Planet Polymathic

The call on our screen was from Greater Manchester Ambulance Service, and there was a lot of detail crammed into a short space.

“30yof ? ‘mental breakdown’. Has just had daughter taken away from her. ? suicidal. Sister in Manchester concerned for her safety. Sent text saying ‘goodbye’. Patient’s name Anna, sister’s name Jenny.”

A lot of the time, we get calls like this, turn up, find the patient drowning their sorrows but otherwise okay and make a reassuring call to the concerned relative. Other times, we find the house locked, with no answer at the door, call the police round with their enforcers to break it down… just at the point the ‘patient’ returns from shopping. Such ‘patients’ are rarely impressed.

On this occasion, however, the ambulance crew found the door wide open, and the flat empty. The ambulance crew called me on the radio to ask what they should do next. I called Jenny, the sister, to explain what we’d found.

“She’s gone somewhere to kill herself!” sobbed Jenny.

“Do you have any idea where?” I asked.

“No,” said Jenny. “I don’t know London at all! She’s only been living there two months. She moved there to get away from her partner when they split up and took her seven year old daughter with her. But they said her daughter’s got to stay with her partner. They came and took her today. She’s not coping at all, she’s gone crazy. I seriously think she’s going to do something stupid…”

“Do you have her phone number?” I asked.

“Yes,” sniffed Jenny, “but it’s no good, she won’t answer.”

I took the number anyway. Sometimes people WILL answer when it’s a number they don’t recognise, even when they’re ignoring their family and friends. Even in the depths of suicidalness, curiosity wins over. Sure enough, the phone was picked up on the second ring.

“Hellooo?” said a wild, tearful and somewhat drunk sounding voice.

“Is that Anna?” I said. “This is the ambulance service. We’ve had a call from your sister, Jenny. She’s very concerned about you, and she’d like an ambulance to check you over. Can you tell me where you are so we can do that?”

“I don’t WANT an ambulance,” wailed Anna. “I just want to go to sleep! I am nothing but trouble to everyone. I’ll be wasting their time. There are people there who deserve help! Don’t waste your time on me when people are really sick! Tell them to go away!”

We can’t force anyone to have an ambulance if they don’t want to, but there’s no rule against gently trying to persuade them to change their mind, and I certainly thought Anna could do with talking to someone.

“Anna,” I said, “you’re not wasting anyone’s time. We’re here to help people like you. Your sister has called us, we can’t let her down. I’m not allowed to let the ambulance leave until they’ve seen you and made sure you are okay”. (This isn’t strictly true but I was pretty sure she wouldn’t know that.)

“I’m not okay, I’ll never be okay,” said Anna. “I just want to go to sleep. I’m very tired.” Her voice was slurred and distant.

“Have you taken something?” I asked, a feeling of dread rising.

“Tramadol, zopiclone… I took them all… I just want to go to sleep…” she muttered.

Oh, great. I’ve spent enough time on the phone to Guy’s Poisons investigating overdoses for crews to know that this was a potentially fatal overdose. We needed to find Anna.

“Where are you?” I asked. “We need to find you. Please tell me where you are.”

“It’s a nice place to go to sleep,” rambled Anna, seemingly missing the point of my question. “There’s grass, and a weeping willow. I like weeping willows.”

All the while this was going on, I still had the radio in my ear, with an increasing queue of impatient ambulances calling up wanting to speak to me. We usually have a dispatcher to do long winded tasks such as ringing back suicidal people who don’t want to be found, but there’s not enough of that type of work late at night to justify having one, so the radio operator has to do everything. J402 were shouting in my ear every five seconds, “J402, red base, J402! We need to go for fuel! Red base! J402!” and I don’t mind saying that this was rather distracting.

“Where’s this weeping willow?” I asked. “Is it in a park? Are you near your house? The ambulance crew are at your house. Can you go back there?”

