LECTURES 2

moms boy

LeadershipforXX

The ASH (Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities) talks offers an opportunity to test out ideas and arguments before an audience which is smart and interested, but has no specialist knowledge of the topic.

Clare Hall - ASH Colloquium

micharl dunne jfk

Friday

Cambridge

cambridge

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Matthew Parker - Bigger Picture (Mainframe Bird Remix)

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Michael Loewe relates his personal experience of work at Bletchley Park during WW2. The high-level intelligence produced at Bletchley Park, codenamed Ultra, provided crucial assistance to the Allied war effort. Sir Harry Hinsley, a Bletchley veteran and the official historian of British Intelligence during the Second World War, believed that Ultra shortened the war by two to four years and that the outcome of the war would have been uncertain without it. 

Michael Loewe was recruited as a code breaker while still an undergraduate at Oxford.  He writes:

‘We were a mixed bag: highly distinguished scholars and mathematicians; senior officers of the armed services; eccentrics; wise men and fools; veterans, long experienced in ‘the game’; or, as some of us, undergraduates torn away from the dreaming spires of Oxford or the fens of East Anglia.

Codes and ciphers varied in their complexity.  There were the simple systems used solely to deny information to lower ranks in the German, Italian or Japanese forces.  There were the highly refined versions of the commercially available ‘Enigma’ machine and its successors, used by commanders in the field, captains of submarines or naval attachés. 

In some cases, once the key to reading a message was found or broken, it could be read in its entirety; but for some systems the work was never complete and did not allow more than a partial reading, perhaps with the key word (the name of a place or a ship) undecipherable.

Codes and ciphers were broken by exploiting basic information, such as the behaviour of units of a language or predicting parts of the content of a message.  Those struggling with their wits at the Park blessed the well worn habits, the careless errors or the laziness of the cipher clerks!  But a basic characteristic of the Enigma machine itself provided the way in.

Occasionally the British services themselves helped, e.g. by a specially planned military operation designed to capture documents, or by laying a minefield at sea to provide a reaction by signal.’

Bletchley Park Code Breaker 1942-45

Michael Loewe, is a University of Cambridge academic and renowned sinologist who has authored dozens of books, articles, and other publications in the fields of Classical Chinese and ancient Chinese history.

In this remarkable talk, he describes the twenty-five Chinese dynastic histories that range from 221 BCE to 1911, a continuous account without parallel anywhere and anytime, and he ponders over what these unique records do tell us about the Chinese sense of history.

China’s historical writings are voluminous, including the basic series of twenty-five dynastic histories that range from 221 BCE to 1911.  Officially sponsored, these works set out to prove the legitimacy of  rule that each house enjoyed, coupled with emphasis on the evil ways that brought its predecessor to ruin.

The compilers sought to set human activities within the inescapable cycles that govern the universe, writing with an air of superiority and and an isolationism that called for a single and harmonious rule of all mankind.  Such was what may be seen as the Chinese version of a Whig interpretation of history, flawed by pride and bias and giving rise to misconception.

Officials called on incidents of the past to explain the activities of the present. Exceptionally some Chinese scholar-historians adopted a highly critical stance, breaking away from traditional standpoints and periodisation.  China’s leading universities to-day accept the need for a critical approach and, despite sensitivity over some matters, they invite westerners to deliver lectures on China’s history to their students.  Splendid newly built museums, crowded by parties of school children, and carefully maintained archaeological sites testify to the serious presentation of China’s past to its inheritors of to-day.

China’s sense of history past and present

The question of how language is acquired has fascinated scholars of linguistics and philosophy since ancient times. In this talk, I discuss the status of language universals and gaps in relation to this debate.

The question of how language is acquired has fascinated scholars of linguistics and philosophy since ancient times. Chomsky's work on this topic in the mid 20th century sparked a cognitive revolution after which the focus shifted from behaviourist approaches towards mental models positing a richly specified Universal Grammar (UG).

More recently, though, different kinds of objections have been raised to the concept of UG, notably the issue of how such a system could evolve.

In this talk, I discuss the status of language universals and gaps in relation to this debate. We shall see that many things which we might expect to find in human languages simply never occur. These gaps, we shall see, provide quite strong support for some kind of cognitive bias in language acquisition, particularly when evidence from artificial language acquisition studies is considered.

Michelle L. Sheehan is a Research Associate, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

Nature or nurture: how much of language is innate?

An ethicist and palliative care physician examines end of life questions from both analytic and practical angles.

Few areas of medicine are as rife with ethical questions as the end of life. 

