Quote Of The Year

Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"

or

H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Sunday, February 25, 2024

AusHealthIT Poll Number 735 – Results – 25 February, 2024.

Here are the results of the poll.

Do You Think The Next Decade Will See A Major Evolution Of Social Media Functionality And Use?

Yes                                                                           7 (31%)

No                                                                          15 (65%)

I Have No Idea                                                        1 (4%)

Total No. Of Votes: 23

A split vote with a majority not holding out much hope for improvement in social media!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

A poor number of votes. But also a very clear outcome! 

1 of 23 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

Friday, February 23, 2024

It Seems AI Is Really Making An Impact At The ‘Top-End’ Of Town!

This appeared last week.

CBA racks up "50-plus" GenAI use cases across the bank

By

Via experimentation environment set up last May.

Commonwealth Bank created 50-plus generative AI use cases using a safe environment it set up for experimentation in May last year.

The bank revealed the large-scale growth and usage in ancillary slides [pdf] accompanying its half-year results presentation, though did not directly address the success.

CBA said that it had practiced “responsible scaling of AI, resulting in [the] 50-plus generative AI use cases to simplify operational processes and support our frontline to serve customers” materialising between June and November last year.

These use cases, it said, were generated out of CommBank Gen.ai Studio, an H2O.ai powered environment aimed at enabling safe experimentation with large language models (LLMs).

The bank said it had also “upskilled over 500 staff on AI tools to democratise the responsible use of AI”.

In addition, CBA suggested that generative AI is enabling it to experiment more with its long-running next best conversation (NBC) engine, known as the customer engagement engine or CEE.

The CEE is used to personalise conversations and offers to customers - CEO Matt Comyn told financial analysts that, for example, the bank had recently used CEE to make “personalised pricing offers” to home loan customers coming off a fixed-rate loan.

Though somewhat cryptic, CBA indicated it had seen a “30x increase in experimentation capability within an NBC compared to [the] current CEE A/B testing framework with GenAI.”

iTnews has contacted a CBA spokesperson to clarify the findings.

Tech drives up OpEx

CBA said that continued insourcing of IT capabilities and cloud contributed to higher operating expenses in the back half of last year, but these were “more than offset” by productivity benefits.

The company’s half-year results for the six months ended December 30 showed a familiar pattern of IT and cloud’s contribution to the bank’s operating expenses.

More here:

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/cba-racks-up-50-plus-genai-use-cases-across-the-bank-605089

I guess the CBA is the toppest ‘top end of town’ you can find. AI has clearly hit the big time as a technology to be considered and reviewed!

David.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

This Really Does Seem To Be A Considerable Leap Forward.

 This appeared last week.

Best Practice will use AI assistant to draft GP patient notes by ‘listening’ to consults

Best Practice is integrating an AI assistant for note-taking.

Heather Saxena

14 February 2024

Major GP software maker Best Practice is integrating a note-taking AI assistant to its desktop software.

The tool was built by Lyrebird Health, an Australian company founded eight months ago and will be fully integrated into the software which is used by around 25,000 doctors.

Best Practice claims it will save GPs who choose to use it between 60-90 minutes of note-writing every day.

How does it work, how was it tested and are there potential medico-legal risks?

Danielle Bancroft, the company’s chief product officer, answers AusDoc’s questions.


AusDoc: The Lyrebird tool is meant to write up clinical notes based on ‘listening’ to the consultation. How does it know what’s important to record? 

Danielle Bancroft: The tool is already programmed to know what is clinical information and reject ‘chit chat’. 

That process has improved as the database of doctors with access to the system has increased.  

If the occasional non-clinical line creeps in, and the GP deletes it from the consultation notes, the system will ‘learn’ not to include similar data in the future. 

When I first had it demonstrated to me, we were in a room with 5000 people. 

We talked about all kinds of things including the weekend footy with the kids.

It managed to remove all of that. 

AD: Does Lyrebird keep all the recordings from GP consults to ‘teach’ the AI based on real patients? 

Ms Bancroft: No, the tool captures what is said and immediately removes any identifying patient information from the audio stream while it’s being processed, as consultation notes are generated and displayed for the doctor to review. 

