Interesting Links for 28-07-2016

[andrewducker]

Remember the ice bucket challenge? It just funded an ALS breakthrough (tags: charity research genes meme ) Vitamin D levels predict risk of brain decline in Chinese elderly (tags: vitaminD china brain age ) Bill Clinton wore a fetching navy pantsuit to honor Hillary Clinton's nomination for US president (tags: fashion politics usa funny viaElfy

Comments

[drdoug]

It may be the latter. The No2NP site is certainly full of tales from the pilots that are pretty much "see, it's as terrible as we said it would be", e.g.:
http://no2np.org/dad-speaks-aspergers-sons-named-person-ordeal/
http://no2np.org/slick-article-fails-convince-parents/
and there's a trickle of this sort of story:
http://www.scotsman.com/news/revealed-what-can-happen-when-a-named-person-reports-on-your-children-1-4089077

I think it's true that the Scottish Government is convinced that "yes, it works" but I don't think it's fair to say that's a consensus. I genuinely don't know what the evaluation process for the pilots has been, but it would be an extraordinarily thorough and independent evaluation that was able to explore whether these sorts of concerns outweighed the benefits when the whole premise of the scheme is that they are indeed outweighed. And the fact that there is no clear guidance about data protection practice (again, SFAICT, I could be wrong) suggests that this was not an issue the evaluation explored particularly deeply.