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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?

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

Robin Wilson is an Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Open University, Emeritus Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, and a former Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He is currently President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. He has written and edited many books on graph theory, including Introduction to Graph Theory and Four Colours Suffice, and on the history of mathematics, including Lewis Carroll in Numberland. He is involved with the popularization and communication of mathematics and its history, and has been awarded prizes by the Mathematical Association of America for ‘outstanding expository writing’. 

Combinatorics: the mathematics that counts

In what is fast being labelled an age of surveillance, the relationship between privacy and security is becoming extremely important. From the Snowden revelations to Facebook, is our privacy the price we pay for an easier and more secure future? Or is this sense of security a false one? Leading experts will talk us through and debate the many issues around our future in an age of surveillance.

Professor Jon Crowcroft (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge) will speak on the topic form a cyber-security perspective.

Professor John Rust (Psychometrics, University of Cambridge) will address the issue of 'nudging' online.

Professor Caroline Humphrey (Social Anthropolgy, University of Cambridge) will discuss surveillance in the context of the former Soviet Union and China

Professor John Naughton (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge) will speak about the ethical and philosophical questions around surveillance.

The event will be chaired by Charles Arthur, Technology Editor for the Guardian.
- See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/big-brother-20-our-future-age-surveillance#sthash.n39bpL8R.dpuf

Big Brother 2.0: our future in an age of surveillance

In this talk Tony Hey, Vice President of Microsoft Research, will explore the origins of computers and of ‘computational thinking’. The story begins with the key contributions of Alan Turing and John von Neumann and the twin concepts of universality and hierarchical abstraction. As an illustration of the importance of abstraction, the ‘File clerk’ model of Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman computing will be described. Our examination of computer hardware takes us from logic gates to the microprocessor and Moore’s Law. On the software side, our discussion of algorithms begins with Euclid’s algorithm for the Greatest Common Divisor and ends with a description of PageRank, the ‘billion dollar’ algorithm that launched the search giant Google. An account of the origins of the personal computer, the Internet and Web then brings us up to the present. We end the talk with a look to the future with the rise of AI and Machine Learning and Butler Lampson’s ‘Third Age of Computing’. - See more at: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/computing-universe-origins-computational-thinking#sthash.ErQvP1BH.dpuf

The computing universe: origins of computational thinking

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Here comes the brand new January cast for 2015. i edited almost every track of this set and put in special versions u can only listen to in my dj sets. Take a trip with me into my world of sounds and music which i like to play out in clubs all over the world. as usual leave me feedback and share the stuff if you dig it.

have a great 2015!

ryan davis

::Playlist::
01 Winter Boredom - Natalie Beridze
02 Zoetrope - King Of The Mountains
03 Opus - Patlac (Ryan Davis Edit)
04 A Night At Hoppetosse - Wareika (Finnebassen Remix /Ryan Davis Cut)
05 Expand/Way Out - Plastikman vs. Gaiser (Ryan Davis Fusion Rework)
06 Sun - Caribou (Ryan Davis Rework 2.1)
07 Lacerta - Problem Makers (Ryan Davis Remix)(Out Soon)
08 Just Like Heaven Feat. Minako - Vincenco (Dave DK Remix)
09 Spark - Ray Kajioka (Ryan Davis Cut)
10 Dizzy Moments - Guy J (Ryan Davis Broken Break Edit)
11 Traces - Who Made Who (Agents Of Time Remix /Ryan Davis Cut)
12 Sphere - Mondkrater (Out Soon)
13 Adrift - Steve Gibbs

Follow Me..

Ryan Davis - 15CAST

This week we discuss artificial intelligence, the holographic universe and more! 

Black Mesa radio Ep.3

More at http://scifri.me/j86ztx

Faked X-rays, fabricated data, unreported amputations—those are just a few examples of the medical misconduct discovered during Food and Drug Administration inspections. But a recent investigation by NYU journalism professor Charles Seife and his students reveals that, in many cases, the FDA never told the public, doctors, or scientists about fraud that the agency uncovered. More transparency, Seife told Science Friday, "is a way to transcend these failings."

The FDA responded to the investigation in a statement: "The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is committed to increasing the transparency of compliance and enforcement activities, with the goal of: enhancing the public’s understanding of the FDA’s decisions and fostering industry’s understanding of the need for consistently safe, effective, and high-quality products." An FDA spokesperson writes that the agency is "convening a working group to further explore transparency issues."

