Early on last Wednesday, February 26th, the BBC Radio 4 programme World at One, had a major item on scamming. Here are the details of that programme:
Released On: 26 Feb 2025
Back in September we revealed the knitted cardigan scam. Millions have been taken in by social media ads of expensive looking knitwear for a reasonable price. Victims hear nothing until something cheap and nasty arrives in the post months later. But it’s more than a simple con. Shari Vahl reveals what its really about. Sales of stout show no sign of stopping as more young women are turning to it. Guinness blames increased demand with supply chain issues for a recent shortage. Its rivals in the dark beer world are jumping on the opportunity with some success. Will it work? Finally, a listener tells us how his energy company gave his mobile number to a criminal who went on to steal £40,000. We find out how you can prevent this happening to you. Presenter: Shari Vahl Producer: Kevin Mousle.
Then later on that morning, I watched the video below, produced by the American Social Administration
Then there was this list of scams and frauds produced by the USA Government
Jeannie and I are at opposite ends of the scale, so to speak. The older I get the more I want everything in the same place, primarily because I cannot remember where I previously put something.
Jeannie loves putting stuff anywhere because she can recall where it is!
I recently helped my mom sort through boxes she inherited when my grandparents passed away. One box was labeled – either ironically or genuinely – “toothpick holders and other treasures.” Inside were many keepsakes from moments now lost to history – although we found no toothpick holders.
My favorite of the items we sorted through was a solitary puzzle piece, an artifact reflecting my late grandmother’s penchant for hiding the final piece to a jigsaw puzzle just to swoop in at the last moment and finish it.
After several hours of reminiscing, my mom and I threw away 90% of what we had sorted.
“Why did I keep this?” is a question I hear frequently, both from my family and friends and from patients. I am a licensed clinical psychologist whose research focuses on the characterization, assessment and treatment of hoarding disorder, particularly for adults 60 years of age or older. As such, I spend a great deal of my time thinking about this question.
What drives the need to keep stuff?
Hoarding disorder is a psychiatric condition defined by urges to save items and difficulty discarding current possessions. For adults with “clinically severe” hoarding disorder, this leads to a level of household clutter that impairs daily functioning and can even create a fire hazard. In my professional experience, however, many adults struggle with clutter even if they do not meet the clinical criteria for hoarding disorder.
When I was a graduate student, I conducted a study in which we asked adults with hoarding disorder to spend 15 minutes making decisions about whether to keep or discard various items brought from their home. Participants could sort whatever items they wanted. Most chose to sort paper items such as old mail, cards or notes.
We found that age was associated with lower levels of distress during the task, such that participants who were older tended to feel less stressed when making the decision about what to keep and what to discard. We also found that many participants, particularly those who were older, actually reported positive emotions while sorting their items.
In new research publishing soon, my current team replicated this finding using a home-based version of the task. This suggests that fear of making the wrong decision isn’t a universal driver of our urge to save items.
In fact, a study my team published in August 2024 with adults over 50 with hoarding disorder suggests that altruism, a personality trait of wanting to help others, may explain why some people keep items that others might discard. My colleagues and I compared our participants’ personality profiles with that of adults in the general population of the same gender and age group. Compared with the general population, participants with hoarding disorder scored almost universally high on altruism.
Altruism also comes up frequently in my clinical work with older adults who struggle with clutter. People in our studies often tell me that they have held onto something out of a sense of responsibility, either for the item itself or to the environment.
“I need it to go to a good home” and “my grandmother gave this to me” are sentiments we commonly hear. Thus, people may keep things not out of fear of losing them but because saving them is consistent with their values. https://www.youtube.com/embed/JNVjPM1cIbg?wmode=transparent&start=0 Your values can help guide which possessions should stay in your life and which ones should go.
Leaning into values
In a 2024 study, my team demonstrated that taking a values-based approach to decluttering helps older adults to decrease household clutter and increases their positive affect, a state of mind characterized by feelings such as joy and contentment. Clinicians visited the homes of older adults with hoarding disorder for one hour per week for six weeks. At each visit, the clinicians used a technique called motivational interviewing to help participants talk through their decisions while they sorted household clutter.
We found that having participants start with identifying their values allowed them to maintain focus on their long-term goals. Too often, people focus on the immediate ability of an object to “spark joy” and forget to consider whether an object has greater meaning and purpose. Values are the abstract beliefs that we humans use to create our goals. Values are whatever drives us and can include family, faith or frivolity.