Each recording is only available for 24 hours after the consultation before it’s deleted. 

It’s purely there for the clinician to check against and validate the notes in that period of time.

It won’t be stored forever.  

The tool is really just short-cutting the manual part of typing up the initial notes.  

The clinician is in control of what is actually saved. 

AD: What happens during that 24-hour period? 

Ms Bancroft: During a consult, all audio is transcribed in real-time on Lyrebird Health’s Australian servers. 

At no point in time are audio files saved or permanently stored.

The audio stream from the consultation is completely encrypted and securely transferred to the servers.  

What this means is that by the time a consult is finished, all audio has already been converted to text and there is no audio remanence of the conversation. 

Even if accessed, it can’t be tied back to the individual GP or patient.

After 24 hours it is removed. 

Ensuring the recording does not persist or contain personal information minimises the risk of breach or data spill.  

AD: What about for the individual GP, the AI ‘learns’ what they want and don’t want in their notes? 

Ms Bancroft: As an example, the system generates consultation notes with default sub-headings — symptoms, observations and the like.   

If a GP removes certain subheadings they don’t use, or add new subheadings in, the notes will eventually reflect the doctor’s usual note-taking format. 

But these changes are specific to that doctor. 

Other GPs won’t find their consultation notes changing as a result. 

The tool is an enhancement to provide a more detailed base to start from for the consult note.  

It does not replace the clinician’s involvement or responsibilities.  

AD: If Lyrebird notes down something incorrectly, and there are consequences, who is held responsible? 

Ms Bancroft: The integration workflow ensures that draft consult note produced is checked by the clinician first before saving/writing to the database. 

There is a confirmation box that prompts users to double-check and confirm the accuracy of their records before they are able to export it to Best Practice. 

Lyrebird worked with medicolegal documentation experts when developing the tool. 

One described the depth of information it generates as being 3-4 times greater than what they would ordinarily write.  

Crucially, through work with doctors who specialise in the quality of records, there has been a significant increase in documentation quality when compared with notes manually recorded by a GP.

On average, less than 3% of the output text that Lyrebird generates is being edited. 

The responsibility is still on the clinician to ensure the clinical notes are accurate prior to saving, just as it is today.  

They have an opportunity to change or add to the notes before saving. 

Lyrebird consulted directly with medical defence organisations when developing the tool. 

AD: Given it’s based on what’s said aloud during the consultation, will GPs need to tweak their style? For example, if they’re taking blood pressure and both the GP and the patient can view the reading, will they need to announce it out loud? 

Ms Bancroft: In that example, GPs will have to say the blood pressure reading [out loud]. 

There’s also a little bit of change required during examinations, with GPs maybe having to pronounce what they are doing, rather than just chit-chat while they check.

AD: What if a GP or patient has a strong accent? 

Ms Bancroft: [We’ve done work] concentrating on different accents.

The more people who use the system the better that is going to get as well. 

It also gets to know the individual clinician: how they speak, how they interact with their patients and their approaches. 

AD: Will GPs need to secure patient consent specifically to use Lyrebird for note-taking? 

Ms Bancroft: When GPs hit record at the start of the consultation, a prompt will ask if they have obtained patient consent and will record whether the patient has said ‘yes, just for this consult’ or ‘yes for all consults’ or ‘no’. 

We are working on a workflow that will allow clinics to send out a SMS with a link so patients can be informed and consent before they get to the clinic at reception. 

AD: Has a system similar to this been used anywhere else by doctors and in what context? 

Ms Bancroft:  Yes, one example being clinical decision support tools that process information about the patient, their history and risk factors and measures it against known information and trends to provide prompts and suggestions back to the doctor.  

MIMS is another example.  

That information is provided based on certain triggers and known trends but ultimately the clinician is the one who takes in the information and decides next steps. 

AD: Have GPs tested the system ahead of its release? 

Ms Bancroft: Yes.  

We have a number of beta testers currently in the process of testing the integration of Lyrebird with Best Practice in advance of the Orchid Sp2 release in a few weeks.  

The metrics we use include user experience, efficiency, accuracy and future workflow enhancement.  

