Tag: risk society

  • Coronavirus Media Narratives

    While Coronavirus is no doubt a real-life event, with real-life social and (for an extreme minority tragic) individual consequences, it is also very much a media event, especially since isolation is correlated with a significant increase our media consumption with news sites especially seeing a surge in visits (U.S. data)… Social media usage (Facebook, Twitter,…

  • Global Warming: Last Chance to Save Planet Earth?

    The Intergovernmental Panel’s Report on Climate Change (IPCC), published earlier this week, doesn’t make for pretty reading… Human activities are estimated to have caused 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. With this level of…

  • How do we explain the 500% increase in prescriptions for Cow’s Milk Allergy between 2006 to 2016?

    How do we explain the 500% increase in prescriptions for Cow’s Milk Allergy between 2006 to 2016?

    In a recent BBC documentary: ‘The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs’ Dr Chris Van Tulleken (Dr CVT) set out to answer the above question. Here I summarise this documentary and throw in a few links and additional commentary You can watch the documentary on BBC iplayer until Late June 2018, although TBH you may as…

  • Contemporary Sociology: The Parsons Green Tube Bomber

    The Tube Bomber: A “Duty” to Hate Britain? The case of Ahmed Hassan, the 18 year old Iraqi asylum seeker who planted a homemade bomb onto a London tube train in September 2017, injuring 51 people is a good candidate for the most serious crime of 2017. Had his device worked properly (it ‘only’ created…

  • The Risks of Big Data

    The Risks of Big Data

    There are three main risks of Big Data: the paralysis of privacy, punishment through propensity, the fetishization of and dictatorship through data 

  • Actuarial Justice and Risk Management

    Feely and Simon (1994) argue that a new ‘technology of power’ is emerging throughout the justice system. It differs from Foucault’s disciplinary power in three main ways: It focuses on groups rather than individuals It is not interested in rehabilitating offenders, but simply in preventing them from offending It uses calculations of risk or ‘actuarial…