Because values are subjective, what people identify as important to keep is also subjective. For example, the dress I wore to my sister’s wedding reminded me of a wonderful day. However, when it no longer fit I gave it away because doing so was more consistent with my values of utility and helpfulness: I wanted the dress to go to someone who needed it and would use it. Someone who more strongly valued family and beauty might have prioritized keeping the dress because of the aesthetics and its link to a family event.
Additionally, we found that instead of challenging the reasons a person might have for keeping an item, it is helpful to instead focus on eliciting their reasons for discarding it and the goals they have for their home and their life.
Start with writing out your values. Every object in your home should feel value-consistent for you. For example, if tradition and faith are important values for you, you might be more inclined to hold onto a cookbook that was made by the elders at your church and more able to let go of a cookbook you picked up on a whim at a bookstore.
If, instead, health and creativity are your core values, it might be more important to hold onto a cookbook of novel ways to sneak more vegetables into your diet.
Defining value-consistent goals for using your space can help to maintain motivation as you declutter. Are you clearing off your desk so you can work more efficiently? Making space on kitchen counters to bake cookies with your grandchildren?
Remember that sometimes your values will conflict. At those moments, it may help to reflect on whether keeping or discarding an object will bring you closer to your goals for the space.
Similarly, remember that values are subjective. If you are helping a loved one declutter, maintain a curious, nonjudgmental attitude. Where you might see a box filled with junk, your grandmother might see something filled with “toothpick holders and other treasures.”
Prof. Mary Dozier makes some powerful, and cogent, statements in this article. Especially that one’s values are subjective. Nevertheless, I think I should write out my values and see what they tell me.
On yesterday’s World This Weekend the programme was entirely devoted to a speech that John Major gave on February 16th. His theme was: “We are moving into a more dangerous world“
From that post: Venus, named for the Roman goddess of love, reaches its greatest brilliancy on Valentine’s Day, February 14. Venus is currently blazing, low in the west after sunset, with Saturn below.
All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf’s law.
Researchers have hunted for evidence of this pattern in communication among other species, but until now no other examples have been found.
In new research published today in Science, our team of experts in whale song, linguistics and developmental psychology analysed eight years’ of song recordings from humpback whales in New Caledonia. Led by Inbal Arnon from the Hebrew University, Ellen Garland from the University of St Andrews, and Simon Kirby from the University of Edinburgh, We used techniques inspired by the way human infants learn language to analyse humpback whale song.
We discovered that the same Zipfian pattern universally found across human languages also occurs in whale song. This complex signalling system, like human language, is culturally learned by each individual from others.
Learning like an infant
When infant humans are learning, they have to somehow discover where words start and end. Speech is continuous and does not come with gaps between words that they can use. So how do they break into language?
Thirty years of research has revealed that they do this by listening for sounds that are surprising in context: sounds within words are relatively predictable, but between words are relatively unpredictable. We analysed the whale song data using the same procedure.
A breaching humpback whale in New Caledonia. Operation Cetaces
Unexpectedly, using this technique revealed in whale song the same statistical properties that are found in all languages. It turns out both human language and whale song have statistically coherent parts.
In other words, they both contain recurring parts where the transitions between elements are more predictable within the part. Moreover, these recurring sub-sequences we detected follow the Zipfian frequency distribution found across all human languages, and not found before in other species.
Whale song recording (2017) Operation Cetaces 916 KB (download)
Close analysis of whale song revealed statistical structures similar to those found in human language. Operation Cetaces
How do the same statistical properties arise in two evolutionarily distant species that differ from one another in so many ways? We suggest we found these similarities because humans and whales share a learning mechanism: culture.
A cultural origin
Our findings raise an exciting question: why would such different systems in such incredibly distant species have common structures? We suggest the reason behind this is that both are culturally learned.
Cultural evolution inevitably leads to the emergence of properties that make learning easier. If a system is hard to learn, it will not survive to the next generation of learners.
There is growing evidence from experiments with humans that having statistically coherent parts, and having them follow a Zipfian distribution, makes learning easier. This suggests that learning and transmission play an important role in how these properties emerged in both human language and whale song.
So can we talk to whales now?
