Packing Travel Tips

Here are some tips for packing your suitcase.

# Roll your clothes together to reduce creasing.

• Group clothes in threes - a bulky item (sweatshirt, jumper, towel), a durable item (PJs, jeans, T-shirt or top) and something that creases (light fabrics, skirt, dress).
• Lay the bulkiest item flat, fold in sleeves or sides to make a rectangle. Roll tightly.
• Lay the durable item flat, tucking in sleeves, etc. Place the bulky item roll on top, then roll second item around it.
• Repeat with third item. If you have them, cover the finished roll with plastic clothing covers from dry cleaning.

# How to pack a hat

• Place hat upside down on a flat surface.
• Fill up the crown with small items, such as underwear and T-shirts.
• Place hat right way up on the bottom of and empty suitcase.
• Pack in remaining items around the hat to hold its shape.

Various sources

Eco-tips in the Living Room

In the living room

• Turn television off rather than leave on standby. Ditto for VCR, digiboxes, DVD, stereo, etc.
• Recycle newspapers and other papers.
• Finished with a magazine - pass it on to family or friends, donate to GP surgeries and dental practice waiting rooms (check first that this is ok), offer to local hairdressers - and if no-one wants it, then recyle.

Various sources.

The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England and Elizabethan England

The Time Travellers Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer (paperback Vintage, 2009)
Imagine you could travel back to the fourteenth century. What would you see, and hear, and smell? Where would you stay? What are you going to eat? And how are you going to test to see if you are going down with the plague? History is not just about battles and dates, it is also about how our ancestors used to live, whether a peasant or a lord.

The Time Travellers Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer (hardback Bodley Head, 2012)

We typically think of the Elizabethan period in terms of Queen Elizabeth I as 'Gloriana', a golden age of maritime heroes, and of great writers but it is also a country in which life expectancy at birth is in the early thirties, people still starve to death and Catholics are persecuted for their faith. This book focuses on such questions as: If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time?

These provide a fascinating look at social history.

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Age of Criminal Responsibility

Important changes in the brain's neural circuits go on well into a person's teens. The prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for decision-making, impulse control and cognitive control, is among the slowest parts of the brain to mature and is not fully developed until around the age of 20 (and possibly even later in some individuals). A young person's cognitive development continues into this later stage and their emotional maturity, self-image and judgement will be affected until the prefrontal cortex of the brain has fully developed. Alongside brain development, hormonal activity is also continuing well into the early twenties.

Child psychologists are being given a new directive (in 2016) which is that the age range they work with is increasing from 0-18 to 0-25. There are three stages of adolescence - early adolescence from 12-14 years, middle adolescence from 15-17 years and late adolescence from 18 years and over.

Motoring expert Quentin Willson says statistics show that at the age of 18 the vast majority of accidents caused by young drivers are down to bad judgement and decision making, and that behind the wheel "adult maturity isn't fully formed until you get past 25 for most cases of people". But rather than raise the minimum age for driving, Willson believes parents and teachers should impart safe driving skills before the effects of adolescence really kick in. He feels that "The government should look at this very carefully and put driving on the GCSE syllabus. So you teach kids to drive in terms of theory at school and all the right messages at 13, 14, 15, because when you get to 17 the testosterone is raging, all those corrosive influences are embedded."

In 2011, the Royal Society reported that the age of criminal responsibility in England, Wales and Northern Ireland could be "unreasonably low" given the emerging understanding of how slowly the brains of children mature, and that widespread differences between individuals also mean that the cut-off age at which children are deemed fit to stand trial, at 10 years old, might not be justifiable in all cases. (In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, a child is deemed fit to stand trial at the age of 10; in Scotland children cannot be convicted until they are 12. In most European countries it is far higher: 18 in Belgium and 16 in Spain)

What Works to Reduce Reoffending: A Summary of the Evidence.
Justice Analytical Services, Scottish Government [by] Dr. Maria Sapouna, Catherine Bisset and Anne-Marie Conlong. October 2011

