This is John Dobson’s 19th century “lying-in” maternity hospital for poor women. It’s located next to the Blue Carpet which I’ve previously featured. It opened in 1826, and remained in use until 1923.

Far from offering care to all-comers, like the modern NHS, this hospital wouldn’t admit those too poor to afford baby clothes, the homeless, those with infectious diseases, or those who had fallen pregnant outside of wedlock. And, yes, marriage certificates had to be presented prior to admission. It all seems so medicoethically bankrupt by the standards of today’s UK.

I understand that the building had a later life as the regional headquarters of the BBC, but I’m not quite sure what it houses these days.

In any one year one in four people in the United Kingdom have their thyroid function checked.

This grammatically erroneous and factually absurd statement from a 2009 BMJ paper remains uncorrected, as highlighted by this interesting paper about journals’ error handling in JRSM. It strikes me as alarming that the Guardian appears to have a more open and robust approach to highlighting and correcting errors than our leading medical journal; but then I guess correcting mistakes in emerging research fields is a trickier issue than correcting journalistic errors.

More irritatingly – how come other people can get such obvious slips though peer review, yet peer reviewers pick up on every dodgy comma in my work?

This is the Infinity Bridge across the Tees in Stockton, so called because it looks a bit like a ∞ when reflected in the water. I first wrote about this bridge when its design was still being decided and I was studying at the University of Durham’s Queen’s Campus, eight-and-a-half years ago:

The new design for the bridge in Stockton has been decided. Five designs were drawn up for the bridge (which will go from the university campus to the other side of the river, where there is currently – well, nothing, actually). These designs were then put to a public vote, via post, phone and online. The overwhelming winner of the vote was design ‘D’. So they’re building design ‘C’. No, I didn’t understand either.

Here’s a BBC Tees article from the time, which shows all five proposed designs. It’s interesting to see that the artist’s render in this case stands up very well to comparison with the finished product. But I’m still quite fond of the design the public voted for.

It’s also worth noting that, all this time on, there’s still very little on the far side of the bridge!

The happiest moment of my year is about three hours before the first race at Cheltenham.

So wrote Charlie Brooks in a Telegraph article on Sunday. This morning, he and his wife Rebecca Brooks were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice… just hours before the first race at Cheltenham.

We found evidence of a reduced risk of death occurring among patients already in hospital on weekend days versus week days.

Given all the attention Dr Foster got for their finding that death rates in NHS hospitals were higher at weekends, it’s interesting that this huge study essentially suggests the opposite (though the full paper is worth reading, and is less encouraging than this single comparison might suggest).

I really wonder about the value of these graphics. I rarely watch programmes “live”, and suspect the prevalence of behaviour like mine is growing. By the time I play back the programme and see the graphic, I’ve missed the programme.

I’ve noticed that channels are trailling programmes earlier than they used to – look at the BBC’s promotions for The Voice or Sky’s for Mad Men – which I suspect attempts to mitigate this effect of time-shifted viewing. But these onscreen graphics are rarely displayed more than 48hrs in advance.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to use this opportunity to moan about unnecessary and obtrusive on screen graphics. Job done.

A couple of years from now, Britain’s record companies expect to be generating half their revenues from digital.

I nearly choked on my cornflakes when I read this sentence in Dan Sabbagh’s Guardian article this morning. I’m totally amazed that digital revenues don’t already account for way over half of record companies’ revenues, but apparently 90% of Susan Boyle’s records – to cite just one example – are sold on physical CD.

I haven’t had a physical CD player in my house for some years now. Sure, I can play via a computer’s optical drive, or the CD player in my car, but I rarely do. I’m amazed that physical formats remain so popular.

I’ve featured the Ouseburn a couple of times before – most recently, of course, yesterday.

This picture, which shows the Ouseburn as it passes a few hundred metres from our house, is a few miles or so further upstream than this one.

Sainsbury’s PR operation tweeted today that it had become the UK’s second biggest online food retailer, with 165,000 orders per week. I thought, “Wow, that’s impressive, it must have beaten Asda into third place!”

To confirm this thought, I clicked through to their full PR puff piece. This is one of the worst bits of PR guff I have read to date.

It starts off by reporting the genuinely impressive news of 20% year-on-year online sales growth – no mean feat in a recession – and it’s impressive position as second in a hyper-competitive marketplace. Fantastic.

But, before the end of the second paragraph, it goes off on an utterly ludicrous tangent, and starts talking about a meaningless customer service survey. Sainsbury’s has commissioned MORI to poll people on the supermarket whose customer service they prefer, and they happily report that Sainsbury’s comes out on top.

But the sample is patently absurd: 912 Sainsbury’s shoppers, 400 Tesco shoppers, 400 Asda shoppers, and 200 Ocado shoppers. It doesn’t take a much of a leap to assume that most people will shop at the supermarket they prefer, so it would’ve been frankly astonishing if survey of a group constituted of mainly Sainsbury’s shoppers didn’t rank Sainsbury’s highest on a number of cherry-picked metrics. Equally unsurprising is the news that Ocado, with the smallest number of customers in the survey, comes bottom on each metric.

Of course, this is the sort of nonsense psuedo-science that PR offices pump out daily, and there are countless examples of the form. But the point here is that Sainsbury’s PR have managed to lump together some genuinely impressive figures with some unimpressive crap, and actually left me feeling less positive about the brand. This story is newsworthy without the tacked-on nonsense, which adds nothing to genuinely contextualise the results, and actually detracts from the key message.

This is Newcastle’s monument to 19th century Prime Minister Charles Grey, who of course gave his name to a splendid blend of tea. The statue was sculpted by Bailey, who also created the statue of Nelson atop Nelson’s Column in London. I rather wonder whether this guy’s sculptures being stuck on top of huge columns, far from close public inspection, is a compliment or an insult…

I read earlier this week that, in some fluke accident, this statue of Earl Grey was struck by lightening during the war, decapitating him. During wartime, repairs weren’t considered a priority, and so the smashed fragments were stored. After the war, the fragments were reconstructed, and a replica made and attached to the statue.

But, bizarrely, the tale of Earl Grey’s head doesn’t end there. In 2000, a cast was taken of the head, and an artwork created and embedded in the Monument’s plinth, which allows anyone to see his head from four different sides. So now everyone can get up close and personal with Earl Grey!