Finding parallel structures between whale song and human language may also lead to another question: can we talk to whales now? The short answer is no, not at all.
Our study does not examine the meaning behind whale song sequences. We have no idea what these segments might mean to the whales, if they mean anything at all.
A competitive pod of humpback whales on the New Caledonian breeding grounds. Operation Cetaces
It might help to think about it like instrumental music, as music also contains similar structures. A melody can be learned, repeated, and spread – but that doesn’t give meaning to the musical notes in the same way that individual words have meaning.
Next up: birdsong
Our work also makes a bold prediction: we should find this Zipfian distribution wherever complex communication is transmitted culturally. Humans and whales are not the only species that do this.
We find what is known as “vocal production learning” in an unusual range of species across the animal kingdom. Song birds in particular may provide the best place to look as many bird species culturally learn their songs, and unlike in whales, we know a lot about precisely how birds learn song.
Equally, we expect not to find these statistical properties in the communication of species that don’t transmit complex communication by learning. This will help to reveal whether cultural evolution is the common driver of these properties between humans and whales.
The research scientists have led to a prediction: … we should find this Zipfian distribution wherever complex communication is transmitted culturally. Humans and whales are not the only species that do this.
I first met Richard Maugham when we were being treated to a private jet flight to the Hannover International Fair in 1982, some 43 years ago. We were both English and I was living in Tollesbury, Essex, near Colchester and Richard living near Ealing, West London.
The common thread was that all the passengers were major sellers of the Commodore ‘PET’.
Richard and I hit it off straight away. Richard was a fellow salesman. I was ex-IBM Office Products Division and Richard was ex-Olivetti.
Both of us also volunteered for the Prince’s Youth Business Trust, a charity headed by Prince of Wales, as he was then, helping young people start their own business.
The Prince of Wales, me, and Richard Maugham
Gillie and Colin, a couple who know Richard, recently sent me the following email:
Dear Paul,
I write to inform you that Richard passed away today at 2.50 GMT.
Both Colin and I were at his hospital bedside.
Our thoughts and condolences are with you.
Gillie and Colin.
The ‘today’ in the above email was Sunday, 9th February, 2025.
Since then, information overload continues unabated, and many people are rightfully confused by an onslaught of conflicting health information. Even expert advice is often contradictory.
On top of that, people sometimes deliberately distort research findings to promote a certain agenda. For example, trisodium phosphate is a common food additive in cakes and cookies that is used to improve texture and prevent spoilage, but wellness influencers exploit the fact that a similarly named substance is used in paint and cleaning products to suggest it’s dangerous to your health.
Such claims can proliferate quickly, creating widespread misconceptions and undermining trust in legitimate scientific research and medical advice. Social media’s rise as a news and information source further fuels the spread of pseudoscientific views.
Misinformation is rampant in the realm of health and nutrition. Findings from nutrition research is rarely clear-cut because diet is just one of many behaviors and lifestyle factors affecting health, but the simplicity of using food and supplements as a cure-all is especially seductive.
I am an assistant professor specializing in medical education and science communication. I also train scientists and future health care professionals how to communicate their science to the general public.
In my view, countering the voices of social media influencers and health activists promoting pseudoscientific health claims requires leaning into the science of disease prevention. Extensive research has produced a body of evidence-based practices and public health measures that have consistently been shown to improve the health of millions of people around the world. Evaluating popular health claims against the yardstick of this work can help distinguish which ones are based on sound science.
To parse pseudoscientific claims from sound advice about health and nutrition, it’s crucial to evaluate the information’s source. tadamichi/Getty Images
Navigating the terrain of tangled information
Conflicting information can be found on just about everything we eat and drink.
That’s because a food or beverage is rarely just good or bad. Instead, its health effects can depend on everything from the quantity a person consumes to their genetic makeup. Hundreds of scientific studies describe coffee’s health benefits and, on the flip side, its health risks. A bird’s-eye view can point in one direction or another, but news articles and social media posts often make claims based on a single study.
Things can get even more confusing with dietary supplements because people who promote them often make big claims about their health benefits. Take apple cider vinegar, for example – or ACV, if you’re in the know.
Apple cider vinegar has been touted as an all-natural remedy for a variety of ailments, including digestive issues, urinary health and weight management. Indeed, some studies have shown that it might help lower cholesterol, in addition to having other health benefits, but overall those studies have small sample sizes and are inconclusive.
