BACKGROUND On the 22nd May 2017, suicide bomber Salman Abedi detonated an improvised explosive device (IED) in the Manchester Arena killing 22 people and injuring 116 others. Following the 'massacre in Manchester', the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, linked UK foreign policy with terrorism on British soil. Controversial and contentious though Corbyn's claims may be, the terrorists th...

Claims for malpractice and medical negligence are a potentially important source of information on the causes of harm to patients and have provided valuable lessons in the past. However today, with many additional sources of information and methods of analysis, the role of claims analysis needs to be reappraised. We consider the role of claims analysis in relation to other methods of studying a...

In a recent paper (Enns, 2004), James Enns demonstrated nearly equivalent and strong backward-masking effects of various types of visual masks at longer target and mask temporal intervals (e.g., 150ms), including strong masking with four dots considered to be a weak mask in standard masking conditions. The principal requirement for strong masking at long temporal intervals was that target had t...

On September 23, 2012, the television program Taboo on the National Geographic Channel featured individuals in Tokyo undergoing the "bagel head" cosmetic modification. Dermatologists may encounter patients who undergo the bagel head procedure and subsequently present with a cutaneous infection. The purpose of this article is to delineate the bagel head procedure, note responses to sensationalis...

This paper ethically analyses arising out the proposed changes to the Mental Health Act for England and Wales. It looks in particular at thea shift in philosophy that the author claims has occurred with the proposals away from rights-focused principles to more utilitarian or outcome-focused principles. It gives examples of these changes and explores its their consequences.

Paranormal claims enjoy relatively widespread popular support despite by definition being rejected by the scientific community. We propose that belief in paranormal claims is influenced by how popular those claims are as well as by dominant scientific views on the claims. We additionally propose that individuals will be most likely to be positively influenced by the views of science when claims...

We present a general model for default time, making precise the role of the intensity process, and showing that this process allows for a knowledge of the conditional distribution of the default only “before the default”. This lack of information is crucial while working in a multi-default setting. In a single default case, the knowledge of the intensity process does not allow to compute the pr...

M. O'Sullivan and P. Ekman (2004) claim to have discovered 29 wizards of deception detection. The present commentary offers a statistical critique of the evidence for this claim. Analyses reveal that chance can explain results that the authors attribute to wizardry. Thus, by the usual statistical logic of psychological research, O'Sullivan and Ekman's claims about wizardry are gratuitous. Even ...

The reforms that finally emerged from the Obama administration's initiative were the result of a year of nasty, demagogic and misleading claims in the US public forum, coupled with the complexities of crafting legislation that stood a chance of passing both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The resulting "hybrid" approach to healthcare reform produced a conservative strategy that ign...

This paper analyzes the savings and health care impacts of mortali~ coniirzgenf claims, defined here as income measures, such as annuities and life-insurance, under which earned income is contingent on the length of one’s life. The postwar increase in mandatory annuity and lifeinsurance programs, as well as the rapid increase in life-expectancy, motivates a better understanding of the effects t...