Half the public don’t know and don’t care about Parliament - August 18 2011 - Archived Press Releases. Connecting Citizens to Parliament – research from the Hansard Society published today – demonstrates that half the public (52%) are not really interested in Parliament and do not want to be involved in what it does.
The research explores which communities and social groups are not engaging with Parliament, why and how this might be redressed. It concludes that connecting with ‘hard to reach’ groups cannot be achieved by a sudden radical change of approach, but demands a number of smaller cumulative step-changes, many of which Parliament can initiate or suggest but cannot necessarily lead.
Woolas. Has Stuart Jackson MP's casual dishonesty been revealed on Twitter? - erdo's posterous. The Bechdel Test Becomes a Bigger Deal » DVDs Worth Watching. I was stunned (in a good way) to see that the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly (cover-dated August 13) had a full-page column about this.
Mark Harris’ column, entitled “I Am Woman. Hear Me… Please!” (which apparently isn’t available online) attacks Hollywood movies for how often they fail the Bechdel Test. In this simple evaluation, first formulated by cartoonist Alison Bechdel (Fun Home, Dykes to Watch Out For) in this comic 25 (!) Johann Hari. Johann Hari is British journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Guardian, The New Republic, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, South Africa’s Star, The Irish Times, and a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines.
He has reported from Iraq, the Gaza Strip, the Congo, Bangladesh, India, Venezuela, Rwanda, Peru, Ethiopia, Mexico, the Central African Republic, Syria and the United States. He has interviewed many global leaders and thinkers, including the Dalai Lama, Tony Blair, Hugo Chavez, George Michael, Dolly Parton, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bill Buckley, Simon Peres, Martin McGuiness, Gerry Adams, Wangari Maathai, Malali Joya, Gore Vidal, Abu Hamza, Chuck Palahniuk and others. He has won many of the biggest awards in British journalism. Top-down-anything does not work (videos) The risky business of human trials. Clint Witchalls, books and arts editor FIRST there was the agrarian economy, then the industrial economy.
Now we have the service economy. This is progress, economists and politicians tell us. But in this brave new world not everyone can be a lawyer, a stockbroker or a film star. In The Professional Guinea Pig, Roberto Abadie gives voice to a new economic underclass, a class of people that makes a living from renting their bodies to contract research organisations (CROs) for medical experiments. "Pharmaceutical research feeds on a mass of destitute citizens who realised that clinical trials offered a better opportunity than jobs in McDonald's and similar dead-end options at the bottom of the new, service-oriented economy," writes Abadie. Between July 2003 and December 2004, Abadie hung out with - or "conducted an ethnographic study on" - a group of career guinea pigs from west Philadelphia in the US.
Though trial subjects give consent, money may blind them to the risks. Pharmaceuticals: A market for producing 'lemons' and serious harm. Tuesday, August 17, 2010 The pharmaceutical industry is a "market for lemons," a market in which the seller knows much more than the buyer about the product and can profit from selling products less effective and less safe than consumers are led to believe, according to an analysis that will be presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.
"Sometimes drug companies hide or downplay information about serious side effects of new drugs and overstate the drugs' benefits," said Donald Light, the sociologist who authored the study and who is a professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
"Then, they spend two to three times more on marketing than on research to persuade doctors to prescribe these new drugs. Doctors may get misleading information and then misinform patients about the risks of a new drug. It's really a two-tier market for lemons. " American Sociological Association: Why should companies be allowed to sue for libel? Should companies be able to sue for libel?
The recently launched Lord Lester libel reform bill includes a provision that companies would have to show substantial financial loss before being able to sue. The House of Commons select committee for culture, media and sport has also called for fundamental reform of libel law in respect of corporate reputation, while many Australian states have limited actions in libel to companies with fewer than 10 employees. But to the conventionally minded English lawyer there is no question that companies should be able to sue for libel. After all, companies are "legal persons" – and in English law, personality goes a very long way. The view is that if "natural persons" can sue for libel then so can companies. The English courts have nevertheless progressively limited the scope of corporate actions in defamation. But should companies be able to sue for defamation at all?
Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls by David Larcker, Anastasia Zakolyukina. David F.
Larcker Stanford University - Graduate School of Business Anastasia A. Zakolyukina. Is That CEO Telling the Truth? STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—How do you tell if CEOs are not being truthful during quarterly earnings conference calls? Stanford Graduate School of Business researchers have developed a model to analyze the words and phrases used during these calls and found some specific speech patterns that give clues. After studying Q&A sections of transcripts of hundreds of calls with CEOs and CFOs, the researchers then looked to see whether financial statements being discussed were substantially restated at some point after the call. If they were restated, Professor David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina, a PhD student at the school, reasoned that the executive had been less than candid in describing their firm’s quarterly figures.
Results from their model are 4% to 6% better than a random guess. Yet the authors offered some cautions about their work. I miss Ofquack so I’m applying for job as a homeopath. The Hospitalist « Shirah Vollmer MD. New Humanist (Rationalist Association) - discussing humanism, rationalism, atheism and free thought. Science sidelined in the government-PR-media frenzy. Under the previous government, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) ran a campaign called Science: So What?
So Everything (SSW). It was designed to encourage young people via websites, media reports and special events, to be inspired by the contributions of science to their lives. The SSW campaign was not without problems. The project included a website that was expensive and inefficient and got little traffic for a campaign of this type. And then there were serious concerns about the quality of some of the research that BIS was promoting. Both the department and its SSW campaign have come under fire from researchers in public and in private. Good quality research depends upon robust, critical appraisal. You too can be a medical* practitioner. Your old mum's pearls of wisdom are all you need to qualify from the School of Old Wives' Traditional Medicine.
Photograph: Old Vic Productions/PA Do you remember the traditional way to treat burns?
Bogus Grass-Roots Politics on Twitter. Researchers have found evidence that political campaigns and special-interest groups are using scores of fake Twitter accounts to create the impression of broad grass-roots political expression.
A team at Indiana University used data-mining and network-analysis techniques to detect the activity. “We think this technique must be common,” says Filippo Menczer, an associate professor at Indiana University and one of the principal investigators on the project. “Wherever there are lots of eyes looking at screens, spammers will be there; so why not with politics?”