Archbishop Martin was born in Dublin in 1945 and was ordained priest in 1969.

He pursued higher studies in moral theology at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome and entered the service of the Holy See in 1976 in the Pontifical Council for the Family.

In 1986 he was appointed Under-Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and in 1994 became Secretary of that Council.

In 2001 he was elevated to the dignity of Archbishop and Apostolic Nuncio and served as Permanent Observer of the Holy See in Geneva, at the United Nations Office and Specialised Agencies and at the World Trade Organisation.

Vice-President of the Irish Episcopal Conference, he was appointed Coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin in May 2003 and succeeded Cardinal Connell as Archbishop of Dublin in April 2004. 

Diarmuid Martin is a Member of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications and is co-moderator of the Joint Working Group for Relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches.

All are welcome and there will be a wine-reception in Michaelhouse afterwards for those present.

Members of the University attending should wear their gowns.

In 1530 Matthäus Schwarz, an accountant in the German city of Augsburg, was man in his prime: slim, smart and successful. In a portrait that shows him in an outfit made for the occasion of the Imperial Diet of Augsburg, he is every inch the fashionable man about town, ready to step out of his door and join the party.

In the painting Schwarz wears a doublet made in panes of brilliant red and yellow silk over a shirt cut from fine linen. His slender calves are shown off in yellow leather hose and his knees are cross-gartered. On his feet are slim shoes and on his head is a flat black beret made in felted wool. At his waist are belts carrying the sword and red purse that complete the picture.

Now an experimental project undertaken by Dr Ulinka Rublack, Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge, has brought this portrait alive in a historically accurate reconstruction of the outfit it depicts. The project reveals the role of dress in conveying complex social and political messages and the way in which fashion had a profound effect on mood and behaviour. 

Head accountant of the Fugger merchant company, Schwarz commissioned paintings of himself showing in considerable detail the clothes that made up his changing and highly fashionable wardrobe. These portraits, known as the Schwarz Book of Clothes, represent a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in the history of fashion as well as Renaissance performances of the self as visual act.

In order to bring her project to fruition Dr Rublack enlisted the expertise of dress historian and theatre designer Jenny Tiramani to whom historical accuracy is of paramount importance.  She has worked with some of the country’s leading theatre directors – including Sir David MacVicar and Tim Carroll – and recently set up the School of Historical Dress with the backing of Mark Rylance, Sir Roy Strong and Dame Vivienne Westwood. Her knowledge of the materials, shape and construction of early 16th century clothing of the type worn by Schwarz was vital to the success of the project.

To put together the outfit in the painting would have taken Schwarz many months of effort in sourcing materials and the craftspeople to make them up.  It would have incurred him considerable expense. And to put the finished garments on in the privacy of his home Schwarz would have needed the assistance of servants to lace him tightly in.  To achieve the narrow waist that such an outfit demands he would have denied himself rich foods. 

As a historian of material culture, Dr Rublack seeks to get close to the past by looking at the things that people lived with and among, and exploring their complex relationships with the objects they used and collected. She is particularly interested in fashion and her research concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation.

Many of the things that have survived from these periods are those which were looked at rather than used, precious items which were regarded as heirlooms and tied up with notions of continuing value - painting and sculpture, jewellery and curiosities, for example.  Much rarer are items that had, at least in part, a practical function, such as textiles, clothing and footwear. And the further back one goes, fewer are the examples of this second group of things passed down to us.

Historians of material culture need to look at visual and written sources, such as portraits and diaries, in addition to inventories, to build up a picture of how people lived in relation to the things they possessed – and the roles that these things played in shaping their lives. In the instance of fashion, the shaping element takes on a literal sense: just as the body makes demands on clothes so do clothes make a demand on the body.

In her book Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2011), Dr Rublack tells a vivid story of how people across society expressed their aspirations and emotions through appearances in an age which underwent fundamental changes in how things were made and marketed. The process of writing the book brought her close to the experience of what colours, textures and cuts appealed to men and women at the time - but she wanted to get a better grasp of both the practical processes that went into the making of dress and the experience of wearing garments that are, to our eyes, so outlandish.

