NHS Direct – Home

… as long as you speak English that is.

I’ve just realised that the NHS Direct website isn’t a multilingual site. I began to wonder if this was because it would be too expensive or whether catering to the mulitiple languages spoken in the UK would somehow weaken the binding power of English. Well here’s a 2020health.org report on the amount spent on translation and interpreting by the NHS and, shock horror, it was found that a lot of money is being spent, it’s being inefficiently spent, and that savings could be made …

Our research shows that the NHS spends an incredible £60,000 every single day on translation services. That is over £20,000,000 a year.

much too much, so:

Urgent action must be taken by Trusts to stem the flow of translation costs and our report sets out a number of recommendations that would do exactly that without altering the level of care given.

Rather than making websites multilingual and enabling interpreters to work at a distance, the main innovative way that this think tank can come up with to save money is to replace medical jargon with simple English. In that way, the argument goes, people who don’t speak English will understand what’s going on.

The NHS has been told by its own patient feedback that documents in simple English – instead of medical jargon – would be acceptable to most people currently using the translation services. It wouldn’t take much effort to drastically cut the £23million of taxpayers’ money that is spent each year on bureaucratic and often duplicated translation fees, and free the money up for treating patients.

I think there’s a danger here. I’m all for jargon-free, simple and direct language use. But there is context and context. There are contexts in which precise, exact, expression – both bio-medical and human – is absolutely essential. ‘Plain English’ is no substitute. It might even be dangerous leading to imprecise understanding and/or translation back to a mother tongue. Sometimes only a language in which a person is absolutely secure will suffice to aid understanding, communicate empathy and enable decision-making.

When the opportunities for providing multilingual services have never been greater it is more than churlish to deny millions of people the option and claim that ‘levels of care’ can remain unchanged.

]]> http://clivemcgoun.net/wordpress/nhs-translating-services/feed/ 0 http://clivemcgoun.net/wordpress/nick-hanauer-on-ted/ http://clivemcgoun.net/wordpress/nick-hanauer-on-ted/#comments Sat, 19 May 2012 14:45:30 +0000 Clive McGoun http://clivemcgoun.net/wordpress/?p=6060 TED videos celebrate and have been celebrated for ‘ideas worth spreading’. But that’s only if Chris Anderson, the man behind TED finds the idea politically palatable. ‘Too partisan’ was the reason he gave for not uploading a six minute talk given by Nick Hanauer.

Here’s the idea that Hanauer wanted to spread:

In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich.

Clearly, Hollande hasn’t made much of a wave in the US yet …

I’ve watched a lot of videos over the last couple of years from TED. The best were the most partisan – they expressed a passion, ferver and strong belief in an idea. Seems like Hanauer’s idea was just the wrong idea. Makes you think how many other ‘wrong’ ideas just didn’t get uploaded.

Anyway, ‘once digital, t’will out’ and here’s Hanauer’s talk in its entirety.

It seems like phase 1 of this project is just coming to an end. I’m surprised there wasn’t more buzz about it … I’m hoping that by the end of the month there’ll be some information about how widespread the participation has been.

It would be easy to superficially trash such a concept as the social media action centre. Morozov’s attack on such activism as being just another form of armchair posturing (he calls it ‘slacktivism’) that has little social impact would be the classical attack. But I think it’s more interesting to consider the extent to which the most minimal action, such as a tweet, may part of a wider involvement that also involves direct action on the street. Digital activism in this account is not part of a binary (action/inaction) but is a continuum of activities: at one extreme the automated tweet and at the other the real time street protest documenting repression and mobilising action.

The Social Media Action Centre gives you the opportunity to take a simple action for justice every two weeks from May 2011 to May 2012. These actions link with Amnesty supporters from across the globe, focusing on six campaign areas where we believe we can make progress in Amnesty’s 50th anniversary year. The Events harness the power of social media so that people can speak out together against human rights abuses.

via AI50.ca – Social Media Action Centre.

PDI is a policy-agnostic political party that does not have, nor will ever have, a political ideology. It has a single and radical proposal: PDI elected representatives will vote in congress according to what the people have previously voted through the internet using Agora.

