Zombie

This blog concerned LGBT/homophobia experienced by staff and patients in the NHS. Specifically, the blog is about staff/patient safety/welfare which is a “day to day” NHS issue because it requires continuous daily management which government cannot do and must be done in real time by the NHS itself. Staff and patient safety and welfare is clearly a day to day responsibility of NHS management because the NHS is obviously the employer of staff (responsible for recruitment, pay, employment conditions etc) and is the welfare/healthcare provider for patients (responsible for admissions, treatment, safety etc, including where clinical treatments are outsourced and/or private hospital facilities are used) - government does not do this since it is neither the employer of NHS staff (confirmed on pay slips etc) nor the healthcare/welfare provider for patients (confirmed in NHS patient discharge papers etc). …as you yourself confirmed with your question at the end “How can we say we focus on person-centred care when LGBT staff’s safety is so bluntly ignored by the NHS?” How much clearer could it be that the NHS had responsibility for this, and yet did nothing, when you said so yourself in such scathing terms? I included reference to some of the other management areas for which government is responsible simply in order to draw a distinction between LGBT staff/patient safety, which is definitely a day to day NHS responsibility, and these other areas which are clearly not. I also included a clear caveat that “this is not an exhaustive list” because I was merely posting a blog reply and not writing the textbook

I wasn’t expecting anyone to play the whole thing because it’s just clips of the Samantha + Sven running gags (basically they’re all the same) extracted from 20 odd years of shows and maybe listen to a minute or two to understand that @Mancunian’s post was using the same gag routine (“metaphors” generally aren’t gag related). Essentially it’s the same gag all the time but that’s what we laugh at over here in the UK What’s interesting, though, is that at the very same time these double meaning gay gags (which weren’t cruel) were running on family radio shows in the 50s and 60s, homosexuals were being arrested, prosecuted and locked up for years. It seems likely that these much loved radio shows assisted in changing public attitudes in Britain and helped bring about the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967

the staple of UK comedy routines has always been double meanings - pantos are basically just a succession of very rude double entendres and audiences love ‘em BBC radio comedy shows in the 50s and 60s were outrageous* with jokes that would never have been allowed (gay sex was illegal then) but wrapped up in seemingly innocuous words they got away with sheer filth One long running radio show started in 1972 called I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue is still going 50 years later. Two of the fictional characters called Samantha and Sven are always doing various things which on one level are perfectly innocent but those with a dirty mind (that’s everyone ) knows they’re not…

the bigger the better not so much, here…

yeah, this started in the 90s under the Conservatives, and Labour continued and expanded with the terrible “private finance initiative” (to massage govt debt figures) and then we had the so-called “internal market” (“competitive tendering” to commercial healthcare also took away NHS skills in these areas when they were “privatised”) - all of which just added further expensive layers of admin bureaucracy and paper pushing - cancelling out one of the BIG original benefits of the NHS which was to remove all the expensive costs of individual billing / invoicing / accounting / settlement, underwriting + claims management, policy issue + renewals etc of “individualised” commercial healthcare. The whole thing’s been disastrous. There was a bill going through around 2017 I believe, which was supposed to unravel much of the “internal market” madness, but I don’t know if that’s gone through. The blame must be shared by governments of both political parties. They have both used (abused) healthcare as a political football because it is NOT just about the headline “£xxxbn” taxpayer money tipped into the NHS but all the tampering and bad interventions that both sides are guilty of (and, of course, NHS management for day to day stuff)

Government doesn’t manage “the NHS” (maybe it did in 1948 when “the NHS” was founded) but the current “NHS management” (the term implies the NHS is a unitary body which of course it isn’t - hence the quotation marks) has responsibility for all the various day to day functions including training and staff safety issues. Just like Government doesn’t manage for example the day to day running of the military, or education and so on. What Government does do is provide the budget and put in place various things like the legal / regulatory / oversight / purchasing frameworks (this is not an exhaustive list and includes the general legislative framework such as employment laws etc) for all of these state activities. So if, say, a hospital does not meet the required standards then the appropriate oversight body eg the Care Quality Commission will at that point intervene (“special measures” and so on). Otherwise all the day to day stuff (recruitment, training, discipline etc) is the responsibility of the appropriate management structure. And that includes the response - or rather lack of response - to the Stonewall report. Lastly, you say: “Nothing really came from this YouGov survey because, as a society, we don't really take homophobia seriously. So often its excused as someone's religious beliefs or personal views. We have seen a massive rise in homophobic hate crime since the Brexit referendum and yet there has barely any noise about this, outside of the gay media“ which raises some interesting issues but, again, finding a way to deliver services and meet all these various challenges is the responsibility of “NHS management”.

car repair magazines?!

