Mars is so that they can test the ability to loiter in earth's orbit and wait before starting the next burn that's a really important capability to put spy satellites American spy satellites especially into orbit and that's one of the things that space x. Is hoping to do with this guy I can tell you a man's died in a fire at a block of flats in west London 85 firefighters tackled the blaze in Holland Park an investigation into what caused it has begun. The e.u. Wants to be able to council the U.K.'s access to the Single Market steering the BRICs a transition period if there are any disputes the proposal is included in a draft silk humans being circulated by e.u. Negotiators Adam Fleming is all Europe correspondents basically what the e.u. Is saying is that if the u.k. Breaks the rules during this 2 year transition period after Bragg's that day then it risks losing access to certain elements of the single market is not to some people that will seem quite threatening to others in the e.u. Side it's just a sensible backup plan the son of a former Labor Welsh Assembly minister has won the by election sponsored by his father's death it's those cull sergeant took his own life after being suspended from the party following allegations about his personal contacts 23 year old Jack Saajan says he'll fight to represent local people in the proud tradition of his dad . A powerful earthquake in Taiwan has killed 2 people and left 200 others injured officials say they've rescued almost everyone reported missing when a 10 story building partly collapse has our correspondent Cindy says this earthquake not only jolted a lot of people out of bed last night including myself and even though I was in Taipei 160 kilometers from the epicenter but I still felt very strong because I live on a 17 floor. The value of stocks in Asia and Australia has bounce back after a steep decline yesterday Japan's Nikkei index aproned up about 3 percent and American markets also recovered their previous day's heavy losses and the number of hedgehogs in the British countryside has more than Hoff to over the last 2 decades that a review of the species shows the decline in urban areas has started to slide he wore a kiss from the hedgehog Preservation Society the hedgehog may look at home in your garden but it needs maybe 20 gardens to survive so there needs to be holes in the fences her dogs need to be able to move from Gollum to God to God Those don't need to be big just the size of a cd case he has this balls Swanzy have cruised into the 5th round of the f.a. Cup after thrashing Notts County 81 not the biggest ever win in the competition next up they'll face Sheffield Wednesday elsewhere Huddersfield Town to set up a clash against Manchester United that's with a 41 win against Birmingham the Premier League club won their reply in extra time whilst League One strugglers Rochdale beat Millwall one No they will now take on the winner of Newport against Tottenham in the Scottish Premiership Rangers' one to know the politics they saw whilst Motherwell piece and Johnston by the same scoreline the former Manchester United left back Patrice Evra is on the brink of signing for West Ham The 36 year old has been out of football since his contract was cancelled by must say how softly kicked a fan before a match in the event and world number one Rafa dollars announced he's going to play Queen's this year it a month 10 years since his only win the tournament in 2008 this is b.b.c. 5 live on digital on the smartphone and sa but the weather cold tonight it's a few wintry showers around as well mainly fine but calm today sleet in the On am and f.m. Are on the u.k. Digital and online. And. The reader's letters on the subject are deeply divided the law gives Americans the right to bring their emotional support. Especially on plane journeys some have no time for this dismissing it as a fog while others are just as defense in the words of one correspondent to USA Today I have an emotional support animal a cat named Amber she flies from the almost always I do everything I can regarding the comfort of other passions to subside border in a wheelchair the attendants no one chambres carriers on the seat I place a plastic bag filled with allergy medications for anyone near me on the plague. Well we begin with a book which we actually read last year and I spoke to Tom Nicholls professor of national security affairs at the u.s. Naval War College he takes on what he describes as the death of expertise in everything from podiatry to politics in his book The Death of a Expect tease that begins with a quotation from the writer as I'm off there is a cult of ignorance in the United States and there always has been some overwrote So what's changed if anything what's changed now is that people don't just have skepticism about experts it's that they think they're smarter than experts they're not just doubting experts they're trying to replace experts with themselves that's the thing that's really changed Americans have always been skeptical about heads and intellectuals and that's human part of our culture I would say that's even in some ways a positive part of American culture what's changed now is the notion that everyone is a smart as everyone else and everyone's opinions are as good as everyone else's something that's really demonstrably false when you go through the examples of people who have posed to say something and opposed themselves against experts. Slight thousands and more than that but here's a here's a positive example of somebody who contested an expert opinion and that was the president of South Africa Tabo Mbeki who really kind of swallowed a whole theory which there wasn't much justification for but it heart a lot of people can can you remind us what Taba Mbeki did. Yeah there was a theory and it's still around but it gained a bit of traction in the early ninety's there was a theory that HIV did not cause aids or that it was not the primary cause of aids and this led to a whole school of Aids denialism that. Aids could be stopped with other measures like better nutrition and things that were really unrelated to stopping the HIV virus and the South African government at the time bought into this idea even though the scientific establishment had test that it looked at it proved that it was wrong and that in fact HIV is the cause of aids that's stopping the transmission of HIV was the most effective way to protect people but because this age denialism had been going into public policy thousands and thousands of people who didn't need to die ended up becoming very ill and dying and it's really a tragic example of