Advocates of this substance often claim that one particular component of it – the cloudy sediment at the bottom of the bottle termed “the mother” – is especially beneficial because of the bacteria and yeast it contains. But there is no research that backs the claim that it offers any health benefits.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the global dietary supplements industry is worth more than US$150 billion per year, so companies – and wellness influencers – selling supplements have a financial stake in convincing the public of their value.
Misinformation about nutrition is nothing new, but that doesn’t make it any less confusing.
How nutrition science gets twisted
There’s no doubt that good nutrition is fundamental for your health. Studies consistently show that a balanced diet containing a variety of essential nutrients can help prevent chronic diseases and promote overall well-being.
However, pseudoscientific claims often twist such basic facts to promote the idea that specific diets or supplements can prevent or treat illness. For example, vitamin C is known to play a role in supporting the immune system and can help reduce the duration and severity of colds.
Some companies overstate the benefits while underplaying the hazards.
For example, wellness influencers have promoted raw milk over pasteurized milk as a more natural and nutritious choice, but consuming it is risky. Unpasteurized milk can contain harmful bacteria that leads to gastrointestinal illness and, in some cases, much more serious and potentially life-threatening diseases such as avian influenza, or bird flu.
The lure of dietary myths has led people with cancer to replace proven science-backed treatments, such as chemotherapy or radiation, with unproven and misleading nutrition programs.
How to spot less-than-solid science
Pseudoscience exploits your insecurities and emotions, taking advantage of your desire to live the healthiest life possible.
While the world around you may be uncertain and out of your control, you want to believe that at the very least, you have control over your own health. This is where the wellness industry steps in.
What makes pseudoscientific claims so confusing is that they use just enough scientific jargon to sound believable. Supplements or powders that claim to “boost immunity” often list ingredients such as adaptogens and superfoods. While these words sound real and convincing, they actually don’t mean anything in science. They are terms created by the wellness industry to sell products.
I’ve researched and written about reliable ways to distinguish science facts from false health claims. To stay alert and find credible information, I’d suggest you follow a few key steps.
First, check your emotions – strong emotional reactions, such as fear and anger, can be a red flag.
Next, check that the author has experience or expertise in the field of the topic. If they’re not an expert, they might not know what they are talking about. It’s always a good idea to make sure the source is reputable – ask yourself, would this source be trusted by scientists?
Finally, search for references that back up the information. If very little or nothing else exists in the science world to back up the claims, you may want to put your trust in a different source.
Following these steps will separate the facts from fake news and empower you to make evidence-based decisions.
A hundred years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble dramatically expanded the size of the known universe. At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 1925, a paper read by one of his colleagues on his behalf reported that the Andromeda nebula, also called M31, was nearly a million light years away – too remote to be a part of the Milky Way.
Hubble’s work opened the door to the study of the universe beyond our galaxy. In the century since Hubble’s pioneering work, astronomers like me have learned that the universe is vast and contains trillions of galaxies.
Nature of the nebulae
In 1610, astronomer Galileo Galilei used the newly invented telescope to show that the Milky Way was composed of a huge number of faint stars. For the next 300 years, astronomers assumed that the Milky Way was the entire universe.
Charles Messier also produced a catalog of over 100 prominent nebulae in 1781. Messier was interested in comets, so his list was a set of fuzzy objects that might be mistaken for comets. He intended for comet hunters to avoid them since they did not move across the sky.
As more data piled up, 19th century astronomers started to see that the nebulae were a mixed bag. Some were gaseous, star-forming regions, such as the Orion nebula, or M42 – the 42nd object in Messier’s catalog – while others were star clusters such as the Pleiades, or M45.
A third category – nebulae with spiral structure – particularly intrigued astronomers. The Andromeda nebula, M31, was a prominent example. It’s visible to the naked eye from a dark site.
The Andromeda galaxy, then known as the Andromeda nebula, is a bright spot in the sky that intrigued early astronomers.
Astronomers as far back as the mid-18th century had speculated that some nebulae might be remote systems of stars or “island universes,” but there was no data to support this hypothesis. Island universes referred to the idea that there could be enormous stellar systems outside the Milky Way – but astronomers now just call these systems galaxies.
