Monday, September 19, 2011

Clinical audit audit

Introduction
As part of the final year of the medical degree at this Fine University, students are required to complete a clinical audit.  This audit examines the adherence of the auditors to the auditing protocol and makes recommendations to improve the auditing process.

Method
Ethics approval
Since this audit was conducted only upon the auditors self and was entered into voluntarily, no ethics committee approval was sought or, therefore, granted.

Selection of audits
A retrospective selection of all audits undertaken by the auditor during the 2011 was performed.  The auditor's email account and hard drive were searched for all files containing the words "audit", "overdue", "panic" and "apathy".  This resulted in the retrieval of several thousand files which would be impractical to search by hand, so they were further searched for the tags "piece of shit".  One record was retrieved, a clinical audit recently submitted by the auditor.

Analysis of audits
The audit was examined for the following key items, drawn from the guidelines to auditing published by the International Lazy Students and Bullshit Artists Association (ILSBAA):
  1. Excessive verbosity clearly intended to boost word count.
  2. References farmed from unreliable online sources such as Wikipedia.
  3. Formatting and structure plagiarized from example audits provided to students.
  4. Meaningless recommendations.
  5. Precision in statistical calculation used to distract from data collection flaws.
Results
For each audit audited, a high degree of adherence to the ILSBAA protocol was found, as shown in the charts 1 through 5 below:
Discussion
Notwithstanding the recent episode where the auditors audit was submitted late for no reason other than his inability to submit the audit on time, the auditor found that the audit was conducted largely in accordance with the ILSBAA protocol, or else in a sleep-deprived stupor, which is also an approved method of production of student audits.  Acute observers may question why confidence intervals were not calculated and quoted above, to which the audit auditor may only quote Demosthenes in the Palladium when he was stabbed in the Ides by the Emperor Octagon: "Auditor, audit thyself".  Whilst the relevance, and indeed the veracity of this quote are lost in the dawn of time, it cannot be denied that they most usefully added some sorely needed bulk to this paragraph and furthermore avoided it being a one-joke section, albeit at the expense of some rather heavy-handed surrealism.

Conclusion
It is recommended:
  1. That further audits by this auditor be audited to determine adherence to the ILSBAA protocol.
  2. That this audit audit be audited.
  3. That the audit audit audit be audited in order to complete the third repetition really needed to hammer the point home.
  4. That you send money now.
  5. That you read Dune by Frank Herbert.  It's full on shit, man.



3 comments:

Leon Polokov said...

A few years ago I decided to read all the Dune books including the short stories in some sort of chronological order according to the Dune universe.

I had, naturally, read the 5 or maybe 6 Frank Herbert book many years before and many times over. I had not read the additional 4,375 books by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson though.

I would like to recommend to anyone contemplating reading Dune to just stick to the bits written by Frank Herbert. Reading the prequels and sequels written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson just made me quite cross. Cross enough that I wrote a letter to Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson expressing my disappointment which I never sent.

I think if I were ever to run into either Brian Herbert or Kevin J. Anderson I would mostly likely frown very very sternly at them.

Oh, and congratulations on cracking the 20 followers mark!

PTR said...

I couldn't agree more. Well, I suppose I could but it would be all YEEEEEAHH BABY!!!!!!!! which isn't really my style.

I bought the book about the Butlerian Jihad in an airport. I forced myself to read the first fifty pages even though I soon realized that it was really really awful. Unreadably awful.

Have you ever read The Dosadi Experiment? It's like version zero of Dune. Not very good but has so many of the same ideas in there that he's trying to work out.

Leon Polokov said...

I believe I have read it but I don't remember anything much about it, perhaps I've lumped it in with the Dune saga. I tend to latch onto an author and read everything I can get my hands on. Asimov took a while!

I would very much like to develop this skill of reading 50 pages or so of a book and being able to put it down after deciding it was rubbish. Unfortunately I just cant do it and must finish any book I start (or worse, series). I've wasted an awful lot of reading time on some real shitty stuff.