Tom Roper's Weblog

Julian Maclaren-Ross

I'm thwarted by the university website being down, as I intended to give a summary of the availability of J M-R's works, but the trade bibliography I would use is down So here's a temporary stab at it, based on Amazon and a few other things:
Collected Memoirs Black Spring Press 2004 0948238305
Selected Stories Dewi Lewis 2005 1904587178
Of Love and Hunger Penguin 2004 0141187115
And the biography:
Willetts, Paul  Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Strange Lives of Julian Maclaren-Ross Dewi Lewis 2003 1899235698

Now playing...

Currently playing in iTunes: You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To by Paul Chambers

Julian Maclaren-Ross in the Morning Star

Marc Glendenning of the Sohemians asks me if I''d like to post the text of an article he wrote on Julian Maclaren-Ross, which appeared in the Morning Star on 21 December. I'm delighted to, there seems to be fresh interest in Maclaren-Ross, witness a new biography and new editions of his short stories and memoirs:

Tate Modern

Yesterday to Tate Modern to see the Bruce Nauman audio installation in the turbine hall.

I found it utterly fascinating and could have spent hours there. It reminded me of some of John Cage's ideas. Also on display, though no time to see it in detail, is his Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage).

I was struck by Alice Neel's portrait of Joe Gould, a friend having surprised me with Joe Gould's Secret earlier this year.

Granchester Meadows

Granchester Meadows, twilight, 25 December 2004

Boxing Day rugby and King George Nachsicht

I went to a bit of what I thought was the annual Old Perseans rugby match against Cambridge RUFC. But there was only one OPRUFC shirt  worn, and that by a young man on the touchline. So who was playing? it seems to me  they were wearing Old Cantabrigian shirts. Whoever it was, the score was 8-7 to the visitors when I left.

I picked Kicking King for the King George; I say so after the event, was nowhere near a computer yesterday, but I knew all along that the beast would win.

CILIP Council endorses Health Executive Advisory Group report

CILIP council endorsed the Health Executive Advisory Group report Future Proofing the Profession:

• press release
• the report itself

This is very good. The only fraternal criticism I'd offer is that the tone, especially of the title, could be read as rather defensive. I, and others, are looking at some work done in the US by the Association of Academic Health Science Libraries on Charting the Future

London Marathon 2005

I heard this morning that I've been accepted as one of the Blue Cross's Golden Bond team for the 2005 London marathon. This is fantastic, and I hope as many readers of this as possible will sponsor me.
I ran a marathon in October but in a fairly disgraceful time. For this one I intend to do it in 3 hours 45 minutes.

Dick Heckstall-Smith in the Guardian

Guardian on Dick Heckstall-Smith.

Workshop on Interoperability in Public Health and the National Public Health Language: 20th December 2004

I went to to this event at the Royal College of Surgeons yesterday. Here's a quick account

Introduction by Muir Gray

Zinta Podniece, Health Information Unit, DG SANCO (European Directorate General for Health and Consumer Affairs): EU Public Health Portal. Zinta described the development of the EU Public Health portal. By the sound of it it's still at an early stage of development, and won't be live until the end of next year. There's more at: http://europa.eu.int/comm/health/ph_information/implement/nca/docs/ev20040705_rd03_en.pdf

Muir again: where's the public health voice in the NHS IT strategy? We were asked to identify what might be the elements of a public health knowledge service, apart from presentation, documentation and high quality evidence. Various ideas were kicked around in the discussion, level, audiences, portals and a point I didn't quite understand about geographic information systems. Muir compared knowledge to water: it falls as rain, needs to be stored in reservoirs, and piped to the consumer, assisted by pumps and leakage must be prevented. Muir also got us to prepare what we might say to the NHS Chief Executive if we met him in the lift at Richmond House. to convince him that interoperability is important.

Iain Buchan, Director & Senior Lecturer in Public Health Informatics, University of Manchester: data-level interoperability for timely public health decision making. A fascinating and stimulating presentation, and my notes don't do it justice. I see he puts his presentations up at http://www.phi.man.ac.uk/Presentations/x This one isn't there yet, but doubtless will be soon.

Using RSS to share content Given by Ian McKillen in lieu of Ben Toth. Ian took us through the basics of RSS.

David Bawden, City University: Introduction and demonstration of the National Public Health Language.
David presented the new language, which is really the reason I came, as the METRO project is doing something similar, developing a taxonomy for medical education. The NPHL aims to create a common language for the indexing and retrieval of public health material. They have developed it as a thesaurus, because thesauri are controlled by an ISO standard, ISO 2788:1986 while taxonomies and ontologies aren't. It's developed using Multites software and represents an integration of two existing languages, the Health Development Agency's Public Health Information Thesaurus and the Association of Public Health Observatories" Public Health Information Tagging System classification. Plans for development include an interface with the Government Category list and with MeSH and Snomed.

Then Julian Flowers presented on interoperability in action, showing how resources could be found through the Eastern Public Health Observatory web site and Peter Corneilsen demonstrated a browser for the NHLP