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The term resilience is ambiguous, but is popular enough to spread widely throughout culture. Resilience literally means to ‘bounce back’. It is used virtually everywhere, from sport to science, environmental, economic and global policy. As far as science is concerned, it seems to have been used in physics and ecology first (C.S. Holling), but it is also used frequently in the social sciences (see ‘Putting a Face on Resilience’ in HRR magazine). Psychologists and psychiatrists talk about examples of personal resilience, especially in young people (see Norman Garmezy).
One big question about resilience is whether it actually means something universal or has its repeated use reduced it to nonsense? During times of disaster, a radically changing climate and global financial crisis, it seems resilience allows people to talk about methods of recovery that were either unknown, not thought about as much, or never existed.
I thought it would be interesting to check on how often resilience has been used in books using Google’s Ngram tool. Researchers with the Tipping Points project use data from Ngrams in many of their studies on the use of emotion words for example as well as the use of climate science terms, both of which are on downward trends at the moment. The term ‘tipping point’ itself has also been studied by researchers and reached its peak in academic publications some years ago. Read more
The new annual report from the Tipping Points project is now available.
It features the latest research updates from all five work packages of the project:
- Trust and maintaining resilience of financial markets
- Development of UK banking sector
- Field research on past climate in the North Atlantic
- Tipping points in populations of UK banks and ‘titanic moments’
- Use of ‘tipping point’ in popular culture and in discussions about climate change
Plus much more!
Tipping Points Annual Report 2011-12
Smoking Prevalence and Lung Cancer Incidence, by Sex, Great Britain, 1948-2010 (Cancer Research UK)
This conference from the Tipping Points project focuses on modelling of social problems and health. Researchers will present and discuss health problems of concern within society together with mathematical and statistical models, which may be useful predictive tools for deriving strategies that practitioners may use. Emphasis of the workshop will be placed on actual health issues that are a huge financial burden to governments and taxpayers, such as smoking, alcoholism, substance abuse and heart problems.
Lectures will be given on mathematical and statistical methods by experts from the Universities of Bologna, Durham, Manchester, Strathclyde and Turin within the context of health problems. A key feature of the workshop are lectures by practitioners from government-sponsored bodies like FRESH (smoke-free North East), and NEPHO (North East Public Health Observatory), together with guests from Volterra Consulting, Rinicare, the Wolfson Research Institute, the NIBHI (Northwest Institute for BioHealth Informatics), and the Universities of Lancaster and Manchester. Read more
In one of the final presentations given at the Tipping Points Annual Conference, Prof Ranald Michie presents the history of London as a global financial centre before and after the 2007-08 banking crisis and subsequent euro debt crisis. Prof Michie explains how London became the global financial centre it is today. Read more
This post is from Dr Matthew Hollow one of the researchers from the Tipping Points project blogging about the annual Tipping Points Conference held at Durham University.
“…think of what ninety nine percent of the human race want – food, shelter, a secure family life and to be left alone by bosses and busybodies. Unfortunately the one percent who are interested in power and ideals and ideologies are the ones who call the tune.” (Aldous Huxley, 1947)
One of the more powerful slogans adopted by the worldwide ‘Occupy’ movement has been the catchphrase ‘We are the 99%’. Inspired by Huxley’s above-quoted comments on the inequalities in society, the phrase was adopted by the Occupy movement to both criticise the extent to which power is concentrated in the hands of a powerful, wealthy minority and, simultaneously, to promote the idea that those involved in the Occupy movement are the true flag-bearers for the masses. Read more
