Robert Dingwall

They’ll tell you that the arts & humanities aren’t practical and then …

Henceforth the red robes will only be worn as an away kit when the Canadian Supreme Court is playing the US one.

Once these things get on general sale, they can be hard to contain but I may have over-interpreted your original comment.

There is a big difference between having a test for a clinically significant illness where there is a specific and effective treatment - not many (any?) of those for respiratory viruses - and having the whole population testing themselves every time they have a sniffle...

According to my textbooks, there are somewhere between 200 and 300 viruses that cause ILI (Influenza-Like Illness). How much do you think it is worth investing to address all of these?

What would be the point of differential diagnosis for a bunch of mostly minor, self-limiting illnesses with no specific treatment? It's one important reason why the UK closed its Common Cold research programme more than 50 years ago...

Those panicing around #LongCOVID seem to forget history. After every major flu pandemic, large groups reported fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath, yes, also children. These were real symptoms, but not evidence of a new, mysterious disease.

bsky.app/profile/did...
1/5

Except that 'misinformation' involves decisions about what counts as true and false, which may depend upon the scientific domain from which the information originates and the relative power and legitimacy of those who 'own' it. Key to the debates over the value of masks during the pandemic?

Agree with your assessment of Chris - problem is what gets to count as evidence and whether politicians are getting good science from other sources. Struck by Francis Collins's admission that US Covid policy attached infinite value to the prevention of a single death and failed to question this.

What he doesn't address is that people may agree on the science but disagree on the implications for action because of different values/contexts. This is not misinformation but proper political debate.

'The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war...' George Orwell, 1984.
The Board of Peace created to govern Gaza...

Digital ID + tracking immigrant volunteering for ILR gets more than half way to a Chinese-style social credit society. Is this a path we really want to go down?

Is there a reason I ask that the Times are using a picture of asylum seekers in a boat to describe rules for migrants who came on legal routes such as skilled worker visas for doctors?

British Politics' Midlife Crisis Why British Parties Can't Make Peace with Their Actual Voters

On the morning of Keir Starmer's conference speech here's a new post on an odd psychopathology in British politics - our main parties don't like the people who vote for them - the dreaded Professional Managerial Class. And so they are acting out like a divorced dad seeking cooler voters. 1/n

Meme showing a worker labelled "academic staff" digging a hole in the ground while 10 others look labelled with management titles such as "Director of Human Resources" look on. The caption underneath reads "The only way we can cut costs is to reduce the number of academic staff..."

A meme for the modern university...

Sad to think that humanities and social sciences will return to being dominated by posh students with limited life experiences...

When I was a teenager there was a bus direct from my hometown in Germany to London - we had a British army base, and this direct bus connection was one of the benefits of that. One summer I went on that bus to go volunteer in an old people's home in Southend-on-Sea. I had just turned 18 and was... 🧵

On the other hand, OA has created an exclusionary paywall in APCs that shuts out scholars not working in HE. Is this a justifiable monopoly?

Would raw milk devastate US public health - or just allow artisan cheesemakers to create a more interesting product?

www.socialsciencespace.com/2025/09/publ...

Mike Esbester

If #Railway200 has sparked or rekindled your interest in #RailwayHistory, and you fancy study at Masters or PhD level - then come & study with Dr Mike Esbester at the University of Portsmouth!

An expert in railway, transport & mobility history:

www.port.ac.uk/about-us/str...

Erving Goffman: Memories, method and metaphors If you do sociology or, indeed, any social science whatsoever, you’ll come across the work of Erving Goffman. I have done too but never engaged with it as much as I should have done. This was…

Today's post delves a bit into the history of #sociology, memories of Erving #Goffman, and his use of #metaphor as method makingsciencepublic.com/2025/09/26/e...

UK sociologist of health? Next call for @fshi.bsky.social awards closes 30th october www.shifoundation.org.uk/schemes/

Information distributed voluntarily (with few checks on accuracy) across a plethora of different databases is quite different from information compulsorily held on a centralized system with penalties for inaccuracy. The Blair faction clearly see a pathway to a Chinese-style social credit system.

So Northern cities get their rail investment kicked further down the road while the SE continues to steam ahead (metaphorically, of course)...?

Every time economists discover occupations exist, a sociologist dies

Are we vaccinating under 2s more than a generation (30 years) ago? We used fewer vaccines, protecting against 8 infectious diseases. These complex vaccines, containing over 3000 antigens, were good, but there was room for improvement.
1/8

He may be a Nobel winner but he is also remarkably ignorant about the history of public health. Vaccines are important but are not responsible for "the majority of the decrease". Big literature on this since McKeown in the 1960s.

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department (branch), consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

My quote of the day

James Madison
Federalist 51

Newcastle has a long history of multi-culturalism. I recall my father's accounts of playing school sports matches in the 1920s and 1930s against teams with non-white members. Any British port city would have similarly mixed populations.

Public Health and American Exceptionalism: Part I Vaccine Mandates - Social Science Space The hullabaloo over Covid-19 vaccine recommendations in the US raises some interesting questions about other areas where public health elites have been […]

The hullabaloo over Covid-19 vaccine recommendations in the US raises some interesting questions about other areas where public health elites have been outraged about shifts towards policies that many of us in Europe would take for granted.

www.socialsciencespace.com/2025/09/publ...