Is it ever appropriate for a physician to hasten a patient's death?  Do those who are using a disproportionate amount of societal resources have a "duty to die"?  Is the terminally ill patient who takes his own life acting courageously, or taking the easy way out?  Who decides when "enough is enough"?  

In this talk, an ethicist and palliative care physician examines questions such as these from both analytic and practical angles, with reference to recent controversies such as Sarah Palin's supposed "Death Panels" and the current furore over the Liverpool Care Pathway.

Ethics at the end of life

What is the evidence for, and why do some people confess to, crimes they have not committed? How reliable is the testimony provided by eyewitnesses, especially by children? Can false memories be created?  What non-legal factors have been shown to influence jury verdicts and sentences imposed by magistrates and judges? Are humans better at detecting lies than machines?

Justice is too important to be left to police officers, prosecutors, judges and juries.

What is the evidence for, and why do some people confess to, crimes they have not committed? How reliable is the testimony provided by eyewitnesses, especially by children? Can false memories be created?  What non-legal factors have been shown to influence jury verdicts and sentences imposed by magistrates and judges? Are humans better at detecting lies than machines?

The talk provides a brief introduction to legal psychology and then address these contemporary issues drawing on legal psychology internationally. In the process, the question of how best to narrow the remaining gap between psychology and law will be answered.

Andreas Kapardis is Professor of Legal Psychology, Department of Law, University of Cyprus

The whole is more than the sum of the parts: narrowing the gap between Psychology and Law

This week your host tries to break through to the other side using the art of John Singer Sargent as a... jumping off point. Also we get an update from our corespondent Peter Choyce. When we last heard from Peter (in "admissions of defeat") he was heading to rehab, he is now free and living in the woods in North Carolina.


Not Soon Enough

Michael Dunne analyses the legacy of JFK's presidency through speeches and other documents.

Michael Dunne - Kennedy: rhetoric, reality and recollections

The holidays are here and a lot of terrible gift ideas are going around pretending to be "popular." We help you thin out the herd a little as drunk as we can.

MoN 11.18  What Not To Give For Christmas

Young Children’s Self-control: Foreseeing Health and Wealth

Policy-makers are considering large-scale early intervention programs to enhance children’s self-control, with the aim of reducing crime and improving citizens’ health and wealth. Experimental studies and economic analyses are suggesting that such programs could reap benefits for a nation. Yet, how important is childhood self-control for the health, wealth, and public safety of the adult population? Following a population-representative cohort of 1000 New Zealand children from their birth in 1972 to age 38 in 2011, we show that childhood self-control predicts criminal offending, addiction, personal finances, benefit use, savings for retirement, and also physical health and illness diagnosed via biomarkers. These effects of the children’s self-control could be disentangled from their intelligence and their parents’ social-class. In another cohort of 500 UK twin-sibling-pairs, the sibling with better self-control at age 5 had better life outcomes than his twin sibling with weaker self-control, despite sharing the same parents and family background. These predictions from childhood followed a gradient of self-control, suggesting a nation’s health and wealth could be improved by enhancing self-control in all of its children. Early interventions enhancing the population’s self-control skills might reduce taxpayer costs of crime control, health care, and old-age dependency.

Biography

TERRIE E . MOFFITT studies how genetic and environmental risks work together to shape the developmental course of abnormal human behaviors and psychiatric disorders. Her particular interest is in antisocial and criminal behavior, but she also studies depression, psychosis, and substance abuse. She is associate director of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, which follows 1000 people born in 1972 in New Zealand from birth to age 38, so far. She also co-directs the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, which follows1100 British families with twins born in 1994-1995 from birth to age 18, so far. On behalf of these studies, she has received the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Contribution Award (1993), the Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award (2002), the Stockholm Prize in Criminology (2007), the NARSAD Ruane Prize (2010) and the Klaus J. Jacobs Prize (2010). She is a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the American Society of Criminology, the British Academy, Academia Europaea, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Association for Psychological Science, and King’s College London. She is a trustee of the Nuffield Foundation. She works at Duke University, in North Carolina in the USA , at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London in the UK, and at the Dunedin School of Medicine, in New Zealand. Her favorite activities are camping and hiking trips in Africa, Asia and the South Pacific, and working on her poison-ivy farm in North Carolina. Learn more at this website: WWW .MOFFITTCASPI.COM

Foresight and Self-Control

Debora Spar, president of Barnard College and author of "Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection," asks: what's keeping so many women out of the innovation economy?

Where are the Women in Tech?

Former Massachusetts Senator Mo Cowan, a 2013 Fall Fellow at the Institute of Politics, discusses his 6-month stint in Congress; what it was like to be appointed to the role having never sought elected office before; the challenges of navigating the Senate's arcane rules and procedures; and his perspective on the chamber's oft-cited partisanship.

