hundreds of jobs. See what you think.

Postscript: When all of our communications are digitised, impersonal and readily available to any party skilled in cyber-insecurity, it occurs to me that there might be a commercial opportunity arising from people’s occasional need for communication which is characterised by certainty that the information is being transferred in confidence from a point-source to a limited number of point-recipients selected by the source. Imagine, for example, the situation in which one person (the point-source) wanted to communicate personal information (of any sort) to one receiver: a one-to-one communication. Rather than following the usual protocols relating to transmission of digital information by satellite technology, through selected encrypted social media in the Cloud which is, in effect, permanently available to the public, suppose that it was possible to encode the selected information in single issue, unique, hard copy form.

It is possible to conceive of this being operationalised by the point-source, using some combination of a medium capable of being physically marked (stone, say, or slate, or compressed layers of barley husks?) and a medium for the marking (a flint, say, or ash, or a corrosive acidic reagent?). By such means, the point-source could transfer the required information from their brain to a unique inanimate physical entity (one wouldn’t want to have the secret intelligence simply wandering away).

The challenge is then how to have this entity transferred into the cognition, via visual field, of the intended recipient. This is where I think the commercial opportunity exists. Suppose one was to enter into a contract with a person to actually carry the entity to the place of residence of the intended recipient: the contract could specify a financial return to the trans-shipper and a moiety for us as owners and managers of the intellectual property associated with the venture.

A huge amount of administrative backgrounding would of course be necessary: one would need physical addresses for any party that might be the target for transmissions; a book of Yellow pages into which those addresses could be collected (they could be alphabetised for easier access?); a system for putting potential point-sources in contact with the service, some means of levying the agreed fees from users of the service, and a large stock of yellow waterproof coats and modestly-powered motorbikes. (I wonder whether the fees could be levied on both parties to the contract – source and recipient?)

There would also need to be developments of associated infrastructure. For example, if the targeted recipient is not working from home there might be no-one home to receive the entity. Perhaps those who opt in to the scheme could affix some sort of receptacle to the outside of their door or their fence into which the entity could be placed? (This might lead to yet another commercial niche: whole companies could produce little printed flyers to be pasted onto these receptacles in an attempt to prevent miscreants from putting unsolicited items in them?)

Some sort of government licensing of the parties involved would probably be required and if it went really well government might take it over from us?. Inter-State travel might be involved and (I am ambitious for the scope and scale of the service.) even international flights.

My preliminary budgeting suggests a unit cost per contract in the range of $US13-14,000 but if the service took off that cost would fall rapidly. There might be a market for a special service (a twice daily delivery?) for a slightly higher fee. As I describe these possibilities, still more options occur to me. For example, being a physical object, the entity to be trans-shipped will have two sides; it might be possible to put the two to different purposes: one for the textual intelligence to be communicated, the other for a pictorial representation of the nearest seaside resort to the location whence the entity is being dispatched.

Any such further aspects to the proposal must be evaluated in the context of the requirement that the central purpose of the whole enterprise is not compromised – being the protected transmission of thoughts, feelings, intelligence and family news between two parties, both of whom seek a level of privacy or confidence not provided by traditional digital means.

What do you think? Am I onto something here?

Please get back to me.

Love always – your brother – gg

Telehealth, demographic change – or both?

Three decades ago, in late 1990, an officer of the Commonwealth Department of Health and Community Services travelled from Canberra to Gundagai to meet with eminent rural GP Paul Mara.

Steve Catling was a UK civil servant on exchange in the Department. It was the first week of his placement, so who knows what he thought of the curious countryside through which he passed.

After his return from the trip Steve famously said to colleagues in the Department that the only solution to Australia’s rural health problems was to move everyone to the cities. That view did not stop him from working hard to help manage the 1st National Rural Health Conference in Toowoomba that took place a couple of months later (Feb. 1991).

Paul Mara chaired the Agenda Forming Committee for that conference and in that capacity had oversight of a draft prepared by Commonwealth, State and Territory officials of the very first National Rural Health Strategy. It was discussed, amended and adopted by those who attended the conference.

One of the outcomes from Toowoomba was the conversion of the Conference Committee to what was called “an ongoing advisory group on rural health”. That became the National Rural Health Alliance (NRHA).

The purpose of the NRHA, then and now, has been to challenge the view that the only solution to the nation’s rural health problem is to move everyone to the cities. It is possible, goes the argument, that by various means people living in rural and remote areas can be provided with good access to health services which gives them equity if not equality with those living in the major cities.

Thus it is that the NRHA promotes action to have health services in rural areas that are fit for purpose for such areas. This quite often requires changes to financial, regulatory and workforce arrangements compared with those that apply in metropolitan areas.

But how important are improvements to health service access compared with, say, regional development in non-metropolitan areas and the demographic change that results?

In working towards better (more equal) health for people who live in rural or remote areas it doesn’t take long to realise that what matters is not a person’s relationship with health services as much as their educational and employment status, their social and cultural background, and their genetic make-up.

