After putting a raft of candidates through an extensive application process the Herald Sun has told applicants that it will not be awarding any journalism cadetships after all.  What a cruel waste of time.

Senator George Brandis’ staffer, 20-year-old Liam Brennan, was caught out whingeing on Facebook about having to deal with “common” electors in the electorate office where he works as an electorate officer. Liam Brennan, of course, replaces the former 20-year-old electorate officer Andrew Nguyen, who had to resign after pleading guilty to the charge of corflute stealing earlier this year. Where is Senator Brandis’ judgement with these young men?

Apparently, the University of Melbourne is still going to change the name of its commerce and economics faculty to the faculty of business and economics (something proposed with the ill-fated Melbourne Business School merger). This is the same name as its counterpart at Monash. The understanding is that this change in brand positioning was required to stem the tide of students to Monash as a result of the Melbourne Model.

I have it on good authority that the Joint Strike fighter jets are going to make near-city airforce airstrips unusable as the noise levels are expected to be somewhere near four times the F111’s. Think broken windows and very unhappy residents.

Frontier economics. Based in Australia, Europe and the UK. Chair of the board: Sarah Hogg. Former senior adviser to UK PM John Major. Married to Douglas Hogg. The one who used his parliamentary expenses to have the moat cleaned out. I do hope Frontier’s political connections aren’t affecting the advice they’re giving the coalition.

Fresh from buying half of DMG radio in Australia for $A112 million, there’s talk that Lachlan Murdoch is about to take a seat on the board of regional TV group Prime Media, in which he owns about 9.1%, along with Kerry Stokes on just over 11%. No announcement yet, but there’s chatter in the TV industry about the report. Seeing he’s on the board of News Corporation, which owns News Ltd and has management control of Foxtel, and is now a radio broadcaster and an active chairman of DMG, can Lachie go on the board of Prime, even if it is a regional TV business?

Stand by for a stoush between the University of Sydney’s health informatics researcher Professor Jon Patrick and the NSW Health over the introduction of an electronic medical record (eMR) for NSW public hospital patients.

Like many other states and territories, NSW Health is well down the track in establishing a statewide eMR to improve patient care as part of the National e-Health Strategy. The recent Garling Special Commission of Inquiry also placed pressure on the NSW health system calling for a statewide eMR to be delivered within 18 months.

Professor Patrick has recently published an online essay where he has raised concerns about the Cerner eMR being rolled out in NSW. Among other things Patrick has claimed the NSW version of eMR poses an “unacceptably high risk” to patient safety because of slowness and that there was no consultation with clinicians before the roll-out began.

The NSW health system defends its use of Cerner by saying it has been in place in many hospitals for more than 16 years, but the latest version has been specially developed for Australian hospitals and comes after numerous design workshops involving several hundred clinical staff from the state’s hospitals.

What Professor Patrick does not mention in his essay is that he and his department are developing an alternative electronic medical record system using open source software. His recent comments about his system are here.

And to reinforce his aim to get more publicity, Professor Patrick who has recently been on conference junket to San Francisco sent an email to a newsgroup he belongs to saying he was about to step up his campaign.

“I think now I want to broaden its distribution so that we can get some political engagement. When I get back o Monday week I will do a  second launch.”