how diluting expertise can not only lead to you know irritating arguments among citizens in a democracy but can actually kill thousands of people when it gets out of control. We my all define experts in a different way maybe at the hands on the amount of trust that we have as individuals but how would you define an expert what isn't an expert non-expert. People bristle at the term expert because they have a tendency to think that it simply means credentials that. When someone says I'm an expert it means that they have a piece of paper hanging on the wall and not much else and that's understandable I actually talk in great detail in the book about how experts are combination of things of credentials of experience of review by other experts and peer review in their own fields and this doesn't necessarily have to be academics or professionals you know the people who license electricians are other electricians the people who make sure that climbers are up to their standards or other plumbers these are all part and that's all part of a profession in which experts keep tabs on each other and of course Ernest Hemingway once thought about writing The other essential element is talent and the way to tell really good experts from merely competent ones is that the really good ones have a certain amount of talent that shows who in their in their record over and over again but it's it's a combination of many things. I was reminded you do of the fellow who is an ex-pat plumber as taught by another plumber of course an expert pilots taught by another pilot and I was reminded of that cartoon that caused all the fuss in the fresh week of 2017 when it appeared in The New Yorker and will MacPhail drew this money standing up in a seat that he's turning right into a shell of passengers in the plane and he says the smog pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us who thinks I should fly the plane and you see all these . You know it's a really good example is that of the number like saloon I think that I expect something. Well and it's this notion I think and part of it is derived from the affluent highly technologically advanced society we live in where people look around and they say hey everything works pretty well how hard can this be and of course most things are actually very hard most people for example don't have any idea how difficult it is just to put together all the pieces that make it possible to mail a letter from one part of the world to the other that it involves everything from pilots and postal carriers to diplomats and air traffic controllers and you know that people just don't think about it they put a dollar you know on a piece of postage in the United States and 3 days later it shows up in Switzerland or Brazil or China and we just take that for granted and I think that's a part of this notion of people saying why you know x. Experts don't really know anything because nothing is that hard part it's because it's transparent to most people and they don't think about how difficult most things really are because we made the move you know coaching that 96 his political scientist Richard Hofstadter saying the complexity in modern life began such a sense of helplessness as if everything is complex then we can't know about anything right and the problem is of course that we can know about things but we can only know about them in small slices and that's why we rely on each other with this division of labor that's why when we look out at a skyscraper we understand that the person who built the elevator is not the same person who designed the windows and the person who put the insulation is not the same person who put in the water piping everybody has some piece of that and together we can create these wondrous things what's happened now in the 21st century is that everybody has an opinion about everything whether you know you're a photographer or a plumber or a doctor or a diplomat someone says well I can I can tell you how to do your job better than you can I have some thoughts on your job and I think that's where. We really have run into trouble because we can't maintain an advanced society that way we simply cannot go on that way I'm reminded of the study that quote where you actually the writers or the research show or the experts are more open to opposing points of view that you will quite happily sit and listen to somebody telling you you're wrong. Good experts are yes. I think experts who are not particularly good at their job get too obsessed with their own narrow field of expertise can can fall into some bad habits there but I think good experts and the ones who prosper and who do their jobs well in fact are good at taking correction because that's part of the whole process of being an expert that's part of the process of science and it's part of the process of intellectual discovery is that you have to be able to hear someone telling you you're wrong and one thing that I think is gone horribly off the rails in modern society is that people can no longer distinguish between hearing someone say you're wrong and hearing someone say you're stupid they tested people people now in society take everything as an insult because we've become so thin skinned and narcissistic that we cannot take correction about anything. You quote from one of my favorite films with Damon in it it's from as from Good Will Hunting and he's in countering somebody who is you know for a push crowd and boy does he give far his so-called knowledge but you know in the book I point out what a terrible scene that move in that movie that scene really is because. This character Matt Damon's character reels off all of these books that he has read any kind of spits them back at this sort of 50 feet ponytailed graduate student and it really does replicate a mistake that most people make which is assuming that you've taken in a lot of data is the same thing as learning something if you recall at the end of that scene Damon says you know you just spent 150000 dollars on an education you could've got for 2 bucks an overdue fees at the library Well that's that's not true and I simply but it's part of the American myth of the self created genius and Good Will Hunting really was the kind of beautiful archetype of that but it simply doesn't happen that way in real life that that study and knowledge take a long time and it takes patience but what what's the difference what's the what's the magic. Different ingredient that goes into making an ex-pat of a self-educated Good Will Hunting or a self-educated I don't know Andrew Carnegie or anybody else you can you sure well I think that's a