PR blunders

Crypto Blunders

Cryptography has emerged as an enormously important component of the networked world. People are hesitant to trust the World Wide Web and eCommerce without the protections crypto provides. As companies build Virtual Private Networks, demand secure communications and require stronger authentication techniques, more and more applications are built with crypto as core components. Many cryptographi...

Einsteinian Blunders

'We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising.' Abstract The World Year of Physics 2005 celebrates Einstein 1905. Too much celebration of a single character may be hazardous as an example for the younger generation. With such a motto in mind, I comment on some episodes in Einstein's scientific career that are at some...

Comparing Blunders in Government

Much attention has been paid to ‘blunders’ and ‘policy disasters’. Some argue, on the one hand, that the UK’s political and administrative system is disproportionately prone to generating disasters, but offer no systematic evidence on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. On the other hand, research on cognitive biases and other failures of col...

Assisted reproductive technological blunders (ARTBs).

ARTBs, as we must now call them, are becoming more and more frequent. In the recent United Kingdom case (discussed in April JME) Mr and Mrs A, a “white” couple, gave birth to twins described as “black”. The mix up apparently occurred because a Mr and Mrs B, a “black” couple, were being treated in the same clinic and Mrs A’s eggs were fertilised with Mr B’s sperm. Mr and Mrs A love the twins and...

Seven Great Blunders of the Computing World