This platform, Agora, aspires to create a virtual parliament where every decision is made directly. Of course there are delegates because an individual citizen would never have time to vote directly on every issue. But the delegates are simply there to exercise the will of the voter – if the delegate should  try not to express the will of the voter, then the vote goes to another delegate who will. It’s referred to as liquid democracy because this system of delegates always ensures that the will of the voter stays paramount.

The website runs through how this might work – it’s potential and the pitfalls that currently stand in the way of its adoption. A lot of people will immediately be skeptical (security, privacy etc. …). But surely it would be better than the rabid politiking that is currently ruining Greece.

The PDI is one of 12 members of the Mission for Electronic Direct Democracy(E2D). Interestingly, no member from the UK. Perhaps that’s because we all think that democracy is running so smoothly we only need to act directly once every five years …

The ‘Flip this Video’ idea takes an earlier suggestion by ?, that teachers should invert the traditional model where they deliver the class and then send students home to do homework based on it. Instead (the suggestion goes) teachers could upload a video of the class they would have delivered which students watch at home and then use class time to do the work based on those materials. The result is less passive learning and more active doing with the teacher supporting, guiding, etc. Because it often involved using a Flip camera to make that initial video, the moniker has stayed.

Here’s what it looks like:

In many ways it’s a great initiative. We’ve all been using YouTube videos for a while now, collecting them together in various playlists and channels and embedding them in materials that exploit their contents in pedagogically rich ways. So, TEDEd is providing another way to use content and save it in a way that makes it easily accessible. The downside is the rather pedagogically poor ways in which this is currently offered: watch-quiz-watch or read something else. It’s a bit passive and reinforces the idea that students often have, that you can learn by absorbing what you see. You can’t. You learn by doing something.

Note: the following is a bit of a spoiler – notes-to-self about the six ‘rules’ of creativity that emerge from Shirky’s examples:

1. Use interest as the design probe for projects
2. Start with a technology in search of a problem
3. combine things in new ways to make new things
4. design for serendipity (included here is the nice idea that institutions need to know when to stop doing things that no longer work)
5. encourage the use everything as raw material for developing things
6. there are no rules for creativity

His definition of creativity?

‘Creativity is not a thing; it is the ability to produce valuable novelty’.

Valuable novelty depends on context: what is valuable novelty for you may not be such for me. But if you can find out what it is for you then you can maximise the opportunities to develop it.

She points out why our loss of conversation is a profound one:

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.”

And it can be a struggle to nurture such conversation without becoming impatient of the form, without wanting to fast-forward someone because their responses are too slow. Even worse, to conquer a desire to reach for the mobile buzzing in your pocket and put the person you’re talking to on ‘hold’ … if only for a second … and with an apologetic smile.

What we are forgetting, what we are losing the habit of, is in engaging – for the sake of engaging – in conversation without distraction. Of just ‘hanging out’ and ‘chewing the cud’- which is less about communicating information and more about the enjoyment of the form and its expression.

Turkle encapsulates the hollowness of being constantly on, constantly being listened to (by Twitter followers, Facebook Friends, Google+ circles …) when she identifies it as an attempt to stave off loneliness:

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t give any clues as to how we might do that.

Whilst some of these categories work better than others, the language used  should enable a more stimulating discussion about creating stuff, originality and using others’ work in/as/though/with your own. The graphic above is a small section of a more extensive infographic which expands and gives practical examples which would probably work well in the classroom. I just wish they’d done separate .jpg files so that they would be easier to … use/copy/remix …

As Dali said:

Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing.

I first came across Tom Scott’s work with I know what you did five minutes ago a performance peice where he takes live data from the web to show how fragile our information privacy actually is unless we begin to take more active control over it. It’s very cleverly disturbing and wickedly entertaining.

Following in the same vein, here is his interpretation of Ray Kurzweil’s notion of the singularity – the moment when humans transcend biology and life goes on … in the cloud.

Despite the faux gravitas of the music and voice and some  rather over-the-top rhetoric (‘it’s during measurement that plywood and metal first kiss …’, ‘the table saw is a wich that will take your finger’) it’s still engaging.

