Anne Clwyd’s report looking at how patients’ complaints within the UK’s NHS are dealt with has just been published. The headline used by the Daily Telegraph’s for its coverage of the report caught my eye: Give hospital patients pen and paper to report bad care, report says The report argues that complaints are an “early warning system” within health care systems, and that it needs to be easier for... »
Fascinating debate in the online version of the Guardian on Saturday (2013-10-12) under the title “Spooks and secrets: what is the public’s right to know?”. In it, Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of the British civil liberties advocacy organisation Liberty, and ex-MI6 officer Nigel Inkster debated the rights and wrongs of exposing the activities of the UK and US security and intelligence ser... »
The murmur of debate and discussion concerning the proper use, and increasing abuse, of their citizens’ personal data by governments has risen to a crescendo since the first of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US’s NSA PRISM and the UK’s GCHQ Tempora programmes were publicied by the Guardian in June 2013. Alongside that there has been a steady stream of continued exposure of the way in which... »
Although it seems like it’s been around forever and life would be unimaginable without it, the Internet is young. From the first inkling of the idea (possibly in 1962, when J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 wrote a series of memos outlining a “Galactic Network”) and its commercial and general public “birth” about 20 years ago, its growth and impact since then has been massive. An... »
