Dark Brightness

I’ve been working on getting my bookmarks for firefox up. They are here. Main reason for this is that I have moved the laptop to Sabayon 4.1 — which has all the multimedia I would ever want, and games, which are needed when I travel. The main machine is now running the rc version of Fedora 11. This allows me to have very similar data to my university machine, which runs Fedora from the Otago University internal repos, and no, I am not going to link thru the firewall….

Now have thunderbird, abiword and most of what I need running. I’m using AutoTen and zotero. Autoten makes Fedora act like Sabayon — but Zotero is needed, as it allows for automagic insertion of references trawled from the internet AND it understands bibtex.

Finally, in my hands Fedora groks R, which is essential. I know one of my mates is making a user friendly statistics programme under the GPL called sofastatistics, but it is not prime time yet, and the kind of modelling I do requires some facility with a statistical language.

There but for the grace go all of us. One of the problems is that the ideolology around mental healht is about recovery. This was decided at the highest levels…

Holiday handed himself in to the care of a secure unit, but the following month a social worker let him back out into the community. This was a “missed opportunity” to have him sectioned, according to the report, which was written by the region’s strategic health authority, NHS Yorkshire and the Humber.

And the decision should not be made by one person. It should be made by a team and there should be a senior psychiatrist signing off on it.

Holiday missed his fortnightly dose of anti-psychotic drugs the day before the killing because he had not been home when a nurse called. He went on to steal a 10-inch carving knife from a store and was captured loitering in the street, as if waiting for someone to pass by.

One of the main reasons for community treatment orders is so that this does not happen. In high risk people a protocol (legal in NZ, but the UK is full of idiots making the life of both the mad and mad doctors miserable) is to admit to hospital briefly: we can and do use the police to bring people back for their injections.

If you miss your meds you can relapse. About 90% of people with schizophrenia who stop their meds will relapse. And being psychotic is very bad for your ability to cope in most people. In a few, very few, it leads to them being quite dangerous, which is why compulsory treatment exists.

He turned off into Wellsted Street, where his path crossed with Miss Stevenson, who had just left her home.

Holiday walked past her, turned and stabbed her once in the back, piercing her heart and leaving her bleeding to death. He then walked home calmly. Police tracked him down from CCTV images and Holiday admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He was ordered to be detained indefinitely at Rampton Hospital.

The report found that Holiday had been treated in at least five mental health units and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act on at least two occasions, but had a habit of escaping.

Known to be high risk. It would be interesting to see if there had been a review panel before all this.

Mr Snowdon apologised to the family of both Miss Stevenson and Holiday for the distress caused to them. He said the trust took the report “very seriously” and lessons had “already been learned”.

The NHS trust and clinicians should have acknowledged distress and that this was a tragedy from the beginning. That is not an admission before a court of law: that is being human and good care.

via NHS trust admit catalogue of errors let schizophrenic kill pregnant woman – Telegraph.

The women have done well. However, the make 6×1500m record has stood since… 1971.

and I’m too old and too slow to help. Besides, it is two layer, hat and gloves temp now… Autumn has arrived.

Athletics: Hill City smashes lovelock record

By Wayne Parsons on Mon, 4 May 2009

Athletics

Hill City runner Kim Hebert-Losier competes in the Lovelock Relay at the University Oval on Saturday. Photo by Peter McIntosh.

Hill City runner Kim Hebert-Losier competes in the Lovelock Relay at the University Oval on Saturday. Photo by Peter McIntosh.

Hill City’s Paula Whiting and Rebekah Greene set up a record-breaking victory at the Lovelock Relay meeting at the University Oval on Saturday

Whiting, Greene, Kim Hebert-Losier and Shireen Crumpton won the 4×1500m event in 19min 30sec.

Their time smashed the record of 19min 46sec set in 1989 by the Leith team of Leanne Durry, Mary-Anne Henzell, Lisa Pollock and Fiona McKee.

via Athletics: Hill City smashes lovelock record | Otago Daily Times Online.

This is what public health is good at. Quarantine, ensuring hygiene, and getting treatments out, using compulsion when necessary.

Panicking does not help. Scoring political points, concentrating on the economics or standing on one’s rights does not help. Nineteethn Century, pre-antibiotic methods: quarantine, ring immunisation or treatment (if available) DO help.

Nine days after swine flu was detected in New Zealand, the Ministry of Health believes the public are not at great risk of being infected, but it is remaining cautious.

The ministry said yesterday that there was no evidence swine flu had spread beyond people who had travelled to Mexico or the United States, or people who had been in close contact with them. A spokesman said the World Health Organisation’s pandemic danger signs – community outbreaks and unexplainable human-to-human transmission – were not evident in New Zealand.

Calls to the Healthline with swine flu queries had tapered off. However, health authorities were tightening controls to ensure the bug was contained and stamped out.

via No signs swine flu spreading – ministry – National – NZ Herald News.

Interesting day. Found this via No Minister. My comment is that it is moral to reward individuals who risk: it is immoral to steal. The most moral tax is atithe (which goes to the poor) or a  head tax (interestingly, the Torah has a head tax to start the covenant, but tithes to keep welfare going.)

It wrong to subsume one’s God-given moral thoughts and freedom to a collective. It is moral to oppose the Borg.

Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It’s also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don’t have without regard for our children’s future.

Enterprise defenders also have to define “fairness” as protecting merit and freedom. This is more intuitively appealing to Americans than anything involving forced redistribution. Take public attitudes toward the estate tax, which only a few (who leave estates in the millions of dollars) will ever pay, but which two-thirds of Americans believe is “not fair at all,” according to a 2009 Harris poll. Millions of ordinary citizens believe it is unfair for the government to be predatory — even if the prey are wealthy.

via The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism – WSJ.com.