Best Practice clinical adviser Dr Fabrina Hossain also utilised the tool within her travel medicine clinic and focused on efficiency in terms of time saved through the day, on average 60-90 minutes per day, through not running late or staying back to flesh out and record consult notes. 

More here:

https://www.ausdoc.com.au/news/best-practice-will-use-ai-to-draft-gps-patient-notes-by-listening-to-consult/

We need to wait for the reports from the field to see how it actually performs in practice. Exciting times!

David.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

This Looks Like Rather Good News On The Cancer Front!

This encouraging report appeared a few days ago.
Australian researchers unlock the secret to a future cancer vaccine

Exclusive

By Natasha Robinson

Health Editor

3:00AM February 15, 2024

Australian researchers have unlocked a crucial key to future ­cancer vaccines in a world-first discovery set to fast-track RNA-based therapeutics.

Vaccine technology took a giant leap forward with the advent of Covid-19, when mRNA vaccines proved successful and were administered to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

But while mRNA vaccines are effective at inducing an immune response in viral disease, the technology has major challenges in its application for other diseases such as cancer, because the genetic ­material is breaks down quickly in the body and is therefore difficult to apply to other diseases.

Now scientists at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne have made a major discovery in the study of another, more robust form of RNA that could underpin the next generation of RNA-based therapeutics.

They studied a type of genetic material called circular RNA (circRNA), and discovered for the first time exactly how this compound is actively transported out of the nucleus of cells to their site of action in the body of the cell.

The discovery means that scientists will now be able to progress with harnessing circRNA in vaccines and other injectable drugs to fight cancer and other diseases.

“It’s the linear shape of mRNA that makes it relatively unstable and lack durability inside the body and this has been a limiting factor in the potential application of RNA-based therapeutics for diseases such as cancer,” explains Dr Vi Wickramasinghe, senior author on a scientific paper reporting the discovery published on Thursday in the journal Nature.

“For this reason, there’s a rising interest and excitement about another more robust form of RNA – known as circular or circRNA – which has the shape of a closed loop of genetic material, making it much more durable. However, key features of how circRNA operates within cells has remained a mystery – until now.

“Our discovery shows that these circular RNAs, which are actually made in the nucleus, they actually function in the cell’s cytoplasm,” Dr Wickramasinghe said. “Essentially, we discovered this pathway of how they get exported, or how they move from the nucleus to the cytoplasm to perform their functions. And the reason that’s important is because knowing these pathways, we can then use that information to help make the next generation of these RNA therapeutics more efficient.”

The scientists’ discovery that circRNAs are transported out of the cell in a similar way to some proteins, rather than in the same way as other types of RNA, sheds light on a mystery that many scientists around the world had been trying to unlock. There has been much scientific interest in circRNAs, particularly since the Covid vaccine revolution, but exactly how they functioned in the body has been little understood and scientifically contentious.

“This further cements evidence these circular RNAs … are made to carry out important functions in the cell – a contention that has been unclear for most of the circular RNAs discovered to date,” Dr Wickramasinghe said.

“Now this molecular mechanism is worked out, it opens up possibilities for manipulating it for beneficial outcomes such as disease therapies.”

Dr Wickramasinghe said it was now becoming clear that mRNA vaccines were “just the tip of the iceberg” in terms of the potential of gene-based therapies.

“We will look back on this in 10 years and say, ‘these RNA therapeutics have transformed medicine’, that’s how impactful it is.”

Australia has moved to set up manufacturing and research facilities to support the development of mRNA therapeutics since the pandemic, and the circRNA discovery cements the Peter MacCallum Centre as a leader in the devel­opment of RNA therapeutics.

More here:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/australian-researchers-unlock-the-secret-to-a-future-cancer-vaccine/news-story/ca3be130e1f68163aaf2489d415aff11

It is really good to see the promise of RNA being realised and making it slowly to the clinic and into people’s arms! One can only hope there is lots of promise and little hype in the report!

David.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

It Seems Every Time We Have A New Health Minister They Drink The myHealth Record Kool-Aide!

This interview appeared last week:

Television interview with Assistant Minister Kearney on ABC News - 15 February 2024

Read the transcript from Assistant Minister Kearney's interview on online health services and voluntary assisted dying laws.

