Tag Archives: United Kingdom

14Mar/23

Silicon Valley Bank: how interest rates helped trigger its collapse and what central bankers should do next

Charles Read, University of Cambridge

A former prime minister of Britain, Harold Wilson, is famous for remarking that a week is a long time in politics. But in the world of finance, it seems everything can change in just two days.

Continue reading

13Mar/23

Uncovering the secret religious and spiritual lives of sex workers

Daisy Matthews, Nottingham Trent University and Jane Pilcher, Nottingham Trent University

Tanya* is telling me just how important her Methodist Christianity is to her. We’re chatting over a video call, and I can see Tanya’s living room in the background. This also happens to be her workspace because Tanya, who is 50, is a full-time phone and cam sex worker. For Tanya, earning her living through sex work does not conflict with her religious beliefs at all. Tanya tells me that she had a client who talked to her about his enjoyment of wearing women’s clothing. He confided in her because they both shared the same religious identity.

Continue reading

13Mar/23

HSBC will acquire the assets of SVB UK. Deposits will be protected

Here’s the HM Treasury statement:

Silicon Valley Bank (UK) Ltd has today been sold to HSBC. HSBC is headquartered in London, is the largest bank in Europe and is one of the world’s largest banking and financial services institutions, serving 39 million customers globally. Customers of SVB UK will be able to access their deposits and banking services as normal from today.
Continue reading

06Mar/23

PenFed Documentary Completes Tour After Selection in Eighteen Film Festivals Across the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom


PenFed Credit Union, the nation’s second-largest federal credit union, recently screened its documentary short film “The Shot” at the NYC Mental Health Film Festival. This completes the film’s competitive run after numerous awards and screening for film festival audiences from Maui, Hawaii to Liverpool, England. Produced by PenFed Digital, the digital media division of PenFed Credit Union, the film follows three patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and their experience before and the year after receiving the promising Stellate Ganglion Block treatment. Continue reading

27Feb/23

The cockney dialect is not dead – it’s just called ‘Essex’ now

Amanda Cole, University of Essex

As English dialects go, cockney is one of the most influential. Long considered the preserve of working-class communities in east London, it has shaped the way people speak across the country, from Reading, Milton Keynes and even Hull all the way to Glasgow.

Continue reading

21Feb/23

15-minute cities: how to separate the reality from the conspiracy theory

Alex Nurse, University of Liverpool; Alessia Calafiore, The University of Edinburgh, and Richard J. Dunning, University of Liverpool

Conspiracy theories aren’t a new thing, and for as long as they’ve been around they’ve ranged from the benign to the absurd. From the six moon landings being faked to the Earth being flat, or our ruling class being lizards, we’ve all probably come across them in one form or another.

Yet, in a surprise twist, the hottest conspiracy theory of 2023 comes from an unlikely corner: town planning. This relates to the idea of “the 15-minute city” and has even gone so far as to be mentioned in UK parliament by an MP who called the idea “an international socialist concept” that will “cost us our personal freedom”.

Continue reading

17Feb/23

Kids’ online safety: A fragile balance

By Samuel Woodhams | Digital rights researcher and journalist

Last week, Joe Biden sounded the alarm over the lack of child protections online during his State of the Union address. He called for a ban on the collection of kids’ personal data and the prohibition of targeted advertising to children, saying: “We must finally hold social media companies accountable for the experiment they are running on our children for profit.”
Continue reading

07Feb/23

Turkey-Syria earthquakes: a seismologist explains what has happened

Jenny Jenkins, Durham University

An extremely large earthquake has occurred in the southeast of Turkey, near the border with Syria. Data from seismometers which measure shaking of the ground caused by earthquake waves suggest this this event, in the early morning of February 6, was a magnitude 7.8 out of 10 on the moment magnitude scale. Seismic waves were picked up by sensors around the world (you can watch them ripple through Europe) including places as far away as the UK.

Continue reading

05Feb/23

Six parts of your car that gather data on you

Rachael Medhurst, University of South Wales

You can tell a lot about someone from the car they drive. The data that many vehicles now collect can reveal the patterns of our daily lives and provide insights into our behaviour, actions and even our state of mind.

Continue reading