Mo Cowan with an Insider's Perspective of the US Senate | PolicyCast

Richard Epstein on how a new wave of economic populism is threatening prospects for growth.

The Return of Populism

Aparecida Vilaça is currently Associate Professor in the Postgraduate
Program in Social Anthropology, Museu Nacional/Universidade Federal do
Rio de Janeiro, and a researcher for the National Science Research
Council (CNPq). Since 1986 she has worked among the Wari' Indians of
Southwestern Amazonia, Brazil. Fieldwork has been financed by the Ford
Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
(predoctoral grant and international collaborative grant), and Finep.
She was Professor Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris in 1999, Directeur d'Etudes Invité at the Ecole
Pratique des Hautes Etudes in the same city in 2000, Visiting Professor
of the Centre of Latin American Studies of the University of Cambridge
in 2001, and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Social Anthropology
at the same university in 2004. She is a visiting fellow at CRASSH
during Lent term this year.

Do Animists become Naturalists when Converting to Christianity? Discussing an Ontological Turn

The Sigma secret society of NW Ghana is one of the very last institutions of its kind to be found in a vast region ranging from Southern Mali to Northern Ghana. My concern is with the way 'secret knowledge' is administered and communicated both in the initiation rituals and in the public performance of the masks at funerals. Following in the steps of Horkheimer and Adorno's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' (1944) I am particularly interested in the way in which what appears prima facie as a form of 'enlightenment' and 'disclosure' works, in the last instance, towards the reinforcement of a conception of knowledge as intrinsically 'secret'.

Dr. Cesare Poppi - Sigma! Masks, Knowledge and Death in North West Ghana

How do conspiracies happen, how can historians use them to understand more about the past, and where do they begin and cease to be relevant to the study of history? Such questions were the starting point for this panel debate, in which Professor Christopher Andrew and Dr Stephen Dorril examine cases from Stalinist Russia, Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960s, and Northern Ireland in the 1970s, to name but a few. - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/history-and-conspiracy#sthash.UnAMoebB.dpuf

History and conspiracy

The gold rush of whole genome sequences spurred by the human genome project, is heralding a new way to study the previously unanswerable from pre-history; allowing us to now mine the genomic footprints of ancient defining events of humankind and other mammals. As early paleontologists conjured up extinct forms based on fossil remains, genetic archaeologists reconstruct the origins of genomic patterns derived from ancient demographic episodes. Modern scourges that clog the world’s hospitals represent a major challenge to human health and a historic selective regulator. Past interactions between constantly adapting pathogens and finely-tuned, ever-evolving immune defenses represent a biological puzzlement that is only beginning to be deciphered. In my presentation I will illustrate how we learn hidden lessons of survival, adaptation and genome evolution referred from current views of natural history with new insights from genomes of wildlife species and ourselves. I will provide an early glimpse of the coming discipline of genomic archaeology giving illustrative examples (from the plague, SARS , HIV -AIDS), and will describe how scientists track the emergence and progression of deadly outbreaks revealing unfathomed threats to their very existence. How these non-traditional approaches can ablate extinctions and unlock medical secrets will be the lessons learned from this presentation.

Biography

Dr. Stephen J. O’Brien is a world leading molecular biologist and dedicated conservationist whom uses the tools of molecular biology to help protect endangered species and understand devastating diseases such as cancer and AIDS . He received his PhD in Genetics from Cornell University, USA in 1971. He then joined the prestigious National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health as a post-doc in 1971 and there, served as Founder and Chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity from 1986-2011. In December 2011, he joined the Theodosius Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics, St. Petersburg State University as Chief Scientific Officer. Convinced of the utility of exploring diverse species to advance our understanding of the human genome, Dr. O’Brien and his team have assembled over 62,000 animal and 424,000 human tissue/DNA specimens, facilitating wide-ranging studies of disease gene associations, species adaptation and natural history. His research interests and expertise span human and comparative genomics, genetic epidemiology, HIV /AIDS, retro-virology, bioinformatics biodiversity and species conservation. Dr. O’Brien is best known for documenting the remarkable genetic uniformity of African cheetahs, resolving the mammalian tree of life, describing heretofore unrecognized species of orangutans, African forest elephants and Bornean clouded leopards. He is credited with the discovery of CCR5 delta 32, the first of 20 human AIDS restriction genes, which imparts natural immunity to HIV . He is the one of the founders of the Genome 10K initiative, has published over 750 leading research papers, written multiple books and is adjunct professor in over 12 international leading universities. He is considered a ‘National Treasure’ by man

Plagues, Populations & Survival

This seminar looks at factors affecting rates of global and local sea level rise; how advanced regions are preparing - Venice, the Netherlands, and Sacramento Bay-Delta; vulnerable cities, agricultural river deltas, low-lying island nations. 