The Hon Ged Kearney MP
Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care

Media event date: 15 February 2024

Date published: 16 February 2024

Media type: Transcript

Audience: General public

GREG JENNETT, ABC NEWS: Now, there aren't many people around the Parliament who aren't offering best wishes to Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister, and his partner Jodie Haydon after their engagement. Love, after all, crosses all political divides. Joy in the occasion is also shared by the Assistant Health Minister, Ged Kearney. We spoke to her starting out on the prime ministerial engagement.
 
[Excerpt]
 
Ged Kearney, welcome back to Afternoon Briefing. It's nice to have you with us here in the studio.
 
GED KEARNEY, ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE: [Talks over] Thanks, Greg.
 
JENNETT: I'm going to get to things in the health portfolio very, very quickly, I promise, but can't go past the fact that the Prime Minister and Jodie Haydon have announced their engagement. As far as we know, the first prime ministerial engagement slash wedding in office that we've ever had in this country. Makes it a pretty special day.
 
KEARNEY: Oh, it really does. And who knew the Prime Minister was such a romantic, doing it on Valentine's Day? It's a great announcement. We're all so happy for them. They're a gorgeous couple and we look forward to the wedding.

……


KEARNEY: Well, since we've been elected, we have injected over $1 billion into the digital health sector. It's an area that we think we have to really take up because it will, I think, advance health care dramatically for patients, which is really what we're here for. So, for example, we're finding that the uptake of My Health Record – something that we are very serious about expanding if we can – has been phenomenal. We've had a 40 per cent increase in the last year of records that have been uploaded into-
 
JENNETT: [Interrupts] What do you put that down to? Because there was an initial reluctance.
 
KEARNEY: There was an initial reluctance. I think there's a couple of things. I think during COVID, people got quite used to seeing health results digitally. I think that's part of it. But even more importantly, is that we now have about 99 per cent of GPs actually engaging with My Health Records, uploading patients’ results and treatment onto it, and encouraging their patients to use the My Health Record. It's so good. When I was a nurse, we used old paper files and they got lost. They got scribbled on, they got torn up, they got things spilt on them. You know, it was terribly inefficient. Having it all on your phone or in a digital record, I think, is so much more efficient and will certainly aid patient treatment.
 
JENNETT: It does seem to be accelerating after a pretty sluggish start in this country. Ged Kearney, I might just take you to one other area that's kind of related to digital health services. It's an anomaly that's been highlighted by Kate Chaney and oncologists this week on this program and in the Parliament. Now that we've got voluntary assisted dying laws in each Australian state, either in place or coming, it remains a criminal offence for a doctor to provide advice or consultations using a carriage service. That's the legal term, but to you and me, a phone or internet connection. The age-old reason being that it might have promoted suicide. It's viewed differently through voluntary assisted dying laws now. Is that an anomaly? Is that what the Government views it as and what will it do about it?
 
……

Here is the link:

https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-ged-kearney-mp/media/television-interview-with-assistant-minister-kearney-on-abc-news-15-february-2024?language=en

Again we have a new Minister who thinks it is wonderful that all these records are being uploaded to the myHR and takes that as a measure of success!

That many of these uploads are totally automated and that there is no information on how many of these uploads are actually being referenced or used seems to be of no relevance!

The update on usage of the myHR is found here:

https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/my-health-record/statistics

In the Jan 2024 Update we find there are 1.2 Billion documents in the system.

Of those 507K are from consumers.

Consumer usage seems to slowing a little with 6 million data views in January. Sadly it is unclear just what data is being viewed.

GP, Aged Care and specialist use of the myHR still seems pretty low.

We still have no measure of the clinical impact of the myHR sadly.

I have no idea why the Minister thinks all this is great! I wonder does she think the $400M per annum spent on the myHR is value for money?

My view is still that the myHR is a useless lemon. Comment if you disagree with reasons!

David.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

I Wonder What Will Come Next In The World Of Social Media?

This appeared last week and encouraged me to wonder where we are going with social media:

Facebook is 20. It still hasn’t grown up

David Swan

Technology Editor

February 11, 2024 — 5.00am

Facebook has turned 20.

