Society

Fifty four years ago today the sleepy South Wales village of Aberfan entered the history books for all the wrong reasons.  Early that morning – Friday 21 October 1966 – following weeks of heavy rain, workmen on number seven tip on the mountain above the village reported subsidence.  Nothing was …

Congratulations!!  You just failed the Marshmallow Test… and your failure was entirely predictable. The Marshmallow Test is a psychological experiment devised in the 1970s by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University, to measure deferred gratification in children.  The test was simple enough.  A child would be sat at …

One of the less mentioned by-products of the printing press was the spread of what today would be called fake news.  In particular, a previously uninformed population began learning about the supposed satanic misdeeds of the elites; and that witches dwelt among us.  This was especially true in the areas …

The BBC has not had a good pandemic.  For all that it prides itself on its supposed quality journalism, when it comes to following the science it has done a worse job than the government itself.  On several occasions the corporation has been caught uncritically repeating press releases from pharmaceutical …

This year’s Extinction Rebellion protests have been met with a very different response to that in years gone by.  Instead of the carnival atmosphere, with police officers dressed in shirtsleeves and soft caps, this year’s protestors were met by a more traditional form of policing which quickly kettled them before …

With the US presidential election campaigning in full flow, news and social media has descended into the depressing blue team versus red team idiocy that experience tells us leads nowhere.  The supporters of both teams blindly claim that voting for their side is the only way of bringing about positive …

In the late 1980s Britain suffered a series of disasters which many attributed to the public spending cuts made years earlier by the Thatcher government.  During the first, 1979 to 1983 government, Britain lost more than two million industrial jobs.  Over the same period, so-called “red tape,” including much health …

Prior to 19 March 2020, the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was quietly doing pretty much what it had been doing for the previous 75 years.  Its antimalarial properties had been known for much longer.  Originally derived from the bark of the Cinchona Tree and sometimes referred to as “the Jesuit powder,” …

In the early 2000s an organisation I worked with, conducted a survey among Britain’s doctors.  “With the internet growing as a source of information,” they asked, “how important will it be to your practice?”  The subtlety was that they asked the first group of doctors about its value in providing …

Ordinarily when dealing with conspiracy theories it is best to take the advice of science fiction writer Carl Sagan – “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  The fact that someone said it on YouTube or that an increasingly detached pseudo-news outlet like CNN or the Daily Mail reported it doesn’t really …