There was a bizarre feature in yesterday's Guardian on political advertising in Iowa. Nothing particularly controversial about the content, but I was struck by the strange scientific claim behind the piece. The thrust was: Iowans are subject to lots of ads from caucus candidates. No shit. But wait: apparently the Guardian knows this because they "commissioned a survey of a local TV station and found that in one half-hour period eight political ads were aired."

Is it just me but doesn't that read a little bit like: "watched television for half an hour"?

It gets better though. There's a comment on the survey method at the bottom of (the online version of) the article: "Dean Treftz, a reporter with the Daily Iowan, campus paper at the University of Iowa, listed the advertisements broadcast over a 30-minute period on his local TV station." So the first passage, strictly speaking, out to read: "The Guardian got a student to watch TV for half an hour and he wrote down stuff that happened."

Also, the half hour coincided with the early evening news.

High level content analysis indeed.

The open road, the freedom afforded by a life of wandering, is much celebrated in every art form. Literature is full of tales of the lure of wandering, either in non-fiction form or in the creations of Swift, Shakespeare, Twain or Jack London In music, the Bruce Springsteen song Further On (Up the Road) perfectly evokes both the uncertainty and the excitement afforded to the traveller.

I have recently finished the book Into the Wild by John Krakaur, the film version of which is playing in cinemas at present (and is certainly worth seeing). Into the Wild tells the story of Chris McCandless

Via Twenty Major, I see that St Luke's Cancer Hospital in Dublin is set to close, with services being moved to a radiotherapy centre in the enormous St. James's hospital closer to the city centre. It's a sad thing to see a hospital closed. In my experience it's a common phenomenon that cancer centres are regarded with a seemingly strange level of affection on the part of patients and their families. This, I guess, is largely down to the incredible people in oncology departments who not only administer the technologies of medicine but the massive emotional impact that cancer can have on patients' families (often, in fact, the impact is greater for families than for the patient themselves).

Still, all that said, I think that the move to centralise cancer services is probably the one bright element in the monumental, world-historical, fuck-up that is Irish cancer care (see here, also via Twenty Major, for one example of how bad things are).

Cancer services are best provided in a centralised manner for two reasons. First, oncology is very very expensive (and set to get more so), so it's simply easier and more effective to pool resources than it is to have a radiology machine here and another one there etc. And it's better to have lots of experts in one place than to have them either dotted around the country or (as also happens) driving from hospital to hospital. Second, and I don't think people consider this very often, people with cancer tend to end up needing all sorts of other services - CT scans, dermatologists, pain management, kidney stuff and so on. If you don't have the resident expert or technology at your own small hospital, you're going to have to bundled at great discomfort and expense into an ambulance to be ferried to the scan or whatever. That is just not a good thing.

Given all this, while the Irish health services is an almost criminal disaster from end to end, I just can't bring myself to feel regret at the concentration of cancer services in Ireland. It's sad that St. Lukes will close, but it will probably make the lives of cancer patients (those who have got in the door anyway) just a little bit easier and, perhaps, a little bit longer.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a depressing piece on the proposed solution to the sub-prime crisis. It makes a gloomy companion piece to this article from the FT in August, outlining the various frauds (criminal and not) surrounding this shoddy saga.

Unlike the Enron debacle, if this one shakes out into a full-blown crisis (as it well might), there'll be no getting away from systematic failures of surveillance, governance and the like. Or to mix a couple of metaphors, when there are more bad apples than good, you start thinking that something's wrong with the basket (hat tip to Meditations71 for passing on the SF Chronicle article).