This is the stuff of a social determinants approach to health – one that sees health services narrowly defined as being little more than repair shops:

Except for a few clinical preventive services, most hospitals and physician offices are repair shops, trying to correct the damage of causes collectively denoted ‘social determinants of health’.  Donald Berwick, The Moral Determinants of Health, JAMA Network (on line), June 12 2020.

Towards the end of my time with the NRHA, Martin Laverty (at that time CEO of the RFDS) led work to bring agencies together into a social determinants of health alliance. That group pointed out that, in Australia, a multi-party Senate Committee had unanimously recommended that the Government should adopt the recommendations from the World Health Organisation’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health.

Nothing has happened. The distribution of wealth in Australia has worsened.  Over a million children are living in poverty.

The Marmot Review published in the UK in 2010 asserted that work towards six objectives would reduce overall health inequalities:

  1. Give every child the best start in life
  2. Enable all children, young people and adults to maximise their capabilities and have control over their lives
  3. Create fair employment and good work for all
  4. Ensure healthy standard of living for all
  5. Create and develop healthy and sustainable places and communities
  6. Strengthen the role and impact of ill-health prevention.

So it is clear why the NRHA has to work on such an enormously wide range of matters, which some have interpreted as having the organisation skate on thin ice. Falling through has usually been avoided thanks to the fact that the NRHA is such an inherently good idea that it has proved feasible to enlist the support of experts in particular topics to join with it in its work.

The Regional Australia Institute reported this week that regional centres attracted more people aged 20-35 than the capital cities during the last two Census periods. While 180,000 millennials moved to capital cities between 2011 and 2016, more than 207,000 moved between the regions, resulting in a net inflow to regional centres of 65,204 people. From 2006-2011, this number was 70,493.

In total 1.2 million people moved to and around areas outside the capital cities between 2011 and 2016. The places concerned included Cairns, Toowoomba, Ballarat, Maitland, Bendigo and Lake Macquarie. (The big movers: understanding population mobility in regional Australia, Kylie Bourne et al, Regional Australia Institute, June 2020.)

Overall, the population of regional cities with more than 50,000 people grew 7.8 per cent, industry and service hubs with more than 15,000 residents grew at 3.3 per cent, and smaller regional areas increased 1.6 per cent. On top of this existing trend, the COVID pandemic has strengthened people’s belief that location may not be a barrier to where they choose to work.

So which is more important, telehealth or demographic change?

As a result of COVID-19 there have been very welcome extensions of Medicare benefits for telehealth consultations – the scale of which has the heads of rural health advocates spinning. But it may be that the kind of demographic changes reported by the RAI will do even more in the long run to deliver health equity to rural areas. The former improve services in the repair shop. But demographic changes are producing more central places in rural areas with the population and service characteristics necessary to stave off, for some, the time when repairs are needed.

But the real answer is both: the ice looks thick enough for a twirl.

Distinguishing Poetry, Verse and Doggerel

Summary: doggerel is inferior poetry; they are both usually divided into verses.

Verse (a collective noun, usually used with the definite article (‘the’);  as in: “I am fond of the verse of GM Hopkins.”)

  • a body of poetry, as of a specific writer or period.
  • a poetic form of writing with regular meter and a fixed rhyme scheme.
  • metrical writing or speaking, esp. when light or trivial or merely metered and rhymed, but without much serious content or artistic merit.
  • a particular form of poetic composition: free verse, trochaic verse.

Verse: a noun, referring to a particular segment of a poem or of a piece of text.

  • a stanza or group of lines in a poem or song, sometimes used to distinguish the verse (the new bit of the narrative) from the chorus/refrain.
  • a single, usually numbered, short division of a chapter of the Bible. (As in Leviticus 3:16 –  the book of Leviticus, chapter 3, verse 16.)

Poetry: a noun.

  • literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.
  • poems collectively or as a genre of literature.

The types of poetry include Ballad, Elegy, Epic Poem, Free Verse, Haiku, Imagery, Limerick and Pastoral.

Doggerel: poetry or verse of a crude or irregular construction. “The term was originally applied to humorous verse, but now means verse lacking artistry or meaning. Doggerel is poetry that is irregular in rhythm and in rhyme, often deliberately for burlesque or comic effect. Alternatively, it can mean verse which has a monotonous rhythm, easy rhyme, and cheap or trivial meaning.”

“Doggerel is a technical term for bad poetry, which is usually characterized by irregular verse, forced rhyme and overly sentimental tones. It can also be used for comical effect. You probably know or knew someone in high school who wrote doggerel.”

– and breaking news: [from Macquarie dictionary blog]

“Who are we versing this week? A teacher commented that the verb ‘to verse’ as in ‘Who are we versing this week?’ is so entrenched that it ought to be in the Macquarie Dictionary.

Well, we are pleased to say that it has been since 2009. The usage note says that it occurs mostly in the speech of children, but the children are growing up. As Column 8 said, the children are now working in the sports department of the ABC. It is time to accept that versing is in adult language now.”

Neologism: A neologism is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not yet been fully accepted into mainstream language.