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Comment by dullcrisp | Hacker News Reader

Why? Would this be more interesting if they were in the UK?

Kind of, in the sense that it sounds like a global news headline, vs. 'University of Exeter researchers find [...]' published by exeter.ac.uk, on this globally read site.

It's global news to me. Hello from Australia!

Edit: Ah wait, I think I get what you mean. By "global news" you mean it's been deemed worthy of sharing to an international audience by media outlets, as opposed to a crowdsourcing news source like HN. Is that right?

I mean when you write 'UK researchers find', especially to a global audience (which UoKentucky PR dept may not particularly have but HN does (Hello from the (the!) UK)) that it sounds more like the country UK than the.. no offence intended but not exactly world renowned university. (I've heard of Kentucky, probably my first time hearing of its university in its own right - though I might have assumed it had one.)

It seems like a fairly mediocre institution, at least in terms of research output: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene...

Not entirely surprised we'd never heard of it.

a lot of southern schools publish in a different fashion. Most of my agricultural and husbandry knowledge of the area i live in comes from various universities .pdf files. My point is merely not publishing in Nature (or wherever) doesn't mean that serious research doesn't occur at that campus. Their "customers" may just be citizens of that state (or in some cases, that county).

I don't feel like that is a correct way to measure an institutions mediocrity or not. I have found that frequently cited Universities that publish many very popular articles per year per journal become less credible with fame. Hubris aside objectivity becomes lost in the money being made.

A far better measure of a University would be the people it graduates or by assessing the actual effects and impact of a research University with their published studies.

If the University of Kentucky specializes in agricultural research, that's most likely why you've never heard of them - perhaps they've made huge contributions to the elimination of terrible fungus plaguing a specific crop, nobody would hear about that.

Fixing the proverbial fungus is a far bigger deal tho than most of the ambiguous pop science publications coming out of far more "prestigious" institutions these days.

I wouldn't read too much into it. UK is one of my alma maters. Everyone in that area of the US means "University of Kentucky" when they say "UK". It isn't a dig at the United Kingdom nor is it (I assume) an attempt to gain undue credibility by associating with the country. For the people there, UK as the University is simply the first order association for that acronym, rather than what is to them a faraway country that has no bearing on their day-to-day lives.

> I wouldn't read too much into it.

I don't think I am? I'm just agreeing the title should be different here, and it has now changed so either the submitted or a mod agreed.

> Everyone in that area of the US means "University of Kentucky" when they say "UK". It isn't a dig at the United Kingdom nor is it (I assume) an attempt to gain undue credibility by associating with the country. For the people there, UK as the University is simply the first order association for that acronym, rather than what is to them a faraway country that has no bearing on their day-to-day lives.

Right, that's what I meant about audience, and it making sense for the UoK's PR dept.

I feel like it would be trusted a little bit more if it was a study by the NHS from the UK rather than something from Kentucky.

I was just reading on the BBC that people were having to go overseas for critical surgeries because the NHS so woefully incompetent that people were on many years long waiting list. So maybe put "NHS excellence" on the shelf next to "Empire" as UK delusions that have long since passed.

U of Kentucky is a pretty decent school, ~25k students with (from personal experience) excellent Civil Engineering and Chemistry schools, at least.

NIHR's research is genuinely world-leading. Any output from "a pretty decent school of 25k students" (U of Kentucky) pales in comparison to the research outputs from studies that NIHR grants fund, many of which are international collaborations. NIHR and "the NHS" are of course completely separate organisations, though NIHR studies recruit NHS patients and make use of NHS patient data for health research. The fact that you don't understand this says a lot about the judgment you attempt to make of the UK's life sciences research.

https://www.nihr.ac.uk/about-us/our-impact/making-a-differen...

https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/search/funder/NIHR%20(ODA)

I'm sorry, but I must admit I'd never even heard of the University of Kentucky before today, and some basic research suggests it's not considered in the top 300 universities globally which is probably why. On contrast, there's plenty of universities within the top 100 (and top 10) within the (real) UK, particularly within the field of life sciences.

I was also pretty happy with the one-week turnaround the NHS sorted for me when I needed something potentially cancerous checked out (endoscopy). I didn't pay a penny for that, I don't pay a penny for my long-term prescriptions and I can see a GP same-day if I need to. Again, for free.

The reason for that is around 30 - 50 years of continual gutting of the NHS, aggressive implementation of perverse incentives and anti-targets (e.g. "hospitals get less money if they fail to meet X standard of care, because they do not have enough money"), and overloading of staff duties to reduce costs (e.g. Physicians now performing duties that receptionists used to handle, the lack of work force meaning they have to work long amounts of overtime on the weekend, the lack of rest contributing to bad decision-making, and so on).

typical austerity measures. The US and the UK power holders have massive incentives to privatize healthcare and schooling, so they de-fund and starve the beast with the sole purpose of trying to get people to support laws that turn public institutions into private ones. "a government small enough to drown in the bath water"

With healthcare this is especially disastrous. In the US for example, most smaller towns don't have a hospital and many don't have any doctors whatsoever, they have to drive a hundred miles or more to get care, and we spend a fuck ton of tax money medivacing (air lifting) these people to major city centers. These places used to have hospitals, but they weren't profitable.

Then these people get disillusioned with the system, are sold the lie that private healthcare will fix all of their problems, and politicians and health corporations runaway with the bag while we citizens in the US pay more for basic healthcare than any OEC nation while also having the worst health outcomes of OEC nations on par with so called "3rd world" countries. Its genuinely pathetic.

The US healthcare system is generally terrible for cost effectiveness but efficacy is very good for certain things. For most types of cancer, our 5-year survival rates are at or near the top worldwide.

    > The US and the UK power holders have massive incentives to privatize healthcare and schooling

This is quite a wide brush that you paint with here. Fifty states in one country, and another 60M people in the UK across its four countries. This feels like classic HN overreach.

Speaking only about US public schools, as long as your community is mostly middle class or above, your schools will be fine, as most funding comes from local property taxes. Note: This is different than almost all other highly developed nations that fund education from state or national level.

    > 30 - 50 years of continual gutting of the NHS

The date range feels a bit arbitrary here. The difference between 30 and 50 years is enormous.

Also, I will get no love for this comment: Highly developed nations have no one to blame but their own democracy for failing to stop the slide. Why hasn't the same decline happened in Denmark or Japan or most other highly developed democratic nations?

There are multiple places that you can point at and go "this was the place where the NHS started getting gutted", it's entirely dependent on where you draw the line. There was an interval where it wasn't entirely obvious that this was happening, as well. Hindsight is 20/20.

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