Garden Bunting

While the garden is beginning to look really good after the hard work we've put into it this year, we aren't about to start hanging out the bunting. That doesn't stop a bunting enjoying the garden though. Specifically a Yellowhammer visited this evening. Sorry about the rather poor photo, but it was taken hand held in poor light (we lose direct sunlight to the garden by about 4 o'clock due to the railway and trees) and through the kitchen window which is definitely in need of a clean.

I haven't heard it sing the traditional "little bit of bread and no cheese" song yet, but I'm assuming it is primarily the male that sings, and this would be a female. Either way a nice new addition to the species list for the garden.

No Post On Sundays?

It would appear that, at least in the UK, Amazon are now using owls to make their deliveries. I ordered a small item from Amazon late on Friday and didn't pay any attention to the expected delivery date, I just assumed that, as I have Amazon Prime, it would arrive on Monday.

When I got up this morning I had an e-mail which said that my parcel was out for delivery today, i.e. Sunday. My initial thought was that it was a glitch in their system, and that it had actually only been dispatched today and would be delivered tomorrow.

Given that the weather today has been great, we spent the afternoon in the garden working, but I did keep an ear out for a delivery vehicle just in case. When it got to 6pm I decided that it really was just a glitch in Amazon's system as who would expect a delivery after 6pm on any day let alone a Sunday. So imagine my surprise when at 7:10pm there was a knock on the door and my parcel was delivered!

Keeping The Milk In

The fridge in the kitchen is old. I don't know quite how old, but we've been using it for over 10 years and before that it was in my Mother-in-law's kitchen. However old it is it still works and we'll keep using it at least until we redecorate the kitchen. For the last year or so there has though been a small niggling little problem. Periodically you would open the fridge only for the milk to go flying across the kitchen, usually leaking everywhere in the process. The problem was that one of the brackets holding the shelf edge on was broken.

I initially fixed the bracket by super-gluing the retaining pins back on, and while this works for a short while it will let go again after a few months. I also tried numerous varieties of tape to keep things together but this was worse than gluing; I'm guessing due to the cold temperature and moisture. Just after lunch last Friday I opened the fridge and yet again the milk went flying. This time it had been less than a day since I'd tapped the shelf edge in place and I'd had enough. Given how old the fridge was I didn't hold out much hope of being able to just buy a replacement part, and sure enough a quick web search didn't turn up anything helpful, so I set about creating a replacement part instead.

Long term readers of this blog may remember that almost two years ago I experimented with 3D printing for the first time. Since then I've designed and printed quite a few model railway items and even opened a shop on Shapeways. Given how easy simple geometric shapes are to model and print, I decided that it would be eminently feasible to design and print a replacement bracket.

It took me about half an hour to model the bracket in Blender using a set of digital callipers to measure the matching unbroken bracket. The part was quick to model as I focused on function rather than form (the model consists of just four cubes, a cylinder, and few mirror and boolean modifiers); it certainly isn't going to win any design awards!

After creating the model it was simple to upload it to Shapeways and less than 45 minutes after deciding to 3D print the replacement part I had one on order in the white strong and flexible material. Yesterday, just four working days after placing the order, the printed part arrived. A quick comparison with the original and it looked as if I'd got the measurements right, and indeed it fits perfectly, so now I can open the fridge without worrying about the milk going flying across the kitchen!

Whilst I really enjoy using 3D printing for producing small models, I think using the process to produce replacement parts is even more useful, especially when there is no other way to source the parts you need. Having proved how well it worked in this case, I'm sure this will be my first choice for any similar situation in the future.

I Know Where The Bodies Are Buried

On a recent work trip to Kaiserslautern in Germany we had a guided tour of some of the old remains in the city centre. This photo shows where a number of old graves were discovered during previous archeological excavations just outside the modern town hall.

Firefox

I'm sure many of you use the Firefox browser for surfing the web, but I'm guessing that many will also have never seen a real firefox before.

We recently had a weekend staying with friends near Oxford, and one of the things we did was a trip to the Cotswold Wildlife Park which have a pair of Red Pandas; otherwise known as a firefox.

Now before you all shout that the icon for Firefox doesn't look like a Red Panada it isn't intended to as the designer actually modelled the icon on a Japanese drawing of a fox!

Beef From The Orchard

Last year I was invited to join Tesco's new product testing site The Orchard. Essential what happens is that Tesco run some form of promotion, they send me a voucher so I can try the promotion free or for less than full price and then I give them feedback, as well as publicising the promotion in some way (like this post). Given that I do almost all my food shopping at Tesco (they are the main supermarket in Penistone) it seems like a good deal to me, and hopefully you won't be too annoyed by the occasional blog post.

