In the 1690s, a mass panic at Salem, Massachusetts, led to 20 people being executed for witchcraft and 150 being jailed. Then in the 1950s, another mass panic gripped the United States and thousands of lives were wrecked as many were falsely accused of being communists. Yet another in the 1990s wrecked the lives of many preschool teachers with false accusations of sex abuse in the classroom. Having written about these sad episodes in an engineering journal a few years ago, I would … [Read more...]