“I won’t go back there if they are there,” said Anna, “goddamnit it… I left my travelcard there, now I can’t go back for it… still, it’s okay here, under the weeping willow in the park…”

You see what she was doing? With one breath, she was telling me she didn’t want to be found, with the next, she was giving me clues. She was in a park with a weeping willow, and she’d not had her travelcard with her, so she must be walking distance from home.

Ding-a-ling-a-ling! Suddenly an ambulance pressed its priority button, meaning it had something important to say to me on the radio that could not wait. Hurriedly, I summoned a colleague to answer the radio, then turned my attention back to the phone.

“Anna,” I said, “please let us help you. You’ve taken an overdose which is most likely going to kill you if you don’t get to hospital quickly. You’re not going to go to sleep, you’re going to die and if you die you’ll leave your sister devastated and you’ll never see your child again. Is that what you really want?”

“No! I just want to sleep! I just want the pain to end.”

“We can help you. Just tell us where you are.”

“I told you! Under the weeping willow!”

And with that, the line went dead. I tried to call back, but she wouldn’t answer. Seemingly, she was challenging us. She was giving us enough information to work out where she was, but not making it easy for us. We’d have to show that we really wanted to find her by putting some detective work in. I turned my attention back to the radio.

“NE22. I’ve just spent ten minutes on the line to your patient. She’s taken an overdose of tramadol and zopiclone and she’s in a park, walking distance from her address, sitting under a weeping willow. I don’t suppose you have any idea where that might be?”

“Oh, the weeping willow!” said NE22 sardonically. “Right! I reckon there must be about five hundred weeping willows in Walthamstow. We’ll start looking, but this could take some time. Perhaps you’d better notify the police, over.”

Funnily enough, at that exact moment a new ticket came in from the police:

“Uphill Park, E17. Under weeping willow tree. 30yof ? psychiatric, crying hysterically, talking to self.”

I directed NE22 to the park and crossed my fingers. Just because we knew where she was, it didn’t mean we’d find her. After all, it’s easy to hide in a park in the middle of the night if you don’t want to be found.

Five minutes after NE22 arrived at the park, they had Anna on board and were on the way to hospital. I guess she didn’t try too hard to hide. I guess she did want to be found after all.

by Mark Myers at July 04, 2008 08:43 AM

I will never understand why some people think it is funny or clever to hoax call the emergency services. Hoax calls cost lives. Whilst ambulance crews drive round in circles trying to find patients that don’t exist and accidents that never happened, and control staff waste hours on the phone trying to determine the location of fictitious incidents, other, genuine patients are put in danger.

The vast majority of hoaxes come from children, most of whom, I hope, get a stern talking to from their parents when the ambulance turns up (children tend not to realise that we can trace any landline call, and the owner of any registered mobile!) and never do it again. There are also a fair few from older teenagers, who, I’m guessing, are doing it for a dare. This type of hoax is pretty easy to spot; the diagnosis is usually blurted out in a rehearsed manner and involves “someone” and a medical diagnosis rather than the more usual description of what has happened. (”Someone’s broken their leg!” as opposed to “My brother fell down the stairs and his leg hurts!”) The caller usually hangs up on further questioning, usually without giving an address. If they do give an address, it’s usually a main road. I can’t ever remember taking a hoax call and not realising it was a hoax at the time, which makes it all the more frustrating because unless we’ve already been to the address that day, we have to treat every single call as if it were genuine.

Somewhat more sinister are the regular hoaxers. We’ve had a few of thesever the years. Some have been prosecuted but some we never find. If a caller uses an unregistered mobile or a payphone to call, it’s pretty much impossible to trace them. There was one young woman who called us every night for months, giving an address near her own every time. When she was eventually traced it was found she was mentally ill and had an obsession with ambulances. Her bedroom wall was covered with pictures of them and she was calling 999 just so she could see one outside. There was also a spate of hoaxes to one address which were believed to be coming from the ex partner of the person who lived there. They always gave outlandish reasons such as “house on fire” “plane crash” and on one occasion, “my wife has cut my testicles off and cooked them in the over”.

