It’s one thing to find an occasional questionable ‘alternative medicine’ article in a dubious journal, quite another to learn that the same flakes have set up shop on your local hospital cancer ward. The latest edition of Skeptic magazine ($, Vol 21, No.4, 2016) points out how gong-banging and aromatherapy and suchlike nonsense is being welcomed into legitimate cancer wards…

“The most disturbing trend in cancer care is the ongoing infiltration of complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) into otherwise legitimate cancer hospitals. As of 2016, every cancer hospital on the top of U.S. News & World Report’s list of America’s best either has its own CAM center or openly markets CAM services. Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Bendheim Integrative Medicine Center offers aromatherapy, Qi Gong, reflexology, hypnotherapy and a slew of other fantasy treatments. At Dana-Farber’s Zakim Center for Integrative Therapies, you can waste as much time and money as you like on Qi Gong, acupuncture, massage therapy, and Reiki. The UCLA Medical Center has a partnership with the Urban Zen Foundation (Reiki, essential oil therapy, and contemplative care/mindful awareness exercises). Not to be outdone, the stellar MD Anderson’s CAM center has Tai Chi, Tibetan meditation, group drumming, acupuncture, and “laughter for health.”

“This has led to some awkward advertising moments in which hospitals warn patients about the very treatments they now offer. Sloan Kettering’s Chief of Integrative Medicine Service boasts of having “studied, published, and lectured internationally” on “alternative therapies” for more than 25 years. The hospital itself advises its patients: “alternative regimens are unproved, expensive, and potentially harmful.”

“… Medical expenses are still the leading cause of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. In dire circumstances, when one is not thinking with due lucidity, the temptation to turn to cheap alternatives that are bountiful outside of mainstream medicine can be irresistible. When legitimate hospitals host CAM services — by whatever name they choose to call them — they implicitly abet a shameful industry.”

Good news, London’s venerable newspaper The Daily Telegraph has dropped its easily-sidetepped metered paywall, and is now going for a hybrid approach. Previously a reader had 20 free articles a month, then the paywall descended. With the new system there’s a 20% premium / 80% free split, with premium articles going behind a “hard” paywall. This paid-for premium content is described as the “most unique, in-depth and insightful journalism” and “interviews, opinion pieces, features and some of your favourite Telegraph writers”.

It’s difficult to get at what the new subscription tiers offer, as they’re hidden behind a “30-days free” offer page that demands your details first. But NiemanLab reports that the lowest level of £2 (about $2.80 US) per week will get plain Web browser access to premium stories, with more expensive options offering scanned ‘paper newspaper’ facsimiles and swoosh-y interactive tablet editions. So about $10-$12 a month for basic premium access. No details about payment options — can British users pay via PayPal and in dollars, or is it ‘Credit Cards Only’? I get paid in $s these days, via PayPal. So dollars are my cheapest and most convenient option, even though I’m in the UK.

I suspect that there will be some bonuses flying back to a journalist whose article gets snaffled by a sub-editor for the ‘premium’ category, but the “hard” paywall content — presumably only very minimally exposed to the open Web — should help to prevent any rush-to-clickbait tendencies among the paper’s journalists. That’s an interesting way around the click-bait problem at newspapers, if it works. The Telegraph is apparently profitable to the tune of £50m a year, so it can afford to take a few risks and try things out.

Personally I’d be inclined to pay a premium Web subscription if I could bin the tablet-tastic thin-column layout, and instead get a layout that actually fits a widescreen desktop monitor. This is what the Business section looks like to me in Firefox after I’ve cleaned it up with Element Hiding Helper…

A ‘science search’ tool has just launched in a new 2.0 version. Iris AI certainly has a nice and fast visual interface, which I read is new with version 2.0. The concept-grouping demo seems to use the UK’s CORE repository database (I couldn’t find any other links) and offers some 30m papers. As such Iris AI 2.0 appears to demo a “pilot” commercial in-house product that is being pitched at high-end business firms. Firms who need a good-looking “science assistant” option alongside traditional keyword search. I guess it would also be a user-friendly way for marketing / recruitment / competitor-research / horizon-scouting teams to garner useful keywords and phrases in highly technical subject areas. Perhaps also to access a firm’s own knowledge repository in a split-screen manner (trade press and relevant journals on one side, in-house repository on the other = then play ‘spot the difference’). I can’t comment on Iris AI’s apparent ‘neural net’, ‘machine learning’ and ‘AI’ aspects, but these days one has to assume that such things may not just be marketing buzzwords.

I just had a PayPal refund from Pinterest for my August Instapaper subscription of $3. On looking at Google News I see that the new owners, Pinterest, have decided to make Instapaper’s premium service level a free service. Nice.

But slightly worrying is that… “Pinterest has planned a strategy to be more than just a place to collect articles with visual content [and] Pinterest has a lot more to offer in the future”. Oh dear, which means some flash-harry Web designer will get his mitts on it and mess around with the layout. I like it just fine as it is, that’s why I was willing to pay for it. I don’t need an all-singing all-dancing ‘Pinter-paper’.

The Eastman Museum of photography has a newly expanded collections hub with 250,000 records, many with pictures. Some of the scans are quite large, such as this 2380px scan of a Minor White picture…

“Cat skeleton”, Minor White, 1953. Eastman Museum.

To get big pictures suitable for lecture or dissertation use, you need to use the Firefox trick and a Firefox add-on like RighttoClick.

Digital Index of Middle English Verse. A fine free resource and the record pages are extensive, but regrettably it has a search interface that only a librarian could love. There’s no dedicated keyword search, and only fairly limited topic tagging. If you want all poems mentioning a “star” but not Jesus, for instance, you have to do a Google site: search.

Opening lines of a prayer to the Morning Star and against the plague, England c. 15th century (modern English):

O heavenly star, most comfortable of light,
Which, with your ghostly gracious influence,
Has clarified and put to flight
All misty weathers perilous for pestilence.

Over 6,000 new pictures of Rhode Island at the Providence Public Library, in “high resolution”. Sadly the new site has fallen over, possibly due to the traffic from several million H.P. Lovecraft fans on top of the local interest. But a press-release is still accessible on a different URL.

Picture: Thomas Street, Providence, Rhode Island — by Metteo Bocci.