I was sorry it finished after only seven minutes.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Each TinyBook contains 24 photos and you get three books for $10.

Who needs a Kindle when you can stuff your pockets with TinyBooks!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

1. FB needs to increase its revenue to keep investors happy. It can do that either by increasing users or eating up its competitors. Doing both is good for business as Adam Smith once remarked. The concentration and centralisation of capital will be key to its success … as Karl Marx pointed out.

2. FB stores something like 100 billion photos and its users upload more than 6 billion every two months. Photos used to be FB’s  ‘core business’: remember it was set up on the back of a college year-book to allow its users to hook up with people they recognised. Strange then that it would not continue to innovate in its ‘core business’ by improving its native photo application. Actually, not so strange when you consider that its core business is actually attracting advertisers to its users whose data is cut and sliced in a myriad of ways to allow fine-grained focusing of ad messages. In that context, buying Instagram (which adds a whole raft of ‘user data’ to the photos it processes) makes perfect sense and a perfect fit with the business model.

Instagram, Kodak and the end of innovation | Norman Lewis | spiked.

But perhaps most importantly of all, Michael Sandel reminds us of the power of language as a cultural tool to solve problems. His performances, and his skills in facilitating the performances of others, are enactments of the two functions of language: cognitive and communicative. Listening to a member of his audience ‘trying on an argument’ through articulating a position before rejecting it as unsatisfactory or unjustifiable, reminds us how we use words to think with. When we watch two people engaged in defending their positions against counter-claims until one is convinced of the other’s perspective, we see how communication changes the way we think. Changing the ways we think can change what we think.

The historical argument in support runs as follows (in a necessarily simplified form): there have been four periods in human history where fundamental transformations in the media have merited the term ‘revolution’. The first, the invention of the printing press, turned Europe upside down and lead to (amongst other things) the reformation, the establishment of some vernacular languages as standard languages (which in turn was a pre-requisite for the emergence of nationalism) and the rise of mass literacy. The second, the invention of the telegraph and later the telephone, was an innovation in two-way media which arguably facilitated the spread of empire through its ability to increase the power of the rulers over the ruled, integrated and centralised economies and led to the modern news business through the use of ‘wire’ agencies. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the development of satellite technologies in the 1960s that the telephone displaced the telegraph as a two-way communication medium of choice. Recorded media other than text had to await Marconi’s successful attempt to transmit radio signals across the Atlantic in 1901 which subsequently evolved into the most ubiquitous mass medium ever known, the radio. The term ‘broadcasting’ entered the media lexicon in the 1920s and, together with the press, became the principle means by which the state communicated with a mass of citizens. The fourth transformation which completed the media landscape that I grew up with, was the transmission of radio waves as images through the air. The birth of the television in the late 1920s led towards the two models of media ownership which dominated the twentieth century: the public service model in the UK and the marketplace model of the US.

These transformations beginning five hundred and fifty years ago led to what Clay Shirky refers to as an affordance asymmetry. In other words: those media which are good at creating conversation are not good at creating groups whilst those media that are good at creating groups, are not good at creating conversations. This is one of the reasons why the area of communication studies was so often broken into ‘interpersonal communication’, ‘group’, and ‘mass communication’. If you want to have a conversation you have to have it with another person. If you want to address a group you create a message and then send (broadcast) it to the group over the air or in the press. All of the ways that humans appropriated communication media in the twentieth century in order to self-organise collective action on their own behalf were shaped by these conditions. And then … the internet. The fifth radical transformation in mediated communication, which began only twenty years ago, has introduced a fundamental innovation in the affordances of the media through which we self-organise. The technical architecture of the internet supports interpersonal, group, and mass communication at the same time. Manuel Castells has a name for it: ‘mass self-communication’. And we have just begun the process of trying to understand it.

