InTuition

Niamh Brook - Writer It’s no question. Audiences love a biopic. We are able to learn with minimal effort in a concise amount of hours. A history lesson for the lazy. A formula is beginning to form in Hollywood (Hollywood making using a formula to make money? I know. What a shock.) A current well known actor playing rock stars or actors who thrived in the past 30 years. Throw in a feel good soundtrack and you’ve got yourself a hit. However, we are not only plagued with the glam rock of the 80’s, period pieces are key in the biopic armada. We’ve seen our fair share in the past year (and a bit) such as, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Tolkien, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Each of these films were received from both critics and audiences in a manner of different ways. Tolkein, for example, grossed $7,776,413 worldwide out of an estimated $20,000,000. Where as Bohemian Rhapsody grossed $903,655,259 with a $52,000,000 budget and also nabbed four oscar whilst it was at it. T...

Sophie Bond -   Writer People have personal preferences about almost everything, whether it be a favourite colour or a favourite flavour ice cream; it is down to what the individual prefers. This is no different when it comes to accents - some people cannot stand a Welsh, Geordie, Scouse, Irish accent, but other people love them. I’m sure you have heard someone say something along the lines of ‘she’s lovely, but I just cannot stand her accent’, I’ve heard this about Cheryl Cole and her thick Geordie accent.  The accent which tends to take most of the hate and hostility seems to be the Birmingham accent, for some reason, hardly anyone has a liking towards it. This accent is shown through the series Peaky Blinders. In case you are not familiar with this T.V series, it is set in Birmingham so the majority of the characters have the accent, but as stated by Lauren O’Neill not all of the accents are spot-on; she says some accents are more representative of the Liverpudlian ac...

Eleanor Parsons - Writer From a young age, we are often asked which superpower we would like to have. Most say flying, super-speed or mind-reading. Some say invisibility. However, for those with invisible disabilities, this wish can soon become a nightmare. Through this article, I intend to give an insight into living with invisible illnesses as a young adult, through my own experience and from others around me. Invisible (or hidden) disabilities are often a taboo subject - one of those areas which many people fear discussing, for fear that they too might ‘catch it'. Invisible disabilities can cover a wide range of areas, from mobility conditions and mental health conditions through to epilepsy and many others. There are 13.3 million people registered with a disability in the UK, accounting for nearly 1 in 5 of the population. Far more people will suffer from a hidden disability than one which is physically apparent, but yet those who do are largely ignored within society. ...

Daniel Priestley - Writer and Editor In this series of articles I will aim to pick apart and suggest relatively simple alternatives to current democratic tools used in the UK's democracy. The aim is to show how it is not just our politicians that are broken, but the systems that they operate in. Today's topic is compulsory voting. Democratic legitimacy is the concept that a large amount of people in a country should support a person and their ideas in order for them to be entitled to lead. Arguably UK governments struggle to obtain democratic legitimacy for two reasons: the way that we vote and who votes. I have already discussed the way that we vote in the first part in this series (linked here) so we must now turn to who votes in elections, but choose not to. For a government to be legitimate, it needs the full support of the people which rests on the premise that people will exercise their democratic right. In UK elections we have a clear problem of low voter turnout. Fo...

Eleanor Parsons - Writer Emergent technologies are any technologies, software or hardware developed since the introduction of the Internet. These technologies have sped up globalisation, creating worldwide reaching communication channels which operate in real time. In recent years, the misuse of these technologies has contributed to issues such as increased radicalisation into terrorist organisations through the use of social media, or major international crisis as seen during the Wannacry virus attack in 2017. As such, retrospective legal or political responses to crime no longer meet the risks that misuse of these technologies pose. These responses must now change in order to address the growing contemporary threat. However, where we move to a society of suspicion and monitoring rather than retrospective investigation, we put the whole population at risk of having their civil liberties eroded, and the protective rule of law weakened. The question is, where should the line be draw...

Matthew Hodder - Writer 1) Introduction: 2007  Whether you like or dislike Apple, it seems difficult to dispute the profound influence of the iPhone when it was first announced in January of 2007. The revolutionary promise of a widescreen iPod with touch-screen controls and the internet changed the face of the smartphone market, but why exactly was it so popular? This article aims to use consumer behaviour theory to explain exactly why the 2007 iPhone was so successful and to analyse the current market for smartphones to some extent. In doing this I will use qualitative data from an iPhone forum at the time, as used by Arruda-Filho, Cabusas and Dholakia (2010), to analyse some of the reasons that consumers so loved the iPhone. Along with this I will explain the concept of convergence in the smartphone market as another reason for the success of the iPhone. 2) Qualitative Data from iPhone users  Arruda-Filho et al. (2010) conducted analysis into social behaviour at arou...

