When Geoffrey Howe became Chancellor of the Exchequer after the 1979 General Election, one of the first people to contact him was his Labour predecessor, Denis Healey. Healey wanted to tell Howe that although there were huge challenges in managing the UK economy, the challenge of using the kitchen in Number 11 Downing Street was almost as…
You know the puzzles: look in one way, and it’s a vase; in another way it’s two faces in profile. Optical illusions of all sorts make the point that what you see depends on what you are looking for. As I write this, we are halfway through the fortnight-long highlight of Sheffield Hallam’s year which is graduation.…
I’ve said, and written, before that Hallam is a remarkable place. It is a huge university, with extraordinary things going on in different places. Almost a year in – and I’ll come back to that later in the year – still not a week goes by without my discovering something I didn’t know before. One…
As Kathryn Schulz points out in her fabulous book Being Wrong, we all get things wrong, but rarely like to admit it. There are any number of reasons why we get things wrong: we look at the wrong clues in the evidence before us; we have the wrong prior beliefs; we fall back on stereotypes; we rely too…
On Friday morning, 11th November, the University will be holding a two-minute silence at 11 a.m. to mark Remembrance Day. I shall be leading a gathering in the entrance foyer of the Owen Building at City Campus, and Professor Karen Bryan will lead a parallel event in Heart of the Campus at Collegiate. I’m told…