In 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis held a Great Debate. Shapley argued that the spiral nebulae were small and in the Milky Way, while Curtis took a more radical position that they were independent galaxies, extremely large and distant.
At the time, the debate was inconclusive. Astronomers now know that galaxies are isolated systems of stars, much smaller than the space between them.
Hubble makes his mark
Edwin Hubble was young and ambitious. At the of age 30, he arrived at Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California just in time to use the new Hooker 100-inch telescope, at the time the largest in the world.
He began taking photographic plates of the spiral nebulae. These glass plates recorded images of the night sky using a light-sensitive emulsion covering their surface. The telescope’s size let it make images of very faint objects, and its high-quality mirror allowed it to distinguish individual stars in some of the nebulae.
Estimating distances in astronomy is challenging. Think of how hard it is to estimate the distance of someone pointing a flashlight at you on a dark night. Galaxies come in a very wide range of sizes and masses. Measuring a galaxy’s brightness or apparent size is not a good guide to its distance.
Hubble leveraged a discovery made by Henrietta Swan Leavitt 10 years earlier. She worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a “human computer,” laboriously measuring the positions and brightness of thousands of stars on photographic plates.
She was particularly interested in Cepheid variables, which are stars whose brightness pulses regularly, so they get brighter and dimmer with a particular period. She found a relationship between their variation period, or pulse, and their intrinsic brightness or luminosity.
Once you measure a Cepheid’s period, you can calculate its distance from how bright it appears using the inverse square law. The more distant the star is, the fainter it appears.
Hubble worked hard, taking images of spiral nebulae every clear night and looking for the telltale variations of Cepheid variables. By the end of 1924, he had found 12 Cepheids in M31. He calculated M31’s distance as a prodigious 900,000 light years away, though he underestimated its true distance – about 2.5 million light years – by not realizing there were two different types of Cepheid variables.
His measurements marked the end of the Great Debate about the Milky Way’s size and the nature of the nebulae. Hubble wrote about his discovery to Harlow Shapley, who had argued that the Milky Way encompassed the entire universe.
“Here is the letter that destroyed my universe,” Shapley remarked.
Always eager for publicity, Hubble leaked his discovery to The New York Times five weeks before a colleague presented his paper at the astronomers’ annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
An expanding universe of galaxies
But Hubble wasn’t done. His second major discovery also transformed astronomers’ understanding of the universe. As he dispersed the light from dozens of galaxies into a spectrum, which recorded the amount of light at each wavelength, he noticed that the light was always shifted to longer or redder wavelengths.
Light from the galaxy passes through a prism or reflects off a diffraction grating in a telescope, which captures the intensity of light from blue to red.
It seemed that these redshifted galaxies were all moving away from the Milky Way.
Hubble’s results suggested the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was moving away from Earth. Hubble got the lion’s share of the credit for this discovery, but Lowell Observatory astronomer Vesto Slipher, who noticed the same phenomenon but didn’t publish his data, also anticipated that result.
Hubble referred to galaxies having recession velocities, or speeds of moving away from the Earth, but he never figured out that they were moving away from Earth because the universe is getting bigger.
Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre made that connection by realizing that the theory of general relativity described an expanding universe. He recognized that space expanding in between the galaxies could cause the redshifts, making it seem like they were moving farther away from each other and from Earth.
Lemaitre was the first to argue that the expansion must have begun during the big bang.
Edwin Hubble is the namesake for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has spent decades observing faraway galaxies. NASA via AP
NASA named its flagship space observatory after Hubble, and it has been used to study galaxies for 35 years. Astronomers routinely observe galaxies that are thousands of times fainter and more distant than galaxies observed in the 1920s. The James Webb Space Telescope has pushed the envelope even farther.
The current record holder is a galaxy a staggering 34 billion light years away, seen just 200 million years after the big bang, when the universe was 20 times smaller than it is now. Edwin Hubble would be amazed to see such progress.
I had a blackout while driving back from the shops last Saturday week, the 17th, swerved and hit an oak tree. Jean and I were both taken to hospital but I was discharged at the end of the day; Jean is still in hospital, the Asante Regional at Medford. Plus the DMV cancelled my driver’s license and the car was declared written off.
Jean is getting better all the time but until she is back home and we can put our heads together about a variety of things I shall not be blogging.
I’m very sorry but that is the way it is at the moment.
Learning from Dogs 