• Long-term studies in both the UK and internationally show that offending begins in  early adolescence, peaks during the late teens and tapers off in young adulthood. Typically the peak age for offending is around 14 years, with a reduction by age 17 and another decrease by age 23. 
• A small number (about 5% of the offender population) "continue to offend throughout adulthood and are responsible for a disproportionally large number of offences. The relationship between age and offending is interpreted as reflecting underlying changes in biology, social contexts, attitudes and life circumstances that influence offenders’ motivation to desist from crime rather than a unitary maturation process". 
• Studies consistently find that "the occurrence of key life events such as obtaining and remaining in suitable employment, acquiring a stable partner and completing education degrees increase the likelihood of desistance from offending by adding structure to offenders’ lives and acting as a source of informal monitoring and emotional support. The same effect has been observed when offenders move away from criminal peers. More recently, researchers have stressed that the perceived strength, stability and quality of social attachments matter more than the events per se."
• Persistent young peopleoffenders are less committed to education and employment and most likely to have family members or peers also involved in crime. Persistent offending is often linked to drug addiction (particularly the need to fund a drug addiction).
• Scottish and English data suggest that community sentences are more effective in reducing recidivism than short-term prison sentences (less than 12 months).
• There is clear evidence from both Scotland and England that only a small proportion of offenders released on Home Detention Curfew (HDC) reoffend whilst on curfew.
• Findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime indicate that the deeper a youth is carried into the formal processing system, the less likely he/ she is to stop offending. The authors argue that the most significant factor in reducing offending is minimal formal intervention and maximum diversion to programming that does not have the trappings of criminal processing
• Positive effects on reoffending have also been reported in the evaluation of the Triage initiative (being piloted in England and Wales in 2011), which diverts young people who have offended for the first time under police custody to support services provided by a youth worker and, where appropriate, restorative justice informed interventions.
• Scotland’s Choice (2008) reported that: prisoners are 13 times more likely to have been in care as a child; 63% of young people have substance misuse issues on admission to prison; of all prisoners 80% have writing, 65% have numeracy; and 50% have reading skills of an 11 year old; and 25% of these young people have clinically significant communication impairment.
• There is strong evidence that provision of practical support in prison is unlikely to have a lasting impact on the risk of reoffending unless it continues upon release. Aftercare should, therefore, form part of a comprehensive intervention package. It is also important that the services provided are appropriately sequenced: for example, employment, while critical in the longer term, is often not a realistic short-term goal until other issues and needs have been addressed. 
• What does not work: short term non-residential employment interventions, summer work programmes, diversion from court to job training for young people, arrest for minor offences, increased arrests on drug dealing locations, ‘boot’ camps or ‘scared straight’ programmes (taking young people who offend to adult prisons), ‘shock’ probation, parole or sentencing, home detention and electronic monitoring, and vague unstructured rehabilitation programmes.

Various sources

Moral Minds

Moral Minds: how nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong by Marc. D. Hauser. Little, Brown, 2006.

Quite a challenging read as it describes in detail a large number of scentific studies, which help our understanding of innate and learnt human behaviour.

Hunter-gatherer societies, typically but not always nomadic and without food storage capacity, are largely egalitarian, with collaborative decision making. Availability of large game is unpredictable, which leads to food sharing. Humans have an innate sense of fairness. An income-distribution study found that when people freely chose to allow inequalities, while taking care of the most in need does not reduce incentives to work hard, nor create a large number of free-loaders who suck the welfaresystem dry. When the same regime is imposed, more cheat and put in less effort because they perceive redistribution through taxes as a right.

While all societies have a sense of fairness, each culture sets the allowable responses to specific situations. Formal laws sometimes override our sense of fairness. Legal policies have to establish why particualr principles are justified, and what happens to those who violate them. Punishment is one answer. If the public does not have faith in the legal system, some individuals will exact punishment instead of, or in addition to, the official one.

Variations of the classic 'trolley problem' (a train will hit and kill 5 hikers on the track if it stays on course, but a bystander can pull a lever divert the train onto another track where it will kill only one person) show that it is permissible to pull the lever and kill one if the intent is to save 5 people and none of the six are known to the bystander; when information about identity is known, kin will be saved over non-kin, friends over strangers, humans over non-humans and politically safe or neutral individuals over politically abhorrent persons. There is no evidence that gender, age or national affiliation affects the judgement.

Men are responsible for a disproportionately large number of homicides, and of these, most are young men between the ages of 15 and 30. [cf New research indicates that the human brain, and in particular the capacity for self control, do not reach maturity until the late teens or early twenties.] The best predictor of violence is the number of unmarried young men; societies that practise polygamy are the most vulnerable to such violence as some men have many spouses, leaving others with none.

Culture-of-honour psychology is a problem, and can have awful, often fatal,  consequences for women. Those in power see specific behaviour as immoral and proscribe punishments intended to shame the victim and exonerate the murderer and his family; most occur in public and are supported by local culture.

Throughout history and in all the world's cultures, there are statements of various versions of the Golden Rule. However, selfish instincts can override this.

• Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.
• Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving kindness: do not do unto others what you not have them do unto you.
• Taoism: Regard your neighbour's gain as your own gain and your neighbour's loss as your own loss. 
• Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow men. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.
• Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even unto them; for this is the Law and the Prophets.
• Islam: Not one of you is a believer unless he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.

While equating morality with religion is common, it is wrong. It falsely assumes that people without religious faith lack an understanding of rights andwrogs, and that people of religious faith are more virtuous than atheists and agnostics. Across a range of moral dilemmas and testing situations, people of various faiths and atheists and agnostics will deliver the same judgements.

The moral intuitions that drive many of our judgements often conflict with guidelines set out by law, religion or both. This has lead recently to battles over euthenasia and abortion. Governments can shoose whether to spend thousands of pounds on continued support for a patient in a vegetative state or spend the money on treatments that will benefit many people or on famine relief programmes.

Hauser concludes that we do have an inbuilt universal moral capacity, that develops over time, but is partially culturally determined. We share a universal moral grammar and at birth could have acquired any of the world's moral systems.

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