Medical Fraud Missing From Public Record

Vitamin D and light: a close relationship with a lot of controversy. Diet is insufficient in providing vitamin D; however, to make Vitamin D ourselves, we need sunlight, which tends to be in short supply in the UK. The EPIC-Norfolk study observed that participants who had a higher blood vitamin D concentration had a lower risk of developing lung disease, heart disease and fractures. Prof. Kay-Tee Khaw will discuss these findings and shed some light on the question: To D or not to D?

12 March 2015 Vitamin D: To D Or Not To D

In this year's Linacre Lecture at St John's, Professor Sharon Peacock discusses a potential tool that could be used to control bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The Linacre Lecture is an annual presentation on a medical topic that has been given at the College since 1524.

Antimicrobial Resistance In The Genomic Era

Lydia Rutherford, an A-level student from Lodge Park Academy (Corby), interviews Professor Trevor Robbins, Head of Psychology at Cambridge University about drug abuse and dependence.

Lydia Rutherford & Professor Trevor Robbins on drug addiction

Noel Fombanu, an A-Level student from Lodge Park Academy (Corby), interviews Dr David Franklin from Cambridge University's Dept of Engineering about the role that neuroscience has to play in robotics.

Noel Fombanu & Dr David Franklin

Dr Denis Alexander talks to Eleanor Puttock about the new technique of human embryo gene editing, the science behind it, its implications as well as a theological view point. 

To find out more about Dr Denis Alexander go to: http://bit.ly/1T0g7sO

To find out more about The Faraday Institute go to: bit.ly/1AAhTXq

To read the original article "CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human tripronuclear zygote" in Protein & Cell go to: http://bit.ly/1EedsFn (subscription required) 

To read the article in Nature "Ethics of embryo editing divides scientists", referred to by Dr Alexander, go to: http://bit.ly/1LM7GQL (subscription required) 

Denis Alexander discusses human embryo gene editing

TATU Interview Alexander Biebricher - String theory & Universal Constants

 The world's most troublesome borders for illegal migration have one thing in common, more older people on one side than the other. Large gaps in the median age on either side show a difference of 19 years for Northern Africa and Southern Europe, and 11 years for the United States and Central America. Age differences between sending and receiving nations are a powerful force exerting migratory pressures on borders, argues Joseph Chamie, a demographer and former director of the UN Population Division. 

Yale University

Migration Trends: Young and Poor Move to Lands of Aging Rich

Speaker(s): David Smith | Most economists argued against Brexit, on the grounds that it would significantly damage Britain’s economic prospects, both in the short-term and the long-term. Three months on from the referendum, are these adverse consequences inevitable, or are there any reasons for optimism? David Smith (@dsmitheconomics) has been Economics Editor of The Sunday Times since 1989. He has written a number of books, including The Rise and Fall of Monetarism, From Boom to Bust, Will Europe Work?, The Age of Instability, Free Lunch and, most recently, Something Will Turn Up. Kevin Featherstone is Head of the European Institute, Eleftherios Venizelos Professor of Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor of European Politics at LSE. This event is part of LSE's 'After Brexit: the future of the UK in Europe' series. An exploration of the issues raised by the UK’s vote to leave the European Union through lectures, panel discussions and debates. The series will cover the broad range of political, economic, legal, and social issues as preparations for the negotiations on Brexit are underway. Brexit represents an unprecedented agenda for Europe and an historical milestone for the British state: as such, the need for informed debate is paramount. Keep up to date with what Brexit means for the UK and the wider world at LSE Brexit blog (@lsebrexitvote).

Britain after Brexit: will something continue to turn up? [Audio]

Faber-Castell is a 255-year-old company that makes pencils. How does an old company with a, well, boring product think about innovation, particularly if and when to introduce new technology? Assistant Professor Ryan Raffaelli’s research looks at established companies with mature products and how they manage technological shifts in their industry and in the world. This case explores Faber-Castell’s “companion for life” strategy and its bet to double down on the pencil.

Faber-Castell Doubles Down on the Pencil

When thinking about the future, it is easy to forget to look behind you. Enter George Dyson, “a historian among futurists”, who does deep research into the history of computing to understand the trends that will bring us into the future. 

One of his persistent themes is taking the “digital universe” metaphor seriously. When we turned on the first computers, we created a computational universe, a universe that is now growing by 5 trillion bits of storage per second. This universe is not merely expanding--it is exploding, and we need to understand computer time as well as we understand human time. 

"No Time Is There--- The Digital Universe and Why Things Appear To Be Speeding Up" was given on March 19, 02013 as part of Long Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world's leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can:

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