Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Michael D. Matthews
My daily walk to work takes me through West Point’s cemetery. Founded in 1817, the cemetery includes the graves of soldiers who fought in the American Revolution, and in all of the wars our country has fought since. I often stop and reflect on the lives of these men and women who are interred here.
By Perry N. Halkitis
On 25 May 2014 and nearly 30 years after first appearing on the stage, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart will be aired as a film on HBO. This project, which has evolved over the course of the last three decades, documents those first few harrowing years of the AIDS epidemic in New York City.
By Tony Hope
Science and morality are often seen as poles apart. Doesn’t science deal with facts, and morality with, well, opinions? Isn’t science about empirical evidence, and morality about philosophy? In my view this is wrong. Science and morality are neighbours. Both are rational enterprises. Both require a combination of conceptual analysis, and empirical evidence. Many, perhaps most moral disagreements hinge on disagreements over evidence and facts, rather than disagreements over moral principle.
By Zygmunt Pizlo, Yunfeng Li, Tadamasa Sawada, and Robert M. Steinman
The most general definition of symmetry is self-similarity: that one part of an object, pattern, signal, or process is similar, or more-or-less identical to another. According to this definition, the complete absence of symmetry is equivalent to perfect randomness, so symmetry is another name for redundancy.
By Kate Farquhar-Thomson
Every year since I can remember, I find myself in England’s famous book town for the excellent Hay Festival. Now in its 27th year the eponymous book festival can be found nestling under canvass for 11 days in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons National Park.
By Sherry Hamby
The common stereotypes about battered women are wrong and not based on up-to-date science. Here are five common myths about battered women and the real truths about the realities and complexities of domestic violence.
By Sarah Perini
The concept of psychological self-help, whether it is online, the traditional book, or the newer smartphone app, is one that elicits divided reactions. On the one hand, self-help is often the butt of jokes.
By David Murphy
Clinical psychologists help a huge range of people, of all ages, with an increasing number of mental health problems. Here are my top tips for getting into clinical psychology training.
With the British Psychological Society Annual Conference underway, we checked in with Susan Llewelyn, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford, and David Murphy, Joint Course Director for Oxford Doctoral Course in Clinical Psychology. We spoke to the co-editors of What is Clinical Psychology? about psychosis, provision of care, and careers in clinical psychology.
By David Murphy and Susan Llewelyn
Psychology must be one of the most diverse disciplines there is; it encompasses understanding language development in infants, techniques to help sports competitors improve performance, the psychology of conflicts, therapy for mental health disorders, and selection techniques for business amongst many others. The BPS Annual Conference is probably the best chance to witness the breadth of the discipline each year in the United Kingdom.
By Mary Jo Kreitzer
Since 2005, more than 80% of Americans have rated nurses on a Gallup poll as having “high” or “very high” honesty and ethical standards. In fact, nurses have topped the list since 1999, the first year Gallup asked about them with the exception of 2001. (That year, Gallup included firefighters on a one-time basis, given their prominent role in 9/11 rescue efforts.)
Soul’s latest incarnation comes in the guise of St. Paul and the Broken Bones. St. Paul is not really a saint. He is Paul Janeway of a new band that is hot on the rise. When you listen to him sing it evokes memories of a time past.
David J. Hand
Nowadays it appears impossible to open a newspaper or switch on the television without hearing about “big data”. Big data, it sometimes seems, will provide answers to all the world’s problems. Management consulting company McKinsey, for example, promises “a tremendous wave of innovation, productivity, and growth … all driven by big data”.
By Peter C. Doherty
A recent New York Times editorial by author David Quammen highlighted the seriousness of the current Ebola outbreak in Guinea, but made the point that there is no great risk of any global pandemic. That’s been generally true of the viruses that, like Ebola, cause exudative diathesis, or bleeding into the tissues, and present with horrific symptoms.
By Rebecca Cramp
In recent decades, the extraordinarily rapid disappearance of frogs, toads, and salamanders has grabbed the attention of both the scientific community and concerned citizens the world over. Although the causes of some of these losses remain unresolved, the novel disease chytridiomycosis caused by the skin-based fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), has been identified as the causative agent in many of the declines and extinctions worldwide.
In the trailer of Transcendence, an authoritative professor embodied by Johnny Depp says that “the path to building superintelligence requires us to unlock the most fundamental secrets of the universe.” It’s difficult to wrap our minds around the possibility of artificial intelligence and how it will affect society.