Evidence from: The December 2012 issue of the Radar journal. In a nut shell, the normal neck is to varying degrees defective. Most of us just ignore it. It comes and goes. Normal defect does not often count as a motoring injury unless a person is examined after a not-at-fault car crash. At that point, the observed defect is an injury and what’s more, it was caused by the car crash!  At-fault drivers are many times less likely to be described as injured. The problem has been that expert examiners have had no common-law-compatible method for distinguishing between normal and probably abnormal. They have had no tools for assessing, from a common law point of view, whether there is an injury or not. So, they use a medical approach instead. Medics are in effect precautionary, rather than reasonable, and trusting rather than probabilistic. This approach is acceptable for broken bones, but is of doubtful relevance to the common law when the actual defect is commonplace and normal. Insurance c

Evidence from: A symposium for Civil Service ‘Horizon Scanners’ and decision-makers. Shrivenham 15th Jan 2013. Remit: How to get more attention [and funding] from decision-makers?   Tuesday was my first taste of a ‘Horizon Scanners’ symposium. It was free to attend. Thank you to CSaP University of Cambridge. Two approaches to “Horizon Scanning” were evident. One approach develops a deterministic model of the current landscape, identifies the different drivers that make sense and to which there is a measured vulnerability. This approach is probably best described as evidence-based resilience testing with targeted enquiry to identify when priority threats and opportunities are emerging. I wouldn’t call it horizon scanning I would call it risk management. An excellent example of this is the National Institute for Health Research Horizon Scanning Centre and of course, the Radar service. The second collects opinions based essentially on strongl