This week, we’ve been utterly inundated with calls from possibly the most annoying hoaxer ever. He’s been calling us for a couple of months now, but this week the call rate has gone through the roof. I’d say he is calling a couple of hundred times a day. Each call taker will end up speaking to him around ten times per shift. Of course, we’ve had his mobile cut off, but he just goes out and buys a new one, and he’s back again. He gives his address as 20, [long and well known road], E1. The address he gives doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist - the road covers more than one postal area, and number 20 isn’t in E1. In actual fact, as we discovered the first time we were called out there, number 20 is a Woolworths.

This guy thinks he is *hilarious*. He loves to give his diagnosis as “itchy penis” and I think this is just because he is amused by the word “penis”. Sometimes he will just call up and laugh and say that he needs an ambulance because he or his girlfriend (surely a moron like this cannot possibly have a girlfriend?) cannot stop laughing. Sometimes he will just sing his “address” at us and laugh hysterically. He knows that we cannot hang up on someone if they say they need an ambulance so he will always maintain that he needs an ambulance, despite rarely giving a coherent reason for doing so. Lately, he has given up on giving any medical reasons for needing us whatsoever - instead he will alternately offer the call taker a banana, or request that a banana is brought to him. According to one rather exasperated emergency operator I spoke to, when asked “Emergency, which service? Police, fire or ambulance?” he replied “Greengrocer”.

If I didn’t think it would lose me my job, I would quite happily post Mr Banana’s phone number up on my blog and encourage every single reader to call him, preferably at 3 in the morning, and offer him random items of fruit and veg and see how HE likes it.

by Mark Myers at June 27, 2008 03:27 PM

Channel 4 News’s anchorman has to disguise his political bias as neutrality, a pretence that is both insidious and unmanly

More here

by Nick at June 26, 2008 10:08 AM

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Obama has gone back on his pledge to stay within the public financing system. A U-turn, yes, but one that won't hurt him From the Guardian's Comment is Free...

June 20, 2008 11:27 AM

My friend Tarek is doing a daily cartoon strip for an English language newspaper in Cairo. I seem to have made a couple of guest appearances: here and here.

by levine at June 20, 2008 01:05 AM

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June 18, 2008 08:51 PM

St Matthew’s warning that ‘unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away’ is the biblical quote least likely to stir the Labour soul.

That the rich get richer and the poor will get poorer is not a policy prescription that appeals to the left. With the best of intentions, however, Labour is imposing the Gospel according to St Matthew on England’s universities and is providing a parable on the state of the nation in the process.

Few dispute that academia needs reforming. Britain has a university system in which the last measure the government uses to judge the quality of academics is their ability to teach. Instead, tortuous bureaucracies assess the merits of the research produced by every department in all the 200 universities. On their ruling rests the disposal of £5bn of public money.

The 2008 fight for loot is under way. Luckless workers at a Bristol warehouse are sending 200,000 scholarly books and papers to the 1,000 or so professors who adjudicate on 70 panels like the judges of beauty contests.

In the inaugural issue of the new magazine Standpoint, Jonathan Bate of Warwick University despairs of the absurdity of the enterprise. He explains that panels filled with professors of foreign languages have been more generous in rating the work of their peers than professors of English. Officially, our universities are now world leaders in the study of French literature but awful at studying English literature. What’s really happened, says Bate, is that while other professors of literature covered each other’s backs and looked after each other’s departments ‘the Eng lit lot couldn’t resist biting each other’s backs’ even if it meant their subject lost money.

Neither he nor the government says this, but a second failing of the system is that it creates conformism in supposedly independent minds. There are many honourable exceptions, but as a herd, academics are the most predictable of beasts. If I sit down with builders, dentists or accountants, I have no way of knowing what their opinions will be. Within seconds of talking to an academic, I guess their views on every major political issue.

Why should I be surprised? To get the academic papers published the judging panels demand, lecturers must engage in the soul-destroying task of sucking up to the editors of learned journals. The funding for their departments and their very livelihoods depend on their ability to please. The government does not ask researchers to produce work of intellectual distinction, however long it takes. They must loyally churn out enough papers to allow their department to claim a slice of the booty.