So the first promotion I was asked to participate in was for uncooked fresh meat from the Tesco finest* range and I was sent a £5 off voucher at the beginning of December. Unfortunately due to being away for Christmas and my local store not always stocking the full range (it's not a huge store) I've only recently used the voucher. The wait was, however, worthwhile. In the end I bought 2 fillet steaks which I served with a Greek inspired bubble and squeak. As I wasn't serving a sauce with the steaks I wanted to make sure they were really nice and succulent so I soaked them in 2 tbsp of balsamic vinegar for about 10 hours in the fridge before I cooked them. A simple but effective way of preparing the steaks especially as they turned out to be possible the best steak I've ever eaten; they really were unbelievably good. I'm sure a lot of that was down to the quality of the meat, but I'll take some of the credit for the marinading!

All in all, an excellent meal, and I'd be more than happy to recommend the Tesco finest* meats. I've already enrolled in the next promotion which is all about potatoes!

I'm Torn

If you live in the UK then in among the junk mail that your postman kindly delivers in order to ensure your waste paper bin gets fed you will probably have had a leaflet from the NHS entitled "Better information means better care". Essentially this is about the pooling of medical records in order to improve care; or at least that is what the leaflet suggests. The problem is that this sharing of data isn't about ensuring that you get better care as your medical details are already shared between your GP, hospitals, etc. to provide you with the best care. In fact, as far as I can tell, no one who would ever treat you would ever have direct access to this shared data. So if it isn't about treating you better what is it about?

The real aim of pooling the data together is for strategic planning and research. Now given that I work as a researcher I understand that in most instances the more data you have the better your results will be. While I'm not a medical researcher I have, over the last few years, been involved in a number of large projects which have involved limited access to medical records of individual patients. So in theory, I should, eventually, benefit from this programme as there will be more data available not just to medical researchers but to people like me (for those who don't know I'm a Natural Language Processing researcher) who can also help society; just a few of the projects I've worked on, or know about, have ensured that prescription information is accurately recorded, have helped to find a new cause for cancer, and have built a system that can predict suicide attempts from medical notes. In all cases access to the medical records have been strictly controlled (the number of hoops you have to jump through can be insane) and for good reason. These documents contain a large amount of very personal information. All the data I have seen has either been from patients who have opted-in to a study (like the cancer work) or has been used on a purely non-commercial basis.

I certainly have no problem with opt-in medical studies and research within a hospital to improve patient care seems a worthwhile use of data. Selling data to outside companies, however, seems to cross a line. I'm sure that large pharmaceutical companies have strict controls in place over data, but the wider you share things the harder it is to control. And anyway, why should the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC -- the people who will collect and hold the data) be allowed to make money by selling your data? If you asked HSCIC they will of course tell you that in most cases the data they release or sell will be fully annonymized.

I certainly have no problem with releasing population statistics like the percentage of the country who suffered from flu last year. I can see that that is useful information and can in no way lead back to me, if I had flu or not. The problem with handling individual medical records is that they are often very private, and the details have been shared knowing that they are treated confidentially. By the time I see a medical record when doing research, they should have been annoymized (like the majority of HSCIC releases will be) to ensure that I can't work out who the patient is. This usually involves removing name, date of birth, address, etc. Unfortunately there are two problems with this. Firstly no matter how hard you try to annoymize a data set, it is often possible to reverse this and to uncover the people involved; two large examples of this are the AOL search dataset, and the Netflix Prize dataset. The more important problem though is that large scale annoymization is usually done automatically, and like any automatic system it will fail and some of the worst instances of this I have seen were actually in medical records. The worst case I ever saw was a large set of notes in which the names of the patients had been correctly removed throughout. Unfortunately these were letters and notes regarding social care and in many cases the names of other family members, including the patients spouse, had not been removed.

So, as the title of this post suggests, I'm torn. On one side I know from first hand experience that the data the HSCIC wants to collect can be extremely useful, while on the other hand I know that keeping it secure can be very difficult. Added to this, while I might be happy for the NHS to internally use this data for research I'm not convinced it should be sold to commercial third parties, however strict the conditions on its use might be. For example, are we talking about selling to pharmaceutical companies for research or advertising?

I've still not made a final decision on what to do about my own records, but I thought some of you might find this post an interesting reflection from both sides of the fence. Unfortunately the leaflet that was sent out didn't actually include an opt-out form. If you do decide you want to opt-out then you don't need to make a GP appointment (that would be a serious waste of the GPs time), all you need to do is send them a letter explaining that you don't want your records included, and there even a couple of websites (here and here) that have form letters you can use to make the process easy.