The portrait that Dr Rublack chose shows an outfit that Schwarz wore in 1530. He had it made for one of the most important events of the era - the return of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to Germany after nine year period during which many parts of the country had turned to Protestant faiths. Augsburg witnessed long-standing confrontations between Protestants and Catholics and would eventually tolerate both faiths.

The purpose of the outfit was to impress and, in particular, to signal Schwarz’s allegiance to Catholicism and to the Emperor. And impress it did: in 1541 Schwarz was ennobled, a tremendous leap in social status for a man who was the son of a wine-merchant. Although he was well off, he was essentially a scribe who worked with figures, recording the business transactions and managing the credits of the Fugger merchant company.

“The colours red and yellow are associated with happiness – and they demonstrate Schwarz’s joy at the visit of the Emperor and his brother Ferdinand of Austria. Schwarz notes that he wished 'to please Ferdinand' and he did so by symbolically expressing gaiety, youthful agility, pride and beauty. His was an aesthetic performance of political values through the expense and effort he had invested in such having so wonderful an outfit created,” says Dr Rublack.

“What we’ve learned in the course of this project is just how spectacular and dramatic such an assemblage would have been. The effect of the bright yellow is almost dazzling when you look at it for some time. The coordination of the textures, dyes and materials is subtle and ingenious.The outfit was designed to lift the spirit, make people marvel at novelty and show off advanced civilization .”

Handling the garments made for the project has shown the extent to which last-minute styling contributed to getting the right look. Dr Rublack says: “The shirt, doublet and hose would need to be skilfully fitted by at least one servant when Schwarz was dressed in the morning to make them work together perfectly. Once he had taken his sword and walked on the streets, a man like Schwarz would be completely confident of his sartorial achievement – but equally he would have been worried about any speck of dirt or loose seam as well as about over-eating and drinking.”

High fashion treads a dangerous line: in making a bold statement, it’s easy to look foolish. The Renaissance fascination with image-making encouraged self-display – but this had to be balanced by an awareness of the dangers of self-delusion and ridicule. In the Renaissance, as today, fashion encouraged fears as much as fantasies and fun, openness to change and reflection on what it means to be human.

By tracking changes in patients’ blood, Cambridge scientists have created a new way of looking at how tumours evolve in real-time and develop drug resistance. The research was published in the print edition of Nature today, 02 May.

Scientists at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge used traces of tumour DNA, known as circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA), found in cancer patients’ blood to follow the progress of the disease as it changed over time and developed resistance to chemotherapy treatments. 

For the study, which was co-directed by Dr James Brenton, Professor Carlos Caldas, and Dr Nitzan Rosenfeld from the University's Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, they followed six patients with advanced breast, ovarian and lung cancers and took blood samples, over one to two years. They then focused analysis on those samples that contained relatively higher concentrations of tumour ctDNA,

By looking for changes in the tumour ctDNA before and after each course of treatment, they were able to identify changes in the tumour’s DNA that were likely linked to drug resistance following each treatment session.

Using this new method they were able to identify several changes linked to drug-resistance in response to chemotherapy drugs such as paclitaxel (taxol) which is used to treat ovarian, breast and lung cancers, tamoxifen which is used to treat oestrogen-positive breast cancers and transtuzumab (Herceptin) which is used to treat HER2 positive breast cancers.

The researchers hope this new approach could facilitate research on how cancer tumours develop resistance to some of our most effective chemotherapy drugs as well as providing an alternative to current methods of collecting tumour DNA – by taking a sample direct from the tumour – a much more difficult and invasive procedure.

Dr Rosenfeld said: “Tumours are constantly changing and evolving which helps them develop a resistance to many of the drugs we currently give patients to treat their disease. We’ve shown that a very simple blood test can be used to collect enough tumour DNA to suggest to us what parts of the cancer’s genetic code is changing and creating tumour resistance to chemotherapy or biologically-targeted therapies.

“We hope that our discoveries can pave the way to helping us understand how cancers develop drug resistance as well as identifying new potential targets for future cancer drugs.”