The government admits this can’t go on. It plans to replace the judging panels with a computer, which will record the number of times an academic’s name is mentioned by his colleagues. The theory is that the best academics receive the greatest number of acknowledgements in footnotes. Let a database identify who these oft-cited professors are and - bingo! - you have found the finest minds of your generation.

Ministers possibly realised that under the present funding arrangements, Cambridge University would have to sack Ludwig Wittgenstein. He might have been a genius, but it took him decades to produce a book. Under their new system, the thousands of academics who quoted his work would provide a true assessment of Wittgenstein’s worth and spare him the dole.

It sounds fair until you remember St Matthew. In 1968, Robert K Merton of Columbia University coined the phrase ‘the Matthew effect’ when he looked at how scientists valued each other. He found that the already eminent got disproportionate credit for their work while unknowns, whose research was often as valuable, struggled for recognition.

The great English geneticist JBS Haldane illustrated Merton’s argument with the story of an Indian student, SK Roy, who had found a way to improve strains of rice. ‘I thought it was a rather ill-planned experiment,’ Haldane admitted, ‘but I let him go ahead on the general principle that I am not omniscient.’ The experiment was a triumph. Haldane said that Roy deserved 95 per cent of the credit, but would never get it. ‘Every effort will be made here to crab his work. He has not got a PhD or even a first-class MSc. So either the research is no good or I did it.’

Beyond the prestige of quoting established names lies the incentive to cheat - academics are already promising that ‘if you cite my research I’ll cite yours’ - and beyond that lies sheer luck. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who glories in the title of professor in the sciences of uncertainty, points out that what leads to one academic being cited rather than another can be a simple fluke. But as soon as he or she is cited in one paper, the odds increase that he or she will be cited in another.

The Matthew effect does not only work in academia. Of the thousands of first novels each year, the few that are reviewed make the literary pages because the author is already well known in another field (prestige), the author is a friend of the literary editor (cheating) or the author’s book was picked at random from a pile on a slow week (luck).

City firms give lavish bonuses because they don’t want to lose staff to rivals (prestige), because they dealt on insider information (cheating) or because they pulled out of the sub-prime market just in time (luck).

You only have to read the financial press to know that the beneficiaries of the property crash won’t be first-time buyers - they are struggling to get mortgages because of the credit crunch. The winners will be the already rich sitting on piles of cash who will snap up assets when their prices hit the floor.

Labour should not be happy with helping those that hath. If it wants to reform education, it should begin by noticing that working-class students are dropping out and middle-class students are paying fees for substandard courses, because the first concern of the universities isn’t teaching. Ministers would do better to redirect public money to make sure that it is.

by Nick at June 18, 2008 12:21 PM

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June 12, 2008 09:00 PM

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June 07, 2008 08:58 PM

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June 06, 2008 09:03 PM

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June 05, 2008 12:44 PM

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June 04, 2008 09:18 PM

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June 04, 2008 09:18 PM

The best crime writers foresaw the disaster of Whitehall targets by creating heroes unlike any other fictional detectives. It is not the determination of Morse, Tennison, Frost and Rebus that marks them out - Holmes was as purposeful. Nor is the loneliness their obsessive devotion to work brings unusual. Inspector Morse never finds a woman who will stay with him and Inspector Frost only has curries for company at night, but they are not so different from Philip Marlowe. Modern British detectives stand out because they have to deal with managers like no other.

Morse’s Chief Superintendent Strange and Frost’s Superintendent Mullett are not corrupt like so many police chiefs in American and Continental thrillers. They are good men by their own lights who would never take a bribe. Nor are they always plodders who rely on the brilliance of a Holmes or Poirot. When they need to curry favour, they reveal themselves as skilled office politicians.

But in pleasing their superiors they infuriate subordinates. In Winter Frost, RD Wingfield describes Mullett as a man who ‘makes a great show of pushing the pile of papers to one side’ when speaking to a colleague. He puts on his ‘tired, overworked, but my staff come first expression’ and parrots the latest management-speak to Liz, a new recruit.

