Sir Richard Branson is a hugely popular British entrepreneur and adventurer who has been able to keep the common touch and does not seem to be as ruthless as some other self-made billionaires.

For more than three decades Richard has also shown that he has a remarkably good nose for identifying important and/or lucrative new trends. Like all people, he has made the occasional bad call, but his overall success rate is astonishing.

So I was extremely interested to see that Richard Branson’s Virgin Group has launched a foray into the British National Health Service (NHS) primary healthcare market and they are trying to persuade family doctors to join them in establishing a network of branded clinics.

It is particularly interesting that British government ministers are welcoming Virgin Healthcare’s decision to open the first of six “one-stop-shop” health centers later this year. The plan is to offer services from homeopathy to psychotherapy alongside typical primary care services.

This project has been two years in the planning and the group has just started its first advertising campaign to generate interest among family doctors who could join its health centers.

The business model allows family physicians to retain their existing contracts but Virgin would manage funds the doctors receive for staff costs and rental. Virgin would then offer a range of additional NHS and private services to visiting patients, including dentistry, screening, a pharmacy “and a range of conventional and complementary therapies.”

The British government has identified the importance of providing more and better primary care services and has £250m a year earmarked for the new services and Virgin wants to be a provider.

What is different is that Virgin Healthcare is proposing to work with primary care physicians to help develop more integrated, accessible and personalized services for patients and that they are quite prepared to consider providing less conventional therapies for which there is patient demand and/or empirical evidence.

That last piece – including less orthodox therapies – will inevitably put the cat amongst the pigeons, but Richard Branson and his advisers have correctly identified that there are some good reasons for including some of these therapies, even if the research base is not yet as good as we would like.

I am sure that this is a story that is going to be picked up and re-worked by those excellent writers over at Law and Order.

An academic at the University of Sheffield has used groundbreaking technology to investigate the potential innocence of a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care.

Professor Sean Spence, who is a pioneer in the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to detect lies, carried out the experiments on the woman who, despite protesting her innocence, was sentenced to four years in prison. His results have now been published for the first time in the journal European Psychiatry.

Sean examined the woman’s brain activity as she alternately confirmed her account of events and that of her accusers. The tests demonstrated that when she agreed with her accusers´ account of events she activated extensive regions of her frontal lobes and also took significantly longer to respond: these findings have previously been found to be consistent with false or untrue statements.

Although the technology has previously been claimed to be 90% accurate, which is far superior to “lie detector” – polygraph – tests, its use has also been open to debate. Lie detection tests are already used regularly in parts of the United States justice system, as well as by businesses. But as far as I know, these are the first brain scanning tests of their kind, carried out on a real-life case, reported in the world literature.

Professor Spence said:

“This research provides a fresh opportunity for the British legal system as it has the potential to reduce the number of miscarriages of justice. However, it is important to note that, at the moment, this research doesn’t prove that this woman is innocent. Instead, what it clearly demonstrates is that her brain responds as if she were innocent.”

“If proved to be accurate, and these findings replicated, this technology could be used alongside other factors to address questions of guilt versus innocence.”

No, this isn’t just a cheap excuse to display a picture of Pamela Anderson.

I just received this from a regular reader:

“Dear Dr Petty,

Have you seen this article Times Online?

“WHEN men meet fair-haired women they really do have a “blonde moment”. Scientists have found that their mental performance drops, apparently because they believe they are dealing with someone less intelligent.

Researchers discovered what might be called the “bimbo delusion” by studying men’s ability to complete general knowledge tests after exposure to different women. The academics found that men’s scores fell after they were shown pictures of blondes.

Further analysis convinced the team that, rather than simply being distracted by the flaxen hair, those who performed poorly had been unconsciously driven by social stereotypes to “think blonde”.

“This proves that people confronted with stereotypes generally behave in line with them,” said Thierry Meyer, joint author of the study and professor of social psychology at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. “In this case blondes have the potential to make people act in a dumber way, because they mimic the unconscious stereotype of the dumb blonde.”

Do you have any comment to make about the research??”

The answer is that I have seen this article all over the Internet, with all kinds of sage comments.

The trouble is that I have not yet been able to read and critique the research. As far as I know, neither the hard copy nor electronic versions are available yet, so I cannot evaluate the report.

This highlights one of the problems of the Internet: news travels across it like the wind, yet a lot of material is passed on without analysis. So the story is fun to read, but until we can see and analyze the data, we cannot comment.

As soon as I get a copy I shall see if I have anything to add to the firestorm of commentary!

Later today I have the privilege of speaking to Jeff Garton and Cathy Yin on Career Contentment Radio, which is broadcast by Business Voice America.

We are going to be talking about one of my favorite topics: Building Resilience.

This program goes out live at Noon Pacific, which is 3PM Eastern, and is rebroadcast at Midnight Pacific time. It will then be available on demand and podcast ready.

I have already sent out e-card invitations with the links to people on my list. If you did not get one, please let me know.

Later today I shall also be posting a report on “Building Resilience” on my main website with more free resources for you to use.

Your humble reporter just saw this on the BBC website:

“Airline bans A380 mile-high club

Singapore Airlines has taken the unusual step of publicly asking passengers on its new Airbus A380 plane not to engage in any sexual activities.

The potential problem has arisen because the first class area of its giant super-jumbo contains 12 private suites complete with double beds.

Singapore, which is the first airline to start flying the A380, said the suites were not soundproofed.

It said it did not want anyone to offend other travelers or crew.

Singapore added that while the suites were private, they were also not completely sealed.

“All we ask of customers, wherever they are on our aircraft, is to observe standards that don’t cause offense to other customers and crew,” the airline said in a statement.”

Does this mean that Singapore Airlines is going to do something with Virgin?

Richard Branson: Care to comment????!