Dr Brenton added: "Importantly, this advance means that we will be able to screen a much larger number of genes in the blood to test if specific genetic changes in the cancer explain resistance to treatment. The low cost and high acceptability of a blood sample means that this can be done across hundreds or thousands of patients. This is vital to discover reliable clinical biomarkers."

Professor Caldas said: "The tracking of different cancer clones in real time using a liquid biopsy will have enormous value to identify drug resistance in the clinic and adjust therapy accordingly."

The Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute is a major research centre which aims to take the scientific strengths of Cambridge to practical application for the benefit of cancer patients. The Institute is a unique partnership between the University of Cambridge and Cancer Research UK. It is housed in the Li Ka Shing Centre, a state-of-the-art research facility located on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus which was generously funded by Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, Cambridge University, Cancer Research UK, The Atlantic Philanthropies and a range of other donors.  For more information visit www.cruk.cam.ac.uk.

Story adapted from CRUK press release.

For more information about this story, please contact: Genevieve Maul, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge. Email: Genevieve.Maul@admin.cam.ac.uk; Tel: 01223 765542.

Surprisingly little has been written about the polymath Francis Willughby (1635 to 1672), the author of one of the earliest comprehensive and analytical ornithologies.  His work Ornithologia libri tres was published by his more famous friend and colleague John Ray (1627 to 1705) after Willughby’s death.  The lavishly produced volume, which contains dozens of plates showing birds categorised by their characteristics, bears Willughby’s name on the title page but it is Ray who is best remembered.

Cambridge University historian Dr Richard Serjeantson will be giving a talk on Francis Willughby on Monday (6 May 2013), titled ‘The Education of Francis Willughby: New philosophy and natural history in mid-seventeenth-century Cambridge’. He hopes that his research into the life and work of this remarkable figure will help to encourage a reappraisal of a man who worked indefatigably to develop taxonomies of insects, birds and other creatures – and was fascinated by topics as diverse as football and fish. 

Dr Serjeantson, a specialist in the history of science of the 1600s, is a Fellow of Trinity College, where Willughby himself studied from 1657 to 1662, graduating at the top of his year – an achievement that would have required a thorough knowledge of Latin, Greek and philosophy.

“One of the chief reasons that Willughby has been neglected by historians of science is that he worked closely with John Ray, who lived much longer and outshone him in terms of publications. However, surviving correspondence between the two suggests that they worked as collaborators on an equal footing. The fact that Ray published the Ornithologia libri tres the under Willughby’s name after his death also suggests that he was keen to acknowledge his friend’s authorship,” says Dr Serjeantson, who is working on Willughby as part of a team project headed by Professor Tim Birkhead, FRS, of the University of Sheffield.

Willughby’s substantial wealth is another factor that might later have stood against him being taken seriously as an early scientist. “He came from a rich family with large estates in the West Midlands, while Ray’s father was an Essex blacksmith. This disparity in their fortunes has added to assumptions that Ray was the brains behind the duo while Willughby merely supplied the financial support,” says Dr Serjeantson. 

“In fact, the papers relating to Willughby that survive in archives paint a picture of an extraordinarily intelligent man who worked extremely hard in the pursuit of the fields that interested him. Though he didn’t need to earn a degree in order to make his way in the world he nonetheless took one, and he clearly cared deeply about his studies.  There’s even a poem in which his former tutor, James Duport, urges Willughby to stop working so hard and concentrate more on his family.”

The young Willughby’s passion for natural history comes through touchingly in a letter to his friend Peter Courthope, in which he gives him advice about how to look after a caterpillar: ‘I thinke it were Best’ for her, he says, ‘when warm weather comes to bee exposed somtimes to the sun.’  He goes on: ‘for Her Diet & other things I leave Her wholy to your Discretion.’

As a rich undergraduate at Cambridge Willughby was a fellow-commoner, which meant that he would have eaten his meals (commons) alongside Trinity’s fellows, who included James Duport and the mathematician Isaac Barrow.  Dr Serjeantson believes that the opportunity this privilege would have afforded Willughby, in terms of engaging with some of the brightest minds of the time, is likely to have been significant.