great question and it's one of been asked many times about the book and I think there's a couple of things 1st of all there is the issue of mentorship I think it's one thing to be unnaturally bright I mean I was I was fortunate I was a naturally bright kid but I had a very undisciplined mind I was of racist reader but I wasn't particularly systematic or discriminating in what I'm I was reading and I found that actually over time teachers were an invaluable resource because they were the people who walked me through these things I mean I read the republic by the time I'd left school I'd read Plato's Republic 3 or 4 times and each time with a different teacher it was a different experience the early founding fathers and people like Ernie you know others they were not entirely self-taught they read not just the classics but they read the literary criticisms of the classics by the leading intellectuals of their time and they spoke with each other and they debated with each other all of whom were learned men and I think people misunderstand that the idea of the autodidact as somebody who just reads a lot of books someone said to me and I quote the person in the book a person said to me one time well if you read a book a month you're an expert well it doesn't work that way there's a lot more to becoming an expert than simply reading a book or mastering a lot of facts you talk about confirmation bias and that's kind of important here what's confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the natural totally understandable and natural human tendency to search for information that already confirms what you believe so for example as I say in the book if you get it into your head left handed people are evil. Then every left handed murderer. You see on death row is going to confirm your belief that left handers are evil Now statistically much many more right handed people are in jail because there are more right handed people but you won't see them because you've already your brain because you're committed to this idea will pick out the left handed people and you'll remember those and you'll dismiss the others and people do this with everything that. If you think the economy is good then you notice all the help wanted signs if you think the economy is bad then you notice all the people on street corners even though the person on the street corner in the Help Wanted sign may just be a few yards apart from each other. How would that relate to a belief that the suicide rate among American veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan increased in the 2012 for example that was a great story and it's one I tell in the book that people really zeroed in on every suicide by a veteran because they seem to be increasing but what happened was the media was not reporting on what was actually going on which is that suicide among everyone was increasing and so the confirmation bias occurred that one a veteran would kill himself it would be reported in the news and played up with a lot of photographs and a lot of discussion about veterans suicide when a non veteran would kill himself or herself it would just be another death notice and no one would even pay attention and as it turns out the definition of veteran was even applied so loosely that only. The people who had recently returned were getting this kind of coverage when in fact the the veteran suicides counted people that were already in middle age who had never been near a battlefield but because we had kind of committed to this idea publicly that veterans were where these walking time bombs coming home every veteran suicide of a young killing of a young warrior and tragic as each one of them was gained to this he. Usually disproportionate amount of attention that had people convinced that American military personnel work home and killing themselves in droves which simply was not true. And it's like any phenomenon in the press isn't it of some particularly. Robbery involving violence and the Marger are used as some kind of Japanese Sardou while every time somebody kills somebody in a in a robbery or even flashes a Japanese saw a convenience store Clark I suppose we're going to have a rash of these things aren't we that's a complicated state exactly it's almost like the Internet or news media equivalent of catching a cold where you know one sneeze produces another and this is where the Internet does play into this because stories that might have happened in isolation that might have been local stories 30 or 40 years ago instantly become global stories this is one reason for example people believe wrongly that crime in America is somehow out of control because they now have an ability to hear about shootings and robberies far away and they feel as though there's an immediacy to all this violence that's happening around them even though their neighborhoods may be quite safe by comparison tell us about the importance of peer review because have something to talk about yet in an in the way it relates to ex-pats and it would separate like you from a hack like me because my work doesn't get peer review does it well even you as a journalist have to get past an editor and every profession worth its salt has at least some gatekeepers somewhere and this is part of the problem that's led to this problem that I call the death of expertise is that there are fewer Gatekeepers which means almost anyone can say anything now in professional work and academic work in science and research peer review is the process by which you take your findings you take your conclusions you. Your ideas and you put them out there to your peers and you let them criticize you the book itself the death of expertise had to pass the in on a mis review of 3 or 4 other scholars and journalists I assumed or I don't even know there are there were scholars chosen by the press readers I should say who then had to say this book is worth publishing and here are some things the author are to think about and so on this is a really really important part of the process as it's also part of the process that laypeople really resent because they see that they see editors or peer reviewers as the thing that stands between them and expressing their opinions but but again we come back to the reality that not all opinions are well informed that all opinions are well thought out not all opinion survey equal value and that's what editors and peer reviewers and. Professional certification and other kinds of mechanisms are there to to regulate and should do as part of their job and you have a very meaty chapter on the a lot of I think the passion is suffering I