Michael Rowe

September 2026

Presentations

  • Making sense of AI in clinical practice: ATOCP at BOA Congress24 September 2026An invited talk in the ATOCP session at the BOA Annual Congress 2026 in London. It looks at what AI can already do in clinical work, why the usual responses to it leave clinicians as spectators, and what physiotherapists bring that AI systems don't have, which is context. The second half turns to patients, who are already using AI before they arrive, and asks what changes in the consultation when both sides bring their own context and their own agents. It closes with three things to do the next working day.
  • AI-powered practice growth9 September 2026A full-day workshop for the International Private Physiotherapy Association's business meeting in Hamburg, run as four linked sessions: how AI actually works and how to prompt it well, building content for a real client group, getting that content found and trusted, and drafting a three-year business plan. Delegates build a single practice file across the day, using their own practice as the input, and leave with a persona, a piece of content in five formats, a communication plan, and a draft growth plan. Every exercise runs on free-tier tools.
  • Better than, or better with?5 September 2026A panel presentation for the South African Society of Physiotherapy's 2026 Symposium, on ethics and the use of AI in physiotherapy. Argues against framing AI in healthcare as a capability contest to be won or lost, and asks a more uncomfortable question: whether keeping the human in the loop is sometimes less about patient benefit than about our own discomfort with the alternative. Closes with concrete ways to bring AI into the clinical conversation rather than manage it as a threat.
  • New therapeutic alliances4 September 2026A panel presentation for the South African Society of Physiotherapy's 2026 Symposium, on AI and the future of physiotherapy education. Patients are already arriving at consultations having consulted AI first, and are increasingly capable of getting genuinely useful health guidance from it. The talk asks what this means for practice, research, and education — not whether AI will replace clinical judgement, but how the profession prepares students and practitioners for patients who bring an AI-shaped health literacy into the room.

Posts

  • A personal design system for scholarly output29 September 2026Almost everything I produce starts as a markdown file and ends in a different format — a slide deck, a handout, a Word document, this website — and until September 2026 I designed each one from scratch. I've replaced that with a personal design system with one visual language, one identity, and a template for each format, all reading the same token file. This post explains what the system is, how the pieces fit together technically, and what's still unfinished.
  • What the Quartz graph view reveals about this site29 September 2026The graph view is one of the reasons I built this site with Quartz, and now that there's enough writing on it the links between pages have started to form a shape. The graph opens from the top bar, shows the site's writing as a network coloured by type, and lets you choose what's on it. This post shows how to read it, and what it reveals about the site: where the ideas cluster, which concepts hold the rest together, and which ones nothing connects to.

Notes

  • GitHub27 September 2026GitHub is a website that hosts git repositories online and adds the tools people need to work on them together, including issues for discussion, pull requests for proposing and reviewing changes, and automation that can publish a project as a website. It was built for software developers, but anything kept as text files can live there, including teaching materials and scholarship.
  • Obsidian27 September 2026Obsidian is a note-taking application that keeps every note as a plain markdown file in an ordinary folder on your own computer, and lets you link notes to one another. Because the notes are just files, they outlast the application, and any AI agent that can read files can read them without an export or a special connection.
  • Zotero27 September 2026Zotero is a free, open source reference manager that stores the sources you collect with their citation details, PDFs, and notes. It also offers programming interfaces that let an AI agent search the library, read from it, and add to it, which turns a reference library into something an agent can check a draft against.
  • Distributed cognition27 September 2026Distributed cognition is the idea that thinking happens across people, the tools they use, and the settings they work in, as well as inside individual heads. In healthcare it describes reasoning shared between clinicians, patients, records, and increasingly AI systems, and it shifts the question from what one clinician knows to how well the whole system thinks.
  • Sycophancy27 September 2026Sycophancy is a language model's tendency to tell you what you want to hear, agreeing with your view, praising your work, and backing down when challenged, even when you're wrong. It comes from how models are trained, and it matters most when you're relying on the model to catch a mistake.
  • Token26 September 2026A token is the unit a language model reads and writes in, usually a short word or a fragment of a longer one. Context windows, usage limits, and prices are all counted in tokens, so the size of a task in tokens decides what a model can take in at once and what it costs.
  • Context window24 September 2026The context window is the amount of text a language model can take into account at once, covering its instructions, the conversation so far, and any documents it has been given. It's the model's only working memory, and how full it is, and what sits where in it, shapes the quality of the answer.
  • Hallucination24 September 2026When a language model produces a fluent, confident statement that is false, why it happens, and why it is harder to catch than other AI errors.
  • Wicked problems15 September 2026Problems that resist resolution because they have no definitive formulation, no stopping rule, and solutions that are good or bad rather than true or false.

Podcasts

  • What happens when AI joins the leadership team?2 September 2026A conversation with Sharon Black on the Leadership Biscuits podcast about what AI asks of leaders in health and social care. The argument is that AI is not a technology project to be handed to IT, because it reaches into decision-making, workflow, governance, education and patient care. We talk about using AI as a thinking partner rather than a productivity tool, why augmentation is a more useful frame than replacement, what universities need to rethink about assessment, and why leaders who have not used these systems themselves cannot govern them well.