He says: “Students were admitted according to a hierarchy that reflected how society worked at the time.  Willughby and other rich students would have been looked after by poorer students known as sizars who earned their keep by acting as unpaid servants.  Isaac Newton, who arrived at Trinity shortly after Willughby graduated and lived on slender means, was a sub-sizar, something he is said to have resented. It is likely that he would have carried out menial tasks, such as emptying chamber pots and serving the fellows and fellow-commoners.”

In archives held by Nottingham University Library is Willughby’s commonplace-book – a book of the notes that he took while he was an undergraduate. Its pages contain evidence of his formidable intellect and passion for discovery, written in Latin in an untidy hand that is difficult to read. A typical page contains references to idiots born under the new moon, the copulation of horses, the Roman poet Lucretius’ views on the eternity of the world, and hot springs and baths, as the young student grapples with, and seeks to find connections between, a myriad of subjects.

“It’s a real puzzle to decipher Willughby’s commonplace-book, as it contains several layers of annotations and crossings-out. But it reveals that 21-year-old Willughby was grappling closely with the writing of Descartes, Hobbes and Galileo – all of whom were pioneers of the ‘new philosophy’. He was soaking up the ideas that fundamentally changed the ways in which people thought and laid the foundations for modern science,” says Dr Serjeantson.

The Cambridge education system in the mid-1600s emphasised the study of philosophy and ancient literature. It’s therefore likely that all Willughby’s work on natural history while at Cambridge – which includes his contributions to a catalogue of the flora of Cambridgeshire published by John Ray in 1660 – would have been undertaken as an extra-curricular activity. He also participated in early chemical experiments, 50 years before Cambridge appointed its first professor of chemistry.

Willughby’s years at Cambridge gave him the intellectual and physical space in which to explore his interests. A late 17th-century print of Trinity College by David Loggan shows a small garden, organised into plots, in front of the main gatehouse. “This may be the garden that John Ray is known to have created at Trinity, perhaps with the help of his friend Francis Willughby,” says Dr Serjeantson. “The same image shows a shed-like building up against the wall. This is the workshop that Newton later used to carry out his experiments – archaeological analysis of the soil at the spot reveals significant traces of mercury, a substance Newton is documented to have used.”

Sadly, Trinity has no record of where Willughby lived while he was studying there. However, busts of Willughby and Ray by the French sculptor Roubillac flank the entrance of the Wren Library which has copies of Willughby’s Ornithology and his other books. Just last year the Library was also generously presented with a copy of Ray’s Catalogue of Cambridgeshire flora which Ray gave to Willughby’s friend Peter Courthope when it was published.

“It’s not often that one comes across someone really interesting, who left a rich body of evidence, but whom historians haven’t previously investigated in any detail”, says Dr Serjeantson. “Yet Willughby is just such a person.” He hopes that the work that he and the other members of Professor Birkhead’s team are doing on Francis Willughby will bring a major figure in the history of English science firmly back into focus.

Dr Richard Serjeantson will be talking on ‘The Education of Francis Willughby: New philosophy and natural history in mid-seventeenth-century Cambridge’ on Monday, 6 May at 1pm, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge. All welcome.

For more information on this story contact Alex Buxton, University of Cambridge Communications Office, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673.

The body’s own immune system’s fight against breast cancer is controlled by genetic ‘fine tuners’, known as microRNAs, according to a study published in Nature today, 05 May.

Looking at 1,300 breast cancer samples, the Cancer Research UK-funded scientists found that the influence of these microRNAs, which help control how genes behave, varies between different subtypes of breast cancer.

Last year Cambridge scientists published a landmark study, METABRIC, showing that breast cancer can be subdivided into ten distinct genetic subtypes. These new findings relate to the most common form, which is unusual in that the body appears to mount a strong immune response to the disease. This is thought to be the reason why patients with this type of breast cancer tend to have a better outlook than those with other forms.

The researchers were searching for relationships between the individual subtypes of breast cancer and patterns of microRNA activity in the tumours. They found that the types of cancers that trigger the immune system also have a characteristic ‘signature’ of microRNAs, which seem be playing a role in controlling this response.

MicroRNAs are short fragments of RNA – a molecule related to DNA – that act as tiny switches inside cells, helping to turn genes on or off and controlling protein production.