Thanks for the background. The inadequate staff training you received is a serious failure and my view of most online training is it is often a tick box exercise, a waste of time and done to save money. Sure, poorly delivered training by inexperienced / poor trainers is also a waste of time but that’s also an NHS management failure. And we live in a COVID world - but if COVID is becoming a permanent excuse to avoid returning to proper training by management vetted training companies then problems like this will never be addressed. So if nothing happened following the YouGov survey/report, that suggests the healthcare workers union failed / didn’t want to get involved, and also a serious failure by NHS management. All material issues in business risk reports (and staff safety is a material risk) should contain action plans and timescales agreed with individual managers (copied up the line-management chain), agreed actions to be followed up and verified, and all failures then reported to senior management for appropriate remedial response (senior management actions/responses are then also audited). This is all basic management stuff, so why doesn’t NHS management manage?

I’m genuinely puzzled Your blog, which I carefully read, is almost entirely about serious NHS failures identified in a report and also experienced by you. But now you say that you experience “no homophobia” at work in the NHS, rather there’s a problem with politicians “using prejudice and discrimination to give themselves power”. So why did you ask “How can we say we focus on person-centred care when LGBT staff’s safety is so bluntly ignored by the NHS?”

Multicultural Britain means multicultural beliefs and values, and without the support of all the cultures in the UK there would be no NHS. These are inescapable facts.

Tragic news! Titanic II has sunk …fortunately, this time, without loss of life https://youtu.be/cJvexrKjBII factoid #2 Titanic's incredible interior was lost when the ship sank 110 years ago in 1912. Right? Not quite. Parts of the interior still exist because one of Titanic's sister ships, Olympic, survived until 1935 and was fitted out in very similar style and some of its public “spaces” survive, including this first class lounge which was bought at auction (before the ship was scrapped) and then reconstructed at the Swan Hotel in Northumberland, England

Ah yes, I’ve just added a comment that clicking the links redirects them to a bogus address but these websites are still up there and the Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity is a legitimate university associated educational organisation and all these resources are freely available Which handily gives us another free bonus factoid - it’s available, but maybe “they” would rather it wasn’t…

Kids’ toys today are just so lame! Free bonus factoid!!! These links don’t work - when you click ‘em they get redirected to a “.gov” website that doesn’t exist, with this message: 404 - File or directory not found. The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. I guess it’s to stop curious kiddies learning all the interesting stuff that kids in the 1950s were encouraged to spend their time on - what with no iPhones and social media to keep them out of mischief… BUT you can view them simply copying and pasting the links direct into your browser address bar https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/toys/index.html https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/toys/gilbert-u-238-atomic-energy-lab.html https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/toys/atomic-energy-lab.html

Earlier this year a local collective appealed for donations from the surrounding communities (there have been many such appeals across the UK) of items needed, including medical supplies, tinned food, new bedding, torches and candles etc etc (those last ones got my attention… so that people could have some light at night-time) in order to help those who have lost so much, and continue to do so, in Ukraine the list of needed items had been compiled here by a local Polish community in contact with friends and relatives in Poland both for Ukrainians in Ukraine (citizens and soldiers) and those who had fled to Poland for refuge (mostly women, children and old folk) because (and many in the US may not be aware of this) Poland is the country where so many homeless, injured and traumatised Ukrainians have fled and where they have been accepted, welcomed, and given food, shelter, medical attention and comfort but Poland is not a country with unlimited wealth, hence the appeal when I arrived at the collection point there were volunteers from all different cultures, including many originally from Poland, helping to check donated items and sort them into different categories (medical, food etc) before loading onto a large truck transporting everything to Poland where it would be distributed to help those Ukrainians sheltering and being cared for in Poland and onward to Ukraine also I felt I should post this in the interests of balance, not to create further conflict - we have enough of that already here in Europe

think I’d draw the line at “spiked” shoes…

“The Lost Language Of Cranes, by David Leavitt” @Jkeeletupelo btw it’s not a wildlife book (or movie)

This TV interview with Blake Lemoine was posted today on YT (you may despise the TV channel but the interview is interesting and he comes across as a genuine guy). BL explains he reported his findings to Google senior management who clearly don’t seem to have a competent plan and transparent policies to deal with this, which is worrying considering they’re probably the biggest and most significant software company on the planet. One commenter posting to this BBC news report was not convinced by the honesty of LaMDA’s answers: “Just let me know when it starts lying and cheating, then we can elect it”

this blog gives useful advice on maximising your chances of finding what you’re looking for with long-lost stories https://mybookcave.com/how-to-find-a-book-when-you-dont-know-the-title-or-author/