KF - Writer Soil health is the frequently mentioned but never fully explained fourth horseman of the Anthropocene. This period when humans are the overriding force of change over the planet is fuelled by 4 umbrella issues: overexploitation, overpopulation, pollution and soil degradation. Now, the first 3 are widely spoken about: exploiting animals to extinction for food or for sport, plastic in the ocean, urban encroachment, climate change. These issues are all covered by the first 3 headings and so receive far more of the limelight than any others. However, soil degradation often gets cast to the bottom of the pile for the simple reason which is that: too few people understand how vital soil is to everything we do. It’s true. Soil might not be the sexiest subject on a Saturday night but like the kid in the movie who was bullied by the lead in the first act, mistreated soil will later return as the villain to take its revenge. So how do we avoid this tired movie cliché and stop soi...

Eve Lewis - Guest Writer In the early hours of July 10th, 1916, Wyn Griffith stood at a hurriedly erected battalion HQ in the middle of Mametz Wood. He had not eaten for twenty-four hours, and had not slept in even longer. As he attempted to make sense of the chaos around him and form a cohesive battle plan for the handful of men left able to fight, Griffith was told that his younger brother, Watcyn, had been killed whilst running a message. Watcyn was just nineteen when he died and became one of more than four thousand Welshmen ‘mown down like corn’ in the six day attack on Mametz Wood as part of the Somme Offensive. Yet Griffith had no time to grieve; the assault continued around him and he had little choice but to keep moving with it, leading those under his command until fresh troops could relieve them. Finally, on July 12th, the last of the German soldiers were pushed from the woods and Mametz was claimed by the Royal Welch Fusiliers. It was one of the few outright successe...

Daniel Priestley - Writer and Editor In this series of articles I will aim to pick apart and suggest alternatives to the current democratic tools used in the UK’s democracy. The aim is to show how it’s not just our politicians that are broken, but the system that they operate in. Today’s topic is voting systems. The UK currently uses a number of different voting systems for different elections. We will be focusing on the most problematic system which is used for the most important elections: “first past the post” which is used for general elections. The FPTP voting system separates the UK into 650 (soon to be 600) constituencies in which everyone votes for a single candidate (usually a representative of a political party) and whoever gets the most votes within their constituency becomes an MP. Each of these MPs sits in parliament and votes on legislation, and whichever political party can obtain a majority (over 50%) in the House of Commons gets to form the government – with their...

Alison Romaine - Writer Quantum mechanics describes the very smallest things in our universe: molecules, atoms and subatomic particles e.g. electrons, protons and neutrons - the fundamental make-up of our daily lives. It has a ‘strangeness’ (Ghose, 2015) that can make its principles such as ‘superposition’ - where something can be in two places at once - seem so remote from our counterintuitive understanding (based on our ‘real-world’ experience). It is therefore such a departure from the ‘classical’ physics of Newton, that we simply reserve its difficulty for the brainy physicists to handle. However, quantum theory is not just bound to formulae on a blackboard, in fact, it holds up our modern society and proffers solutions to 21st century challenges. Importance of Quantum Mechanics Without the understanding of quantum physics, we would not have computers, LEDs (rely on semiconductors) GPS technology (rely on atomic clocks), MRI machines, encryption and lasers which beam through ...

Sophie Bond- Writer I’m sure you will remember the exhausting difficulty of learning to read and write - nothing ever written the way you thought it would be. But why did the word sound different when produced compared to how you spelt it out in your phonics lessons? It is important to note that English has an alphabetic writing system, meaning that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a sound and a grapheme. A grapheme is the symbol used in writing when spelling out a word, so in the word ‘happy’, the graphemic form is <happy>. Geoffrery Sampson (2013) describes writing as ‘a means of visually recording spoken utterances’. English is comprised of 26 symbols; 21 consonants and 5 vowels, originating from other alphabetic systems such as Roman and Greek. However, English is a language which has an opaque orthography, meaning that there is still phoneme (sound) grapheme (spelling) correspondence, but not in all cases. For example, the phoneme /f/ can be represented by the ...

Edward Baker &  Daniel Priestley  You’ll be vaguely aware of who the Jehovah’s Witnesses are from their notorious door knocking habits to promote their religion. With a worldwide profile and 8.5 million Jehovah’s Witnesses actively preaching every month, the religion is incredibly significant - for scale Judaism is estimated to have about 14 million followers. However what you might not know is that their practices are banned in 34 different countries; in alphabetical order these countries are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Brunei, China, Comoros. Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Loas, Lebanon, LIbya, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, U.A.E., Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yeman. This article will focus in on one of these countries: Russia. Whilst practicing the religion in not strictly illegal, the Russian Supreme Court declared the group as “e...