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]

I don't know how much privacy-intruding we have to do to catch all the vile people before their vileness kills or seriously injures their children, but I'm willing to put up with quite a lot.

I would be too, but I'm not at all sure that it's a tradeoff. I fear we may end up with ever-increasing amounts of privacy intrusion and parental distress *and* no material improvement in the number of serious abuse and murder cases.

I hesitate to mention the terrible case of Liam Fee (two-year-old abused and murdered by his mother and her partner), but it is already a political football, with opponents of Named Persons arguing that if it missed a situation that egregious it's failing badly on one of its key purposes, and the SNP insisting that the Named Persons scheme wasn't fully working in that situation, it's appalling to use a tragedy like that to score political points, and anyway there's no way we can stop this sort of thing from happening sometimes.

It does leave me thinking that getting people to worry more about kids' bedroom decoration and football clubs is a recipe for getting bogged down in fine details and missing the big picture.