flynn002

Dear Boris, Last week you   created a media storm with your speech at the Centre for Policy Studies in London. As a self-publicist, you make Katie Price look like a case of social phobia, and maybe you are pleased with the column inches you attracted. But perhaps you are also made nervous by the many commentators who have suggested that you have damaged your chances of greater political glory by letting the avuncular mask slip and revealing what lies behind it. As a eulogy for Margaret Thatcher, your speech was most effective, though it came across as a transparent bid to take on her mantle.   But it also revealed a blind spot in your understanding of your fellow human beings.   This is evidence in the two themes that run through the speech: (1) people are motivated solely by competition with others; (2) those who win competitions are morally superior and more deserving than those who lose. Let’s look at the evidence in the speech.   The first comment that gave me pa...

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Matthew 25:29 So you’ve slaved over your departmental submission for REF2014 , and shortly will be handing it in. A nervous few months await before the results are announced. You’ve sweated blood over deciding whether staff publications or impact statements will be graded as 1*, 2*, 3* or 4* , but it’s not possible to predict how the committee will judge them, nor, more importantly, how these ratings will translate into funding. In the last round of evaluation, in 2008, a weighted formula was used, such that a submission earned 1 point for every 2* output, 3 points for every 3* output, and 7 points for every 4* output. Rumour has it that this year there may be no money for 2* outputs and even more for 4*. It will be more complicated than this, because funding allocations will also take into account ratings of ‘impact statements’, and the ‘e...

This was one of the first tweets I saw when I woke up this morning : In response, a parent of two girls with autism tweeted "gutted to read this. B's statement has been final for 1 yr but no therapy has been done. we're still waiting." I was really angry. A parent who is waiting for therapy for a child has many reasons to be upset. But the study described on the BBC Website did NOT identify a 'critical window'. It was not about autism and not about intervention. I was aware of the study because I'd been asked by the Science Media Centre to comment on an embargoed version a couple of days ago. These requests for commentary on embargoed papers always occur very late in the day, which makes it difficult to give a thorough appraisal. But I felt I'd got the gist: the researchers had recruited 108 children aged between 1 and 6 years and done scans to look at the development of white matter in the brain. They also gave children a well-known test of cognitiv...

Before the electronic age: Henry Wellcome's dissertation from 1874 I don't know how it works in other countries, but in the UK, if you agree to examine a PhD thesis, odds are you will receive a bound document of some 250-400 pages to evaluate. You are not supposed to write on it. You may be explicitly forbidden to obtain an electronic version of the document. There are ways of dealing with this: the most useful one, taught to me by Uta Frith when we co-examined a thesis some years ago, was to make ample use of post-it notes. However, this is still pretty tedious. What I want is a loose-leaf document that I can write on. I want, when travelling on a train to be able to take a chapter or two with me. Please, can somebody fix this?

Teaching children to read is a remarkably fraught topic. Last year the UK Government introduced a screening check to assess children’s ability to use phonics – i.e., to decode letters into sounds. Judging from the reaction in some quarters they might as well have announced they were going to teach 6-year-olds calculus. The test, we were told, would confuse and upset children and not tell teachers anything they did not already know. Some people implied that there was an agenda to teach children to read solely using meaningless materials. This, of course, is not the case. Nonwords are used in assessment precisely because you need to find out if the child has the skills to attack an unfamiliar word by working out the sounds. Phonics has been ignored or rejected for many years by those who assumed that if you taught phonics the child would be doomed to an educational approach that involved boring drills in meaningless materials. This is not the case: for instance, Kevin Wheldall argues ...

A couple of years ago I did a Google search for ‘Specific language impairment’. I was  appalled by what I found. The top hit was a video by a chiropractor who explained he’d read a paper about neurological basis of language difficulties; he proceeded to mangle its contents, concluding that cranial osteopathy would help affected children. I’ve previously described how I got together with colleagues in 2012 to try and remedy this situation, culminating in a campaign for Raising Awareness of Language Learning Impairments (RALLI). The practicalities have sometimes been challenging but I’m pleased to say that the collection of videos on our RALLI site has now attracted over 90,000 hits, providing an accessible and evidence-based source of information about developmental language impairments. As well as research-based films we have videos with practical information for parents, children and teachers. So here, for those of you interested in this topic, is an index of what we have so far:...