Sea Level Rise, Coastal Cities, and Wetlands

Language about ‘plague’ rather than – say – ‘epidemic’ introduces elements of moral and theological interpretation into our view of a situation: plague is something ‘inflicted’, and is conceived against the background of certain kinds of biblical and classical narratives (the plagues of Egypt, Oedipus at Thebes, etc.). While this is by no means defunct (with some very unpleasant recent applications) the overall climate has changed. But it is still possible to reach for this language as a metaphorical structure – Camus, Garcia Marquez – which highlights aspects of the moral urgencies and ambiguities of a situation. The lecture will look at both the background usage and its modern transformations so as to draw out some thoughts on the nature of human limits and human responsibilities.

Biography

Dr Williams is Master of Magdalene College. He was educated at Dynevor Secondary Grammar School in Swansea, he came up to Christ’s College in 1968. He studied for his doctorate at Christ Church and Wadham College Oxford, working on the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky. His career began as a lecturer at Mirfield (1975-1977). He returned to Cambridge as Tutor and Director of Studies at Westcott House. After ordination in Ely Cathedral, and serving as Honorary Assistant Priest at St George’s Chesterton, he was appointed to a University lectureship in Divinity. In 1984 he was elected a Fellow and Dean of Clare College. During his time at Clare he was arrested and fined for singing psalms as part of the CND protest at Lakenheath air-base. Then, still only 36, it was back to Oxford as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity for six years, before becoming Bishop of Monmouth, and, from 2000, Archbishop of Wales. He was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2003. He was awarded the Oxford higher degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1989, and an honorary DCL degree in 2005; Cambridge followed in 2006 with an honorary DD. He holds honorary doctorates from considerably more than a dozen other universities, from Durham to K U Leuven, Toronto to Bonn. In 1990 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Dr Williams is a noted poet and translator of poetry, and, apart from Welsh, speaks or reads nine other languages. He learnt Russian in-order to read the works of Dostoevsky in the original. This led to a book; he has also published studies of Arius, Teresa of Avila, and Sergii Bulgakov, together with writings on a wide range of theological, historical and political themes.

Plagues & Metaphor

Royal Society Fellows are the most the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists in the UK and Commonwealth and Fellowships have been awarded annually since 1660. Six new Cambridge researchers were made Royal Society Fellows in 2013. Tonight we are delighted to welcome immunologist Professor Gillian Griffiths from Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, biochemist Dr Phillip Hawkins from The Babraham Institute and computer scientist Professor Jon Crowcroft from the Computer Laboratory to the Festival to introduce us to their research

Cambridge stars: Professor Gillian Griffiths

Today, more people live in cities than in rural areas and, by 2050, this ratio is predicted to rise to 7 out of every 10 people. Can we rethink how we design and live in cities? What will the impact of increasing numbers of people living in cities be on society, or biodiversity, or on food, water and energy security? A panel of distinguished speakers focuses on some of these most pressing challenges faced by our cities. 

Sustainable Cities

Social Science, Small worlds and Big Data

Matthew Jackson - Research Directions: Networks and their Roles in Economics

The news tends to focus on the antagonism between India and Pakistan. A distinguished panel of academics – Dr Kamal Munir, Dr Ornit Shani, Dr  Bhaskar Vira and Professor Joya Chatterji –
look at the common ground between the two countries. 


India-Pakistan: the common ground at Hay Festival

Ideas about states of emergency go back to Ancient Rome in which it was said that necessity knows no law. This idea took on different meanings during the early modern period and was employed again in 1848 to justify emergency rule in Paris. The idea was inverted by Marx. It was no longer emergency that justified dictatorship—dictatorship was posited as a desirable outcome in a transition to new forms of society.

The genesis of 20th C political authoritarianism by Prof Gareth Stedman Jones

In 1815, two large armies faced each other at Waterloo. Unknown either to Napoleon or Wellington, the battle would be decided by a small, ordinary group of British and German troops.

Did the Germans win the battle of Waterloo? by Professor Brendan Simms

In the age of Charlemagne, Rome was not just associated with the glory of classical and late antique empire, but above all with an authentic Christianity. North of the Alps, rulers and aristocrats created a virtual Rome by importing relics as well as liturgical practices that were thought of as typically Roman.

Charlemagne, Rome and the management of sacred space by Professor Rosamond McKitterick

Despite recent assertions to the contrary, Prof Matthew Kramer argues that there can never be any moral justification for torture.