‘”Teamwork, Inspector. That’s the key word. No cowboys, no Indians, no generals, no privates - all one big team.” These were the words the chief constable had used at yesterday’s meeting at which Mullett had nodded his fawning agreement. He was surprised that Liz didn’t seem to be doing the same.’

Frost and Liz must always watch their backs. From the chief superintendent to the chief constable, they can’t trust their managers to support them or help the victims of crime.

Inspector Frosts are all over the public sector and not only in the police. Paul Gregg, an economist at Bristol University, and his colleagues looked at who in the workforce was prepared to forgo their own self-interest by working unpaid overtime. They found the ‘public service ethos’ was not just propaganda from union leaders when the annual pay negotiations began. Among the teachers, doctors and nurses they studied, altruism and devotion to duty were far stronger in the public than the private sector.

They weren’t all saints. Many happily fiddled the incentive schemes Labour invented in the naive belief that they could micro-manage local services. But so many were prepared to work for nothing that Bristol University estimated the Treasury would need to pay for another 60,000 staff to cover for them if they decided to leave at the end of their shifts.

Despite the increases in taxation and national debt, Britain has not benefited from their selflessness. Labour sabotaged their altruism by overwhelming the public sector with legions of Mulletts.

Last week, Harriet Sergeant of Civitas described a police service which was close to incapable of doing its job. In a think-tank pamphlet, she delivered a devastating condemnation of an enclosed and self-referential bureaucracy which operated without regard to the wishes of the people who paid for it.

We now spend proportionately more than any other developed country on policing, she pointed out. The Home Office used targets to run it and delivered funding and bonuses to chief constables who filled its ’sanction detention’ arrest quotas.

The first perverse consequence was that although the public expected the police to keep the peace, an officer who successfully stopped trouble was not rewarded because no trouble meant no arrests. More seriously, the police played the Home Office game by going for trivial offenders rather than serious criminals. Solving the case of a child who steals a Mars bar earned as many points as solving a murder. It made more sense to arrest rowdy children for ‘harassing a tree’ than to begin the hard work of tackling a potentially homicidal teenage gang.

Chris Dillow, author of New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism, describes Brown’s Mullettry as a marriage between Old Labour’s Fabian belief in the centralised state and Thatcherites’ worship of management consultants. Between them, they have spawned a bureaucracy which despises democratic accountability and, worse, does not and cannot work.

Fabianism, with its loathing for the masses - ‘We must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit in,’ declared George Bernard Shaw at the turn of the 20th century - is not the only Labour tradition. The Co-op and guild socialist movements were at ease with democracy as was radical liberalism. Last week, Phil Collins, an occasional speechwriter for James Purnell, suggested to the Brownites that Labour could find a way out of its crisis by listening to the Fabians’ liberal opponents. He cited a warning of Leonard Hobhouse, the early 20th-century liberal intellectual, that the ‘mechanical socialism’ of the Fabians ‘applauded the running of the machine merely because it is a machine and is being run’. Hobhouse might have delivered it yesterday.

Brown invited Collins to Downing Street to talk over his ideas. Maybe he is grasping the near-universal public dissatisfaction with what Labour has done in its name and with its money. If so, it’s too late.

‘Right,’ cries Frost to his officers as Mullett approaches. ‘Super’s going to say a few words. Try and look as if you’re paying attention.’

Within days of the Civitas pamphlet, the chief constables of Surrey, Staffordshire, Leicestershire and West Midlands showed they no longer even had to pretend to pay attention to Labour. They announced they were breaking with the Home Office and everything it stood for.

‘Quite simply, local people’s safety, confidence in police and their satisfaction when they call us for help are more important than misleading targets,’ explained the acting chief constable of Surrey. He would never have said that when Labour ministers were in the ascendancy. But he’s not frightened now because he knows that it’s over and the electorate’s target is to throw them out.

by Nick at June 01, 2008 05:33 PM

From the new magazine Standpoint now available at the newsagents

by Nick at May 29, 2008 09:38 AM