New report from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has just published its annual report. This specialist police unit monitors how well civil court orders work in preventing sex offenders from re-offending after being released from prison. The report states in no uncertain terms that the current measures fail to protect children, and suggests a simplification of what is currently on offer would help prevent further abuses.

To view how the BBC are currently reporting the issue then go here or to view the full-text CEOP report click here.

If you need help with referencing this kind of report (especially if you think it would be appropriate for a late insertion into your dissertation!) then email me as soon as possible.

Save the Children report on mothers and childbirth

Hopefully there'll be plenty of media attention given to a new report that's been published today. It's on the relative safety of childbirth across the world and provides a league table of countries, looking at survival rates for newborns.

The report's called Surviving the First Day and provides excellent statistics on midwifery provision and a whole host of related issues. If you're a CAS student this would make a terrific resource to examine, plus the attached reference section includes an extensive list of reports and statistics any student could use for researching childbirth as a worldwide issue.

The full report is available here.

Pornography and society debate at the Royal Institution

A few weeks back I heard Germaine Greer mention an event she was due to speak at. It was a debate on the positive and negative effects of pornography in society, and it has just been made available online. The whole thing is hosted by Intelligence², who have been hosting these debating evenings for a while now.

Some of you may have studied on the unit The Social Body which touches on some of these issues.

This particular debate is 'lively' and inevitably features language which is both graphic and confrontational. It also made me laugh on a number of occasions, so there is light and shade in there. My advice would be if you're likely to be offended by the content, then don't watch it.

One more thing - the debate doesn't feature any pornographic images so I think you'd be fine to watch this anywhere providing you're using headphones.

The Intelligence² website with the current debate and a nice archive of older debates (there's a good one on the current relevancy of Marxism in relation to austerity measures) is available here.

As always, if you'd like advice on how to reference anything you find on YouTube then just ask.

Time to call in some favours

I enjoy helping people.
It's why I do my job.
Well. That and my frankly enormous salary, obviously...
And I help students without asking for anything in return, because, again, that's the deal.

But now I've got a favour to ask.

I'm part of a university project who are looking at how students use DISCOVER and we need some students to volunteer for the trials we're running on the 9th and 16th of May. I reckon each student wouldn't be required for longer than 15 minutes.

So think of this as your gift for all the times I may have helped you! How's that for potentially shameless, guilt-induced participation?

If you're interested in participating on either day, email me directly and I'll explain in more detail what the study involves.

Alan

E-books on demand project is now finished

Hello.
The clue's in the title with this one.
The e-books project has now run it's monetary course, and we'll be reviewing what was bought and rented by students since Christmas over the coming months.
What I can say already is that over 1000 e-books were purchased, which is amazing and very encouraging for the long term prospects and possible future return of the project next academic year.

If you rented any titles then thanks for taking part.

BBC1 programme on the prison system.

I watched the first episode of a four part series on the prison service this week.
I didn't really intend to watch it all, but I found myself wanting to know what would happen to the individuals who featured in the show. It highlighted many of the usual issues relating to short stay prisoners; drug problems, homelessness, lack of support on leaving prison. Despite that, it was on the whole a surprisingly optimistic programme (maybe overly so?) and I'll be watching the other episodes.

Have a look here to visit the BBC website for the programme and to view last week's episode.

Psychology and Sociology; why can't they just get along?

You've probably heard me say before that I'm a psychology graduate. This supposedly gives me a psychological (as opposed to a sociological), approach to life. In reality, I'm not sure it quite works like that. In my case I was always drawn to theoretical approaches that had no problem with criticising the shortcomings of mainstream science. Hence, I found myself attracted to what's broadly known as the social constructionist approach. This standpoint suggests that language is the driving force behind everyone's wholly individual view of reality; that language actively creates reality and doesn't just describe it. This is still pretty much my view.

Psychology symbol

The reason I'm sharing this today is that I've been listening to some great archived radio shows which describe the history and impact of seminal psychology experiments. And I got to thinking about whether I should promote these shows to you. The conclusion I came to was that I should; not because I'm looking to wilfully confuse you (although I've been accused of that more than once...), but because there are occasions when it's an awfully thin line between what's defined as psychology and what counts as sociology.

The social sciences just aren't that tidy. If the family of social sciences were a real family they'd be awfully prone to getting drunk and fighting each other. The Daily Mail would label them as 'FAMILY OF SHAME'. Put it like this; if they had a party there'd be a lot of individuals not prepared to sit next to each other because of some supposed slight uttered in 1935.  

However, my reason for suggesting you look at these radio shows is simpler than that. The social sciences are partly defined by each other-to know what sociology isn't you need to know what psychology is. Also, these shows are very easy to listen to as well and feature key experiments by theorists such as Maslow, Piaget, Ainsworth and Bandura, all of whom are known as psychologists but who you've probably come across on your sociological-based course.

OK. Enough. The radio show is called 'Mind Changers' and you can find the archive of shows here. If you want to reference any of them in assignments just ask for help.