January 2021 - NevilleHobson.com

FIR 203: Insurrection and Sea Shanties

‘Trust’ was the major theme for discussion in the January episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report podcast aka FIR 203 that Shel and I recorded last weekend and published on Monday. It underpinned all other topics we discussed as we started the episode reviewing the key analysis in the Edelman Trust Barometer 2021 – the report concludes that there is a ‘crisis of leadership’ with a growing trust gap and declines in trust worldwide; and without a trusted leadership…

Digital hoarders: we’ve identified four types – which are you?

Updated on January 27, 2021 How many emails are in your inbox? If the answer is thousands, or if you often struggle to find a file on your computer among its cluttered hard drive, then you might be classed as a digital hoarder. In the physical world, hoarding disorder has been recognised as a distinct psychiatric condition among people who accumulate excessive amounts of objects to the point that it prevents them living a normal life. Now, research has begun…

SDF 43: The wearing away of trust

In the first episode in 2021 of our monthly Small Data Forum podcast, Thomas, Sam, and I discussed the big picture of Trump and what’s next for him, Joe Biden and America post-Trump, and in the context of our predictions in episode 42 in December. Those predictions weren’t that shabby, as it turns out. We considered what social media is: platform, publisher, or leech, which provoked some lively and trenchant opinion. We pondered the consequences and outcomes of the Capitol…

The uneasy case for face masks and enforced wearing

In the UK last November, the most frequent locations people with the COVID-19 virus had been prior to testing positive was supermarkets. Two months on, that may still be the case. It makes sense, then, that if you are going to a supermarket, you wear a face mask for your own protection as well as that of everyone else. Unless you have valid exemption, wearing a face mask when in an enclosed public place like a supermarket is also the…

Post Trump, a better system must start in America

The eye-opening scenes of hundreds of people storming the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on Wednesday January 6 – broadcast live and shown on television screens around the world – will have significant effects in the long term on society in general in ways that are hard to immediately imagine or understand. In the US, outrage at what happened that day is growing as greater clarity emerges on those events that many see as encouraged by President Trump. ‘Insurrection’ and…