The team’s findings suggest that microRNAs don’t act simply as on/off switches, but have a much more nuanced role in fine-tuning a cell’s behaviour, including how it interacts with the body’s defence mechanisms.

Professor Carlos Caldas, senior study author based at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge, said: “Since we discovered that breast cancer can be split into ten different diseases we’ve been looking for the differences that make each type unique. In this particular type of the disease these genetic ‘fine tuners’ seem to help control the immune system’s fight against breast cancer.”

Dr Kat Arney, science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “MicroRNAs are a hot topic in cancer research right now, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about these tiny controllers. Understanding more about what they’re doing in tumours will increase our knowledge about the biological processes that underpin cancer, and is vital for shaping the development of future treatments based on these little molecules.”

The Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute is a major research centre which aims to take the scientific strengths of Cambridge to practical application for the benefit of cancer patients. The Institute is a unique partnership between the University of Cambridge and Cancer Research UK. It is housed in the Li Ka Shing Centre, a state-of-the-art research facility located on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus which was generously funded by Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, Cambridge University, Cancer Research UK, The Atlantic Philanthropies and a range of other donors.  For more information visit www.cruk.cam.ac.uk.

Story adapted from CRUK press release.

Gareth Evans describes himself as “a glass half-full kind of person” while acknowledging that anyone optimistic about anything in international affairs “runs the risk of being branded ignorant, incorrigibly naïve or outright demented”.  His snapshot of himself might come as surprise given Evans’s career of more than 25 years in grappling with some of the world’s most intractable problems of war in all its terrible guises – from cross-border conflicts in the Gulf to the horrific internal strife that has beset Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and many African states.

Born just before the end of the Second World War, Evans was educated at Melbourne University (where he studied Law) and Magdalen College, Oxford (PPE). After a career in law, he entered Australian politics, and was a long-serving Cabinet Minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor Governments, including as foreign minister from 1988-1996. He followed that with nearly a decade as president of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, and he is now chancellor of the Australian National University.

Currently in Cambridge as Humanitas Visiting Professor in Statecraft and Diplomacy, and a visiting scholar at Pembroke College, Evans will be giving three public lectures that will tackle profound questions about human behaviour. Recognising our innate capacity for violence (and just how quickly combative situations can escalate), he will examine the major challenges facing the international community in brokering peace and protecting the vulnerable.  Overall, his message will be one of optimism, albeit balanced by some powerful caveats.

Peace does not make news; war does.  In his first lecture (‘Ending Deadly Conflict: A Naïve Dream?’ on Wednesday, 8 May), Evans will set the scene by taking the long view, both of how we operate as individuals and as states. He will show how, despite the headlines that assail us, the last 15 years have seen a substantial decline in the number of major conflicts both between and within states, in the number of genocides and other mass atrocities, and the number of people killed.

Evans puts this drop in major conflict down to improvements in diplomatic peace-making, peace-keeping and peace-building that goes on behind the scenes – but rarely makes the news – and the gradual emergence of an effective system of international criminal law, notably the establishment of  new international courts and tribunals delivering an increasingly  plain message to warlords and warmongers that they will be taken to task for their actions.

He also believes that on a deeper level there has been a disappearance of what the French call bellicisme, the ideology seeing virtue and nobility in war.  Here he is in tune with the American psychologist Steven Pinker who, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, writes that norms in influential groups have shifted to the view that war is inherently immoral and that at least interstate war may go the way of “customs such as slavery, serfdom, breaking on the wheel, disembowling, bear-baiting, cat-burning, heretic-burning, witch-drowning….”.

An associated development has been the emergence of a strong taboo on the use of nuclear weapons that no civilised state would consider breaking – though recent research suggests disturbingly that this taboo is not felt as strongly as previously thought by the US public.

In his second talk (‘Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes: A Hopeless Dream?’ on Friday, 10 May), Evans will discuss the hugely tricky problem of how the world should respond to mass atrocity crimes committed within state borders – and the failure for many years of the international community to honour its vow of never letting the horrific killings carried out in, for example, Bosnia, Darfur and Sri Lanka happen ever again. He describes the evolution of the new norm of “the responsibility to protect”, initiated in an international commission he co-chaired in 2001, and endorsed by 150 heads of state and government attending the 2005 World Summit on the occasion of the 60th birthday of the UN, which has been largely successful in building bridges between North and South in a way that “the right to intervene” rallying cry of the 1990s could not.

