Impact
UB40 (a reggae group from Birmingham, whose first album was released in 1980) was named after the form issued by the DHSS to those claiming unemployment benefit, the full name of which was Unemployment Benefit form 40.
The initials "DHSS" are recited several times in Wham!'s 1983 hit single Wham Rap!, a tongue-in-cheek celebration of wilful unemployment. The first album by Half Man Half Biscuit (released in 1985) was called Back in the DHSS, a play on the Beatles song "Back in the U.S.S.R.".
Doris Lessing's short story "DHSS" from 1991 describes a former DHSS employee's attempt to help a young woman who has no money because of a strike at DHSS. The department is portrayed as having undergone a change of financial cuts, understaffing and a growing distance between the social workers and the customers.
Despite having been abolished for over twenty years, the initials 'DHSS' are still used by the general public to describe the Department for Work and Pensions or some of the benefits it provides (such as Income Support).
Read more about this topic: Department Of Health And Social Security
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)