The social media company that began life in 2004 as a “hot or not” website from 19-year-old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, eventually growing into a $1 trillion behemoth, would now be old enough to legally, in Australia at least, drink and smoke if it were a person.

Some say Facebook is the new tobacco: an addictive substance that doles out regular dopamine hits – in Facebook’s case in the form of “likes” and comments – with severe negative health consequences, particularly for young people.

It’s arguably worse and, like smoking, we likely won’t know the true impact for decades.

The story of Facebook’s first 20 years is one of initial promise and optimism being replaced over its evolution by rampant privacy intrusions, misinformation and an overall malaise that has long dogged the company, though not its share price.

Facebook’s decline – setting aside its eye-watering valuation – is symptomatic of the ruination of everything we once loved about the internet.

It has fallen victim to “enshittification”, a term coined by the writer and futurist Cory Doctorow to describe the decay of online platforms. As Doctorow put it: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Nearly every online service you can think of – Twitter, Reddit, Google search and Bandcamp – are now shadows of their former selves thanks to enshittification, and Facebook is arguably the poster child.

Facebook was once a far more friendly, fun and innocent place to spend time online. It was a simpler platform, and it was good to its users. Its feed was filled with inane status updates (everyone must know what I just had for dinner), tedious photos of said dinner, and general life updates including new jobs and successful marriage proposals.

Its premise was simple: to be a place to connect with your friends and family online. It could be a time suck, sure, but a time suck without the toxicity and rampant misinformation that we have now.

But gradually Facebook changed. What began as a tool for connection became a hub of division and unforseen consequences. The feed became increasingly flooded with advertising, fake news and abuse. When their parents joined, many users – in particular those aged 18 to 30 – left the platform altogether, flocking instead to cooler platforms like TikTok, or switching to group chats and texting.

While Facebook’s first decade was largely successful, its second has seen it deteriorate in the face of scandal after scandal. The company has failed at every hurdle to accept responsibility for the content posted on its platform and, even two decades in, has not proven it can be trusted to act in the best interests of its users.

In 2012, the company conducted experiments on around 70,000 users without their consent, removing certain words from their newsfeeds to test how it affected their reactions to posts. It took two years for those experiments to be made public.

Nearly 10 years later, in 2021, employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before US Congress that the company puts profits over safety. Haugen helped release the so-called “Facebook Papers” which detailed the platform’s fading popularity with teenagers and its inability to counter hate speech.

That same year, Facebook blocked the pages of Australian charities, health organisations and government services during a pandemic and raging bushfires, all to protest a law that would force it to compensate local publishers for news.

And, in 2022, the company paid a whopping $1.1 billion to finally settle legal action relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their personal data released en masse to third parties without consent.

Facebook’s algorithms, which remain shrouded in secrecy, have often fed our worst tendencies, encouraging everything from home decor envy to political extremism and violence, as has been seen in the US and Myanmar.

Earlier this month, it became apparent just how unrecognisable Facebook is now from its 2004 self. In front of the US Senate Committee, Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley executives were forced to face parents holding photographs of their dead children, who were victims of online sexual exploitation and cyberbullying.

Senators were united across the aisle about the damage done by the likes of Facebook to the health and wellbeing of children.

“They’re responsible for many of the dangers our children face online,” the judiciary committee’s chairman, Democrat Dick Durbin said. “Their design choices, their failures to adequately invest in trust and safety, their constant pursuit of engagement and profit over basic safety have all put our kids and grandkids at risk.”

Republican Senator Josh Hawley – who couldn’t be more different politically from Durbin – also repeatedly criticised Zuckerberg.

“Your product is killing people,” he told the executive.

More here:

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/facebook-is-20-it-still-hasn-t-grown-up-20240206-p5f2q6.html

I think it is fair to say most of the social media platforms have become unrecognisable over the period since they opened  for use and that since then huge numbers of users have left – myself included – due to the unappealing way the platforms seem to work and the dominance of all sorts of unwanted advertising and other unwanted influences.

All the platforms seem to have mostly lost the ‘social’ aspect of their operations and many are now ‘no fun’ to use anymore, and have lost track of their core purpose.