But fine words are one thing and implementation something else, as Evans admits. Military intervention – how and when to apply coercive force – is always a contentious issue, now being hotly debated again in the context of Syria. The Security Council has been largely paralysed, not least because of differences that have emerged over the implementation by NATO-led forces of the “responsibility to protect” mandate they were given in Libya: seen by their critics as focusing on regime change rather than civilian protection, rejecting genuine ceasefire offers, striking fleeing personnel who posed no risk, hitting locations with no military significance, and selectively ignoring an arms embargo to support the rebel side. Evans argues that it is crucially necessary to re-establish broad Security Council consensus on how the hardest atrocity-crime cases should be tackled, and he will suggest how this might be achieved.

In his final talk, Evans will concentrate on nuclear disarmament (‘Eliminating Nuclear Weapons: An Impossible Dream?’ on Monday, 13 May). The big picture is chilling: nine nuclear-armed states share the current global nuclear weapons stockpile of just under 18,000 weapons with a combined destructive capacity of almost 120,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.  But, as Evans notes, a topic that in earlier decades mobilised thousands of activities to demand disarmament  now barely resonates with the public or with policy makers apart from an occasional flurry of activity about what North Korea  or Iran might be planning.  He will argue that complacency is indefensible: so long as any state retains nuclear weapons, others will want them; so long as any weapons are retained by anyone they are bound one day to be used, by accident if not design; and that any such use will be catastrophic for life on this planet as we know it.

Optimistic to the last, Evans will insist that disarmament is achievable: of course nuclear weapons cannot be ‘uninvented’, but they can be outlawed, as chemical and biological weapons have been. What is necessary is leadership – top down from key heads of government, bottom up from civil society actors, and from peer group international pressure; and recognition that in the world of the 21st century international cooperation, rather than confrontation, is the only rational course.

All three of Gareth Evans’s talks will take place at the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Cambridge, 5-6.30pm. Open to all, no need to book. A symposium 'The Future of Deadly Conflict: Is Optimism Defensible?' will be held on Tuesday 14 May at the Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge. To register for the symposium and for all details about the lecture series go to http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2402/
 

The bombing of the Boston Marathon in the USA, the reported foiling of a train bombing plot in Canada, and reports in the UK about terror cells in places such as Birmingham, have once again highlighted the threat of ‘homegrown terrorism’.

These cases come amid continuing public scepticism about Islam and its place in western societies. Polls show that the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims that opened after 9/11 has grown wider. In 2011, for example, nearly half of Americans surveyed believed that Islamic and American values were incompatible. The situation was not much different in the UK, where the previous year, a poll showed that over half of the British public associated Islam with extremism while nearly 70 per cent believed it encouraged the oppression of women. Similar sentiments can also be seen in polls conducted in other European countries such as Germany where over one third of Germans polled in 2010 indicated they would prefer "a Germany without Islam."

Such figures are concerning given the fact that around 1.5 billion people, or one-fourth of humanity, are Muslim, there are millions of Muslims living in western countries, there are 57 Muslim states, and western countries are involved in, and have close relations with, many of them. It is thus imperative that a more informed understanding of Islam and the complexity and reality of Muslim society is promoted.

So how is the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims to be closed, and terrorism curtailed? Some of the work I have been involved in on this subject may provide some answers.

I have been in a unique position with which to view relations between Muslims and non-Muslims and the Islamic world and the west. As an undergraduate studying history at American University in Washington DC, I took an elective class entitled “The World of Islam” with Professor Akbar Ahmed, a renowned anthropologist, Islamic scholar, and diplomat who had served as Pakistan’s high commissioner to the UK. Inspired by his work and approach, I took several more classes and eventually was able to join him as a research assistant on three major projects. It also began my journey towards social anthropology, which has led me to Cambridge to pursue graduate studies in the discipline.

