tl;dr the big variation in non-GP specialist fees in Australia is largely due to differences between individual doctors, rather than factors such as patient complexity or structural costs.

Sources of specialist physician fee variation: Evidence from Australian health insurance claims data 🔒


Guizhou has been the target of successive visions of state-led sinofuturity, which have developed the province as unevenly as its karst landscape.

China’s Hinterland Becomes A Critical Datascape - NOEMA


3.5 million Argentinians pushed into poverty this year

Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency, offering the first hard evidence of the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population

Poverty in Argentina soars to over 50% as Milei’s austerity measures hit hard



Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war

It’s awful that Israel’s “escape forward” strategy, at the cost of thousands of lives, faces no meaningful international censure.

🇱🇧🇵🇸

A line of displaced people carrying scant possessions walk along a beach. The photo was taken near Tyre, Lebanon. &10;&10;Image credit: Aziz Taher for Reuters

Sticking an AirTag on my Kindle just saved me again. If it wasn’t for this I’d have lost it many times by now.

A reader with a brown cover. An AirTag is attached to it using a stuck-on pen loop with a key chain running through it.

Catholicism, another flank in America's pernicious global influence?

Another interesting piece, though it cements my view that American Catholicism has far more in common with with the evangelical churches of their countrymen than what is understood to be Catholicism in the rest of the world. Another flank in America’s pernicious global influence?

Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex - Vanity Fair


Interesting piece on Vance and his antecedents.

Who Owns America? was the Agrarian-Distributists’ last hurrah. The American public — including, ironically, the very farmers and working men that the movement sought to “save” — was simply not attracted to the philosophy.

The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right - Olivia Paschal in HNN


As above

A bridge over the River Lee, with the bridge and a building reflected in the water.


In one of the University College Cork buildings they have a Mac (the same model that my Dad bought for our family and that I used as a kid) on display in a glass case, like it’s some sort of early hominid tool. I’ve rarely felt so old.


Welcome, Vault Dweller


Tide players surf the currents

Twenty years of the development of health impact assessment in Australia

A presentation at University College Cork, 17 September 2024

References cited

Community Affairs References Committee (2013) Australia’s domestic response to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Commission on Social Determinants of Health report “Closing the gap within a generation”, Australian Senate: Canberra.

ECHP. (1999). Gothenburg Consensus Paper on Health Impact Assessment: Main concepts and suggested approach.

Haigh, F., Crimeen, A., Green, L., Moeller, H., Conaty, S., Prior, J., & Harris-Roxas, B. (2023). Developing a climate change inequality health impact assessment for health services. Public Health Research and Practice33(4). https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp3342336

Harris, P., Harris-Roxas, B., Harris, E., & Kemp, L. (2007). Health Impact Assessment: A practical guide. UNSW and NSW Health. http://www.hiaconnect.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Health_Impact_Assessment_A_Practical_Guide.pdf

Harris-Roxas, B., & Harris, E. (2011). Differing forms, differing purposes: A typology of Health Impact Assessment. Environmental Impact Assessment Review31(4), 396–403. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2010.03.003

Harris-Roxas, B., Viliani, F., Bond, A., Cave, B., Divall, M., Furu, P., Harris, P., Soeberg, M., Wernham, A., & Winkler, M. (2012). Health impact assessment: The state of the art. Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal30(1), 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/14615517.2012.666035

Kim, J., Dannenberg, A., Haigh, F., & Harris-Roxas, B. (2024). Let’s Be Clear—Health Impact Assessments or Assessing Health Impacts? Public Health Reviews45, 1607722. https://doi.org/10.3389/phrs.2024.1607722

Office for Health Improvement & Disparities. (2024). Health Equity Assessment Tool (HEAT): What it is and how to use it. Office for Health Improvement & Disparities. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-equity-assessment-tool-heat/health-equity-assessment-tool-heat-executive-summary

O’Mullane, M., Smith, K., Archibong, U., McHugh, S., Mullally, G., Purdy, J., Pursell, L., Harris-Roxas, B., Kelly, I., Kavanagh, P., Daly, H., O’Mahony, T., Green, L., Ward, J., Burke, S., Connolly, B., & Cave, B. (2023). Development of a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) Implementation Model: Enhancing Intersectoral Approaches in Tackling Health Inequalities (Irish Health Research Board)

Pollard, E. E. (2023). Interrupting white business as usual: Applying the Health Equity Assessment Tool in health service and programme planning in Aotearoa [PhD]. University of Otago.

Sally, S., Felicity, B., Christina, Z., Serene, Y., Anna, P., & Kathryn, B. (2024). A realist impact evaluation of a tool to strengthen equity in local government policy-making. International Journal for Equity in Health23(1), 179. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-024-02266-5

Winkler, M. S., Furu, P., Viliani, F., Cave, B., Divall, M., Ramesh, G., Harris-Roxas, B., & Knoblauch, A. M. (2020). Current Global Health Impact Assessment Practice. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health17(9), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17092988

Winkler, M. S., Krieger, G. R., Divall, M. J., Cissé, G., Wielga, M., Singer, B. H., Tanner, M., & Utzinger, J. (2013). Untapped potential of health impact assessment. Bulletin of the World Health Organization91(4), 298–305. https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.12.112318

Winkler, M., Viliani, F., Knoblauch, A., Cave, B., Divall, M., Ramesh, G., Harris-Roxas, B., & Furu, P. (2021). International Best Practice Principles: Health Impact Assessment (2nd edition) (Special Publication Series). International Association for Impact Assessment.

Zanella, N. (2021). ‘Treading waves’ on the Qiantang River: An exploration of wave riding in Chinese history and literature. TEXT25(Special 65). https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.28071

The post Tide players surf the currents appeared first on Ben Harris-Roxas.


A genuinely shocking number of students on campus. I wish things were more like this at home.

Young people sitting on a shaded lawn amongst trees. It's the University College Cork campus.

James Joyce Bridge

An angle arched bridge over a river at sunset. The blue and yellow sky is reflected in the River Liffey.

Love a cavernous train terminal

A large single structure train terminal, large enough to accommodate several high speed trains.

The front of a baroque cathedral. It's the Iglesia de Santa Isabel de Portugal in Zaragoza, Aragon.


We crave assurance that intimacy can survive independent of convenience. We dream of friendship that is interminable, impervious to the passage of time or changes in geography or individual growth.

On group chats - LARB


Scholarly communication infrastructure has been beyond its breaking point for a while. Generative pre-trained transformers look increasingly like an epistemological omnicidal weapon that we've failed to contain.

Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar.

Worryingly it is free tools like Google Scholar, and fields like environmental and health sciences that have obvious policy and practice relevance, that seem particularly vulnerable.

GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation - Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review