Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
MR G.W. ROWE, HEAD OF BIOLOGY What is it? In simple terms the R0 is a disease’s basic reproductive ratio - the number of cases at time zero measured compared to the number of cases at a future date. If there were 100 cases of disease X last week and 500 this week this would give a ratio of 1:5 and the R0 would be given as 5. Therefore, an R0 of 1.0 means the epidemic is infecting the same number of people over time and is not accelerating. An R0 of above 1.0 will lead to an exponential increase in the numbers infected and an R0 below 1.0 will lead to a decline in the numbers infected by the disease. There are many complex interacting factors which determine R0 for example, method of transmission (airborne droplet = generally lead to higher R0 values than sexual transmission), period of time where those infected are able to transmit the disease and success in isolating those infected from the general population. But, in a nutshell, the first paragraph describes what most people need to ...