Our most recent project, 'The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam', will be published this month in the UK. It examines the impact of the war on terrorism on 40 Muslim tribal societies including in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and across North Africa. While a link between terrorism and Islam is often made, as reflected in the polls cited above, we found that this is a faulty assumption. The book argues that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam but largely stems from a breakdown in relations between central governments and Muslim tribal societies on their peripheries fighting to preserve their autonomy. After 9/11 the United States, in pursuit of terrorists and using technologies like the drone, became embroiled in these often centuries-old local conflicts. In order to stabilise these regions and end the suffering of the people there, the US and western powers involved must gain a better understanding of local culture and history and the relationship between the centre and periphery.

My first experience studying Muslim societies, however, which had a huge impact on my life, came as a researcher for Professor Ahmed’s book Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization (2007). The book involved travel as part of a team across the Muslim world to measure global Muslim attitudes. "We think Americans don't care about us,” they said, “thank you for listening." We were treated very hospitably, and enjoyed delicious food and good company. I realised my presence was challenging common views of Americans shaped by the media. I was the first American many people had ever met. 

While I frequently heard criticism of aspects of US foreign policy such as the Iraq war, the issue of perception came up most often. In fact, in each of the eight Muslim countries where our team distributed questionnaires, "negative perceptions of Islam in the USA and the west" was cited most commonly as the greatest threat to the Muslim world.

The frequency with which people discussed the USA in our conversations led to a follow-up study on Muslims in America and the relationship between Islam and American identity. Over a period of one year Professor Ahmed and our team travelled to 75 US cities and 100 mosques, which resulted in the book Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam (2010), and an accompanying documentary film. The project allowed me to see my own country through the eyes of its Muslim population.

In the USA we were again welcomed warmly and hospitably into Muslim homes and communities across the country. Muslims of every conceivable ethnic background and religious interpretation told us that they were proud to be American and frequently cited the USA as the "best place in the world to be Muslim" because of religious freedom that was not possible in many Muslim countries. We found numerous positive initiatives in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians were in dialogue with one another as friends. Yet many Muslims feared that their religion made them a target for hostility. Indeed, I visited mosques that had been fire-bombed and interviewed many people who had faced discrimination and intimidation.

The challenges and tensions experienced by American Muslims were most starkly demonstrated to us in a meeting in a Pakistani Shia mosque in Brooklyn, New York. There, a ten-year old boy, speaking accent-less American English, described being constantly beaten up at school and called a terrorist. It then emerged that his mother, while visiting Pakistan, had been blown up in a bus by the Taliban. We wondered how this boy would make sense of what was happening to him, especially as he entered his teenage years.

When I saw reports about the Boston bombers, I immediately flashed back to that boy. The younger of the two Chechen brothers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, arrived in the USA when he was around the same age and also spoke without an accent. It seemed likely that he too was caught between cultures. Tamerlan, the elder brother, admitted that he had no American friends and could not understand Americans. The indiscriminate violence the brothers perpetrated was a clear indication that they could not resolve this tension and lashed out in hatred at their adopted country.

Our projects conclude that the most effective defence against homegrown terrorism is a Muslim community with effective leadership that feels secure and fully part of the nation. The community will then have a close and positive relationship with law enforcement and will be able to participate fully in all aspects of social and civic life.

In order for this to happen, we found, there must be knowledge of Islam and Muslims and the wide variety of backgrounds and religious interpretations contained within the community. Likewise, the Muslim community must have knowledge of the dominant culture, customs, and heritage of the society it is a part of, which will facilitate dialogue and enable people to build on what is common between them.

I believe that social anthropology, with its emphasis on fieldwork, observation and interpretation, can provide some of the tools needed to facilitate understanding between the west and the world of Islam, which is one of the most pressing challenges facing all of us. As I have plunged into fascinating and rich anthropological theory and ethnographies since enrolling at Cambridge last autumn, I feel privileged to be able to study in a department with such an esteemed faculty and illustrious history. I intend to employ these tools in the future as I continue to pursue knowledge and scholarship in the interest of fostering communication and comprehension.

The documentary Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam will be shown in the Department of Social Anthropology seminar room on Tuesday, 7 May at 5pm. It will be followed by a roundtable discussion involving Frankie Martin who helped to produce the film. The event is sponsored by the Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society. All welcome.

