“Don’t argue philosophy, he told me. Show me your mortality rates, and then I’ll believe you” … it was the year when the US President, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times got to grips with the vocabulary and some of the implications of prevention science.

The latest edition of the UK Journal of Adolescence carries a reminder that young people on the brink of adulthood face special problems, which prevention programs can have done little to avert during the favored earlier intervention years.

“When human beings give you an answer on a numerical scale about how satisfied they are with their lives, it is best to pay attention.” UK Economics professor Andrew Oswald believes he may have brought more objective clarity to self-reported quality of life assessments.

UK social entrepreneurs Charles Leadbeater and Hilary Cottam smell the blood of social and political opportunity on the wind of UK public spending cuts.

Proposed US legislation has the potential to “change the game” by making social and emotional learning a national priority and securing investment in a national Technical Assistance and Training Center to steer its development.

An Australian website is among the first to make local epidemiological information about child development publicly available, to spur on community-based prevention efforts.

A national center of excellence in outcomes to measure the impact and guide the progress of the various UK early intervention strategies introduced in recent months is still on the government policy agenda according to a Cabinet spokesman.

Research in Oregon emerging from the state's only health and research university highlights the value of providing as much of the population as possible with a stable focus for medical or social care.

“Political orthodoxies and dogmas are hiding behind what ‘science says…’ The science might tell you the facts on climate change; it doesn’t mean that my local council can go round charging me for not recycling my rubbish.” The director of the UK Institute of Ideas highlights a modern confusion between evidence and justification.

Suggestions that, by one surface reading of a UNICEF report, Australia might be regarded as a leader among industrialized nations in its treatment of immigrant children have been stifled at birth by the country’s Children’s Fund chief executive.

The Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America mentoring program, which is as close as any prevention initiative to being regarded as a national institution, has faltered in its attempt to make the crossing between community and classroom.

The mismatch between the implementation standards required for evidence-based practice, the conventions of professional social care training, and the complex pattern of need in the general population are highlighted in a 2005 study that provides a solid foundation for today’s embryonic implementation science.

Why behave sensibly if all you are doing is preserving your body for a miserable old age? Belfast researchers tell young drunks they’ve got it wrong: “Don’t worry – you’ll be happy”.

The fruits of two decades of medical research based on a nonprofit system of hospitals, surgery centers, doctors, clinics, and homecare and hospice providers in Salt Lake City suggest that there may be a route to successful program delivery that closes the gap between laboratory bench and the patient bedside.

One day the eminent UK child psychiatrist Sir Michael Rutter urges policy makers to “focus on family conflict and the quality of family function – not on family structure,” and, the next, the Labour government publishes proposals to do precisely that. Was “speaking truth to power” ever more straightforward?