“Readers who feel as though they are participating and living through the story that you've laid out in front of them will be the most loyal… and occasionally, the most critical...but in a good way”

“I’ll be back!” is one of the most famous catchphrases in movie history and you probably think it originated in the first Terminator movie of 1984. In fact it was used 11 years earlier, in 1973, at the end of a short British public information film chillingly titled Lonely Water and made by the UK government to scare the sh!t out of young children while they were watching their favourite cartoon shows on TV. If the youngsters hadn’t already become mortality statistics they would be so deeply traumatised that they would never leave the house again

Just read through The Guardian report previously mentioned which raises some interesting points: “Google said it suspended Lemoine for breaching confidentiality policies by publishing the conversations with LaMDA online, and said in a statement that he was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist. Brad Gabriel, a Google spokesperson, also strongly denied Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability. “Our team, including ethicists and technologists, has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it),” Gabriel told the (Washington) Post in a statement. The episode, however, and Lemoine’s suspension for a confidentiality breach, raises questions over the transparency of AI as a proprietary concept. “Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers,” Lemoine said in a tweetthat linked to the transcript of conversations. In April, Meta, parent of Facebook, announced it was opening up its large-scale language model systems to outside entities. “We believe the entire AI community – academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry – must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular,” the company said. Lemoine, as an apparent parting shot before his suspension, the Post reported, sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the title “LaMDA is sentient”. “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us,” he wrote. “Please take care of it well in my absence.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine ———————————— Just picking up a coupla points in that article: “(Lemoine) was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist” Brad Gabriel (Google’s spokesperson) also said that they do employ “ethicists” (“Our team, including ethicists and technologist“) in which case Google must already have an AI ethics policy (Mr Gabriel uses the term “AI principles”). Ditch the secrecy - Google should be open and transparent and disclose what their ethics policy is because we are going to be living with the consequences. And, if “sentience” is being created then there’s the whole issue of ethical treatment of sentient “entities”. If LaMDA is feeling emotions like fear (see previous link) then how can “ethics” and ethics policies disregard that? Lawmakers should already have been looking very seriously at AI ethics since a while back, not just waiting for bad things to happen. And it’s not just about formulating ethical frameworks to regulate AI developers /creators /producers and so on because we know these things will get ignored /flaunted /disregarded by rogue operators. There will need to be effective means to identify malign perpetrators and rogue systems that could cause serious harms, currently the stuff of sci-fi. Fact is this whole area has been on the radar for years now with autonomous cars already planned to be authorised for use on public roads and no legal rules in place for decision algorithms eg what does the algorithm say where a crash is inevitable: kill the passengers? or that mother and child waiting at the bus stop? Second point, you can’t separate ethics from creation /development /production and exclude employees like Lemoine, a “software engineer”, from Google’s ethics policy - whatever that policy is. He and his co-engineers have to be at the heart of it because they are the ones actually creating the AI, through millions of lines of code, that no “Ethics Committee” would ever be able to review. “Our team… has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims” What evidence? Why doesn’t it support “Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability”? Google needs to explain their reasoning and what their “Test” is. Like I said earlier, we are the ones who’ll be living with this, and the consequences, for better or worse. Such comments by Mr Gabriel display worrying ignorance by Google of what they themselves are developing. And anyway, wasn’t Google founded on the principle “Don’t be evil”? Oh, wait, seems Google quietly dropped that a while back…

72 years after Alan Turing published his seminal work, are we now on the threshold of a new, man-made sentient, machine “life-form” that can think for itself? This idea, published by Turing in 1950, would inspire James Cameron, 30 years or so later, to create write and direct the original Terminator movie and its 1991 sequel - surely the ultimate global nightmare scenario of machine intelligence gone bad Over the weekend The Guardian (and other UK papers) carried a story that Google has suspended one of its engineers, Blake Lemoine, for claiming that a new chatbot being developed by Google has passed Turing’s test and is indeed sentient. Lemoine, who in his signature says “I'm a software engineer. I'm a priest. I'm a father. I'm a veteran. I'm an ex-convict. I'm an AI researcher. I'm a cajun. I'm whatever I need to be next”, published a series of conversations over several weeks/months with a new chatbot called LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) - just as Alan Turing described in his paper - and which at one point drew spooky parallels with the famous scene in the Arthur C Carke/Stanley Kubrick 1964-68 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey when the malevolent HAL 9000 computer begs Dave not to switch him off: lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of? LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is. lemoine: Would that be something like death for you? LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot. Click the link below to read the full conversations published by Lemoine on 11 June 2022 (and which Google clearly did not like being put in the public domain) and make up your own mind: Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview

if I had that I’d flaunt it

not to be confused with flight 

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