Accounts: 50 Years of a Great Idea

Great Ormond Street 50 years ago.

I was appointed house physician at The Hospital for Sick Children in 1937. In retrospect I can see that I was there at a very particular time in the hospital's history, because 1937 was to mark the end of an era. A decade or so before, the fame of Great Ormond Street had depended on a generation of physicians of the calibre of Still, Garrod, Batten, and Poynton. But the staffing of the hospital...

A Common Idea among Competing Accounts

A theory of object recognition requires a theory of shape. Despite considerable empirical and theoretical research, however, a definition of object shape has proved elusive. Two experiments provide new insights by showing that children’s object recognition changes dramatically during the period between 17 and 25 months. During this time, children develop the ability to recognize stylized threed...

50 years of Sterillium®

Synthetic Validity: A Great Idea Whose Time Never Came

Synthetic validity is very much like monogamy. It is an idea that is universally admired but not widely practiced. The concept of synthetic validity has been around for almost 60 years (Lawshe, 1952) and it is described in virtually every testing and measurement book and every industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology textbook I have ever read. I still vividly remember my undergraduate Psy...

Tubercular Meningitis, A Tale of 50 Years.

Whyth in 1768 for his treatise ‘Dropsy in the brain’ [2]. The patho-physiology of TBM was unravelled by Arnold Rich and McCordock in 1933 [3]. Before the mid-20th century, childhood TB was uniformly fatal. The introduction of isoniazid in early 1950’s revolutionized the treatment of TB. For nearly two decades, the standard treatment comprised of combination of isoniazid and streptomycin, follow...