That process involves understanding the three major areas of change ushered in by the internet. Although intimately connected, all call for detailed study. The first is that communication technologies now facilitate many-to-many relationships in horizontal local/global networks. This goes far beyond the ‘cc’ capacity of email and the transformations it is beginning to create have yet to be fully realised. The second is that because everything (that can) is in the process of migrating to the network, every medium sits next to every other medium, facilitating (and sometimes forcing) a process of multi-modal convergence. There is little sense in suggesting that we watch the internet in the same way we watch the television. Increasingly we live ‘with’ the internet as an over-arching fabric where all forms of communcation are articulated into a composite, interactive, digital hypertext with enormous consequences for social organisation and cultural change. In a converged media landscape media become less an experience and more a site for the coordination of group-based communication. We are communicating more and to more people than in any other time in human history. Such a landscape leads to the third major change: traditional categories such as ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’ have become blurred. Bruns calls the new category ‘produsage’; Gilmore talks of ‘the former audience’. The same equipment that allows me to consume media now also allows me to produce media. This is a radical change that is creating tension (opportunity v fear) in social, political and cultural arenas.

So, in just twenty years a media landscape has developed which is utterly different to the one I grew up with in the twentieth century. This twenty-first media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. It’s leading to changes in social, political and economic organisation. It’s forging new and changing older relationships between people. It’s undermining traditional power structures and creating opportunities to create new, more egalitarian values. Social movements and agents of political change have always re-programmed communication networks to bring new values, new ideas and change to people. The technologies of communication now available afford levels of autonomy never before experienced by such movements. ‘The Digital Commons’, ‘User-Generated Content’ and ‘Crowdsourcing’ are just some initial glimpses at the ways networked communication can enhance the opportunities for social change. What these technologies of communication don’t do however, is define the content and purpose of such change. Life is more complex than that, more interesting and more challenging to understand.

Now, I’m all for the shattering of the illusion that the self is a coherent, unified, subject, and using the result to modify the ways in which we live. I just don’t think that playing with multiple avatars is actually the tool that can do the shattering or that the adoption of multiple avatars can lead to the forging of a healthier self in harmony with its world. It’s a Disney World self, a solipsistic fantasy game that leads, well, to other games, other fantasies. And of course, lets not forget that Disney World is a corporation and the avatars it offers (no matter what level of customisation is allowed) are products used to generate profit. To think that a Facebook profile is not a product to sell to the highest bidder for advertising rights, is to miss an important trick in contemporary ‘social’ media.

And so to Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation by Beth Coleman which seems to be bringing Turkle’s earlier arguments up to date. Instead of multiple screens, virtual reality and RL (real life), Coleman offers X-reality (cross reality) to suggest that our online experiences are actual and fulfilling and that they augment the self in ways that are empowering. The key is in the avatar and the ways in which, with the rise of the ‘network of things’ (ie the world as a linked database), our ability to act on the world will be increased:

Coleman calls the next cycle of media technologies to enter our culture “pervasive media” and thinks that an emergent practice of X-reality will develop out of “everyday experience of augmented reality and extended sites [of] agency. This will help us to see ourselves not as passive consumers but as agents, with a capacity to change the world around us. THE Review

The reason I’m going to buy the book is not because I’m convinced by this snippet or the review of it in general. What I’ll read it for is to see if she’s able to deal with Turkle’s recent cautionary tone or to offer some counter-arguments to Jaron Lanier’s rather magisterial rant in You Are Not A Gadget. In other words, can she convince me that our ‘avatars’ are more than simply multiple choice identities which give away our precious content for nothing to aggregators, advertisers and corporations? Or that we are ‘augmented’ by these online experiences in ways that enable us to have a healthier connection to our worlds or change them for the better?

I’m not holding my breath …

At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.

via the Independent

“Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

via What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success – Anu Partanen – National – The Atlantic.

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

via Slavoj Žižek speaks at Occupy Wall Street: Transcript | The Parallax | Impose Magazine.

Lee’s remarkable image is simultaneously moving and troubling. By peeling away the superficial veneer of modern British society, it forces the viewer to evaluate their own position in the social hierarchy of the age and confront some uncomfortable truths.

It is a gritty, poetic image which tells a long and painful story. You can see it below (bottom row, fourth from the left) as part of Lee’s flickr gallery. Click through to that gallery and view the series as a full screen slideshow to really appreciate the beauty in the detail.