To me the question is what can come next and attract users while fostering more interested and useful behaviour! I am sure the platform is out there already but that not many have noticed so far! It will be interesting to see what emerges over the next decade or so.

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 734 – Results – 18 February, 2024.

Here are the results of the poll.

On Balance, Has Facebook Been A Force For Good Or Evil Over The Last 20 Years?

Good                                                                         6 (21%)

Evil                                                                          15 (59%)

I Have No Idea                                                         5 (20%)

Total No. Of Votes: 26

A split vote with a majority seeing evil as the dominant outcome!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

An OK number of votes. But also a very clear outcome! 

5 of 26 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

Friday, February 16, 2024

Not Digital Health But A Story Like This Really Does Lift The Spirits And Engender Hope.

This appeared a few days ago:

AI helps scholars read scroll buried when Vesuvius erupted in AD79

Science

Researchers used AI to read letters on papyrus scroll damaged by the blast of heat, ash and pumice that destroyed Pompeii

Ian Sample Science editor @iansample

Tue 6 Feb 2024 01.07 AEDT Last modified on Tue 6 Feb 2024 13.31 AEDT

Scholars of antiquity believe they are on the brink of a new era of understanding after researchers armed with artificial intelligence read the hidden text of a charred scroll that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago.

Hundreds of papyrus scrolls held in the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum were burned to a crisp when the town was devastated by the intense blast of heat, ash and pumice that destroyed nearby Pompeii in AD79.

Excavations in the 18th century recovered more than 1,000 whole or partial scrolls from the mansion, thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, but the black ink was unreadable on the carbonised papyri and the scrolls crumbled to pieces when researchers tried to open them.

The breakthrough in reading the ancient material came from the $1m Vesuvius Challenge, a contest launched in 2023 by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Silicon Valley backers. The competition offered prizes for extracting text from high-resolution CT scans of a scroll taken at Diamond, the UK’s national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire.

On Monday, Nat Friedman, a US tech executive and founding sponsor of the challenge, announced that a team of three computer-savvy students, Youssef Nader in Germany, Luke Farritor in the US, and Julian Schilliger in Switzerland, had won the $700,000 (£554,000) grand prize after reading more than 2,000 Greek letters from the scroll.

Papyrologists who have studied the text recovered from the blackened scroll were stunned at the feat. “This is a complete gamechanger,” said Robert Fowler, emeritus professor of Greek at Bristol University and chair of the Herculaneum Society. “There are hundreds of these scrolls waiting to be read.”

Dr Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, added: “This is the start of a revolution in Herculaneum papyrology and in Greek philosophy in general. It is the only library to come to us from ancient Roman times.”

“We are moving into a new era,” said Seales, who led efforts to read the scrolls by virtually unwrapping the CT images and training AI algorithms to detect the presence of ink. He now wants to build a portable CT scanner to image scrolls without moving them from their collections.

In October, Farritor won the challenge’s $40,000 “first letters” prize when he identified the ancient Greek word for “purple”, in the scroll. He teamed up with Nader in November, with Schilliger, who developed an algorithm to automatically unwrap CT images, joining them days before the contest deadline on 31 December. Together they read more than 2,000 letters of the scroll, giving scholars their first real insight into its contents.

“It’s been an incredibly rewarding journey,” said Youssef. “The adrenaline rush is what kept us going. It was insane. It meant working 20-something hours a day. I didn’t know when one day ended and the next day started.”

“It probably is Philodemus,” Fowler said of the author. “The style is very gnarly, typical of him, and the subject is up his alley.” The scroll discusses sources of pleasure, touching on music and food – capers in particular – and whether the pleasure experienced from a combination of elements owes to the major or minor constituents, the abundant or the scare. “In the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant,” the author writes.

“I think he’s asking the question: what is the source of pleasure in a mix of things? Is it the dominant element, is it the scarce element, or is it the mix itself?” said Fowler. The author ends with a parting shot against his philosophical adversaries for having “nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or particular”.

More here:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/05/ai-helps-scholars-read-scroll-buried-when-vesuvius-erupted-in-ad79

It is wonderful to think of the scrolls being read and adding to our knowledge of a time really long past!

I hope we get more that shopping lists or the like!

David.