Blue Steens in September 2019
Catch up on Blue Steens articles and venture further
This month on Blue Steens
Gender transition is in transition
Transgender health management has seen important advances in the recent past. Some notable remaining issues outlined in this article revolve around the standard of care and insurance coverage.
Read >>
Nearly one month in
Vlog about my first month as an ICAS (Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland) trainee. In short, it’s been mental!
ICAS study aids
Being a right model student, I started tampering with the ICAS material to aid my learning (and because it’s fun) and shared some of it in short YouTube clips. Hopefully, they will be useful for other ICAS students.
Embrace challenge and grow
I share an excellent TEDx talk on perseverance, motivation and personal growth on my website. I will be placing such great external content on Blue Steens every so often from now on.
Watch >>
Impressions from Offshore Europe 2019
The big offshore (essentially oil & gas) exhibition gave me a good excuse to play with the Lightworks video editor. 🎥
If you are interested in amateur video editing, find some comments on Lightworks on Blue Steens.
Next month on Blue Steens
We will explore
... what 'health' means, and why it matters.
Beyond Blue Steens
Health data sharing
Sharing healthcare data could bring huge benefits to biomedcial R&D but is fraught with uncertainty about data privacy and management, access and ownership rights and not least ethics. Here are some relevant articles I came across this month.
How Should Scientists' Access To Health Databanks Be Managed? - Glance at one UK and three US American organisations collecting genetic data: their approach to sampling (from specific to diverse populations) and data sharing (from very restricted to open)
Britain to use millions of NHS patients' histories to seek cures - From October data hubs from Health Data Research UK are going to offer unprecedented access to anonymised NHS patient medical histories.
Google swallows DeepMind Health and useful historic overview Google's DeepMind and Patient Data Usage: The Saga Continues for some background - Do we trust Google with our healthcare data? Besides speculations about the reasons for Deep Mind’s co-founder’s leave, this statement is extremely worrying, ”But as of now there are no plans to replace the ethics panel, so there is little clarity on who will oversee the work Google does with the data of NHS patients.“
Tech and legislation
Cases from different industries where legislation was/is either insufficient or lagging behind technological advance.
Vaping is suspected in a fifth death and hundreds of injuries - Vaping was hailed as a healthier way of smoking. Now this is questioned. Judging from the uncertainty about ingredient and device safety, I wonder how well things were tested and what approvals of these mass market products involved. Since protective pre-sales mechanisms seem to have have failed consumers, some legislators have now taken action by banning sales temporarily. - CDC reports another surge in number of cases of vaping-related illness
Flying taxis are taking off to whisk people around cities - Tech is literally miles ahead of legislation. It sounds like prospective service providers are aiming to work with legislators to get going. Hopefully, commercial interests won’t trump user safety and other societal needs.
The Real Story Of The Repo Market Meltdown, And What It Means For Bitcoin - Comprehensible explanation of the dire (insolvent?) state of banks. Add some background on the repo market for better understanding. Also, good insight into how powerless (clueless?) auditors are by design and a hint of bitcoin as antidote. Regulators and legislators seem to be dragging their feet in fixing old and enabling new systems.
Not tech-heavy but surely tech-facilitated case demonstrating how slowly legislators react and the damage caused … Cum-ex tax scandal cost European treasuries €55 billion (No recent news even though I’ve only discovered this now.) - Complete legislative fail: Large-scale tax fraud across Europe driven by banks and stockbrokers who exploited a legal loophole. One comment in this article by a main suspect is extremely startling. It conveys sheer ignorance towards the wider implications of exploiting legal loopholes to such an extent and ignores the concept of ‘substance over form’. As if there was nothing wrong with what had been done because it was not strictly illegal. Legislative provisions will probably never cover all possible nooks and crannies, and maybe they shouldn’t. What about personal morals and professional ethics? The people involved were not just amber gamblers on a quiet road. Here are some illustrations to put the figures in context: The Multibillion Euro Theft.
Random musings
The 5 Habits Of A Corporate Intrapreneur - Whilst we celebrate entrepreneurs with shout-outs and awards, innovators and drivers within companies get less public attention. Being an employee does not necessarily mean leading a passive professional life. I absolutely appreciate this piece about the challenges faced by intrapreneurs.