Roger Robinson is a specialist in 19th-century literature. He’s also a distinguished long-distance runner who writes about running.  When he stands up to talk about the maverick polymath Samuel Butler (1835-1902) on Saturday 11 May, he will add another strand to what is already known about Butler as a writer, artist, photographer, composer and sheep farmer.  Robinson has discovered that Butler was also a talented runner – an ability he may have deliberately downplayed in an attempt to portray his schoolboy self as a miserable “mollycoddle”.

Best known for his fantastical novel Erewhon (nowhere spelt backwards – or almost), Butler was an iconoclast who defied his family’s wishes, attacked the establishment, and famously proposed that the Odyssey was written by a woman. The event at which Robinson will be speaking, along with the journalist and broadcaster Simon Heffer, celebrates the culmination of a two-year project to catalogue the Samuel Butler Collection held in the Old Library at St John’s College.  The project has brought Butler’s prodigious intellect sharply into focus and its online resource will help make the collection accessible to a new generation of scholars and other interested parties worldwide.

Butler rowed for his College while at Cambridge and was later an enthusiastic climber, but it took another runner to discover that he was also a star of field and track. In the late 1990s, acting on a hunch, Robinson flew from New Zealand, where he is Emeritus Professor of English at Victoria University, back to England where he grew up. Teaching Butler’s The Way of All Flesh to his students, he had been struck by a passage in which the hero Ernest Pontifex runs several miles across country to present a gift to a housemaid dismissed by his stern father. Ernest accomplished this with ease, according to the narrator, because at school he had joined in “an amusement” called “the Hounds”.

The Way of All Flesh is semi-autobiographical and Robinson became convinced that Butler must have been a runner as a young man. Butler attended Shrewsbury School, which Robinson found had a sporting society called the Hounds that organised games based on fox hunting in which boys played the part of foxes, hounds and horses.  Leafing through the “crackly old” exercise books that make up the archives of the Hounds, Robinson found evidence that in 1854 Butler was the Huntsman, or club captain – thus overturning the view that Butler later created of himself as “a young muff, a mollycoddle... a mere bag of bones with…  no strength or stamina whatever”.

For Robinson the discovery that Butler was an accomplished athlete adds to two important connections he already has with Butler. Both studied at Cambridge: Butler read classics at St John’s from 1854 to 1858; Robinson read English at Queens’ in the late 1950s, returning to take a PhD in the 1960s. Both went to live in New Zealand, Butler to start a sheep farm and Robinson to take up a post as a university lecturer.

Research by Robinson into the Shrewsbury School archives also shines a light on the early history of running clubs, revealing that the school hosted the earliest known cross country event in modern times, with records of an Annual Steeplechase taking place from 1834 and a track and field meet held in 1840. This trumps claims that Rugby School, the setting for the paper chase in Thomas Hughes best-selling novel Tom Brown’s School Days, was the definitive cradle of running.  It also spurred Robinson to run a series of former Hounds routes around the town of Shrewsbury, some of them now intersected by main roads and housing estates. He even pinpointed – and scrambled through - a treacherous ditch mentioned in the Hounds books.

Robinson’s presentation will follow a talk by Simon Heffer, who will share material from his forthcoming book, High Minds: The Victorian Pursuit of Perfection (Random House, 2013),  exploring Samuel Butler’s motivations and his role as a brilliant Victorian intellectual intent on provoking controversy.

Both talks will take place in the Divinity School, St John’s College, on Saturday 11 May, with Simon Heffer’s talk ‘Samuel Butler: Victorian Atheist and Controversialist’ at 2pm, and Roger Robinson’s talk ‘Young Sam Butler and the Origins of Modern Running: His Athletic and Illicit Exploits as a Fox and a Hound’ at 3.30pm. To reserve a seat and book free afternoon tea at 3pm, email the Butler Project Associate, Rebecca Watts, on rew35@cam.ac.uk. 

The talks accompany an exhibition of highlights from the Samuel Butler Collection, open in the Old Library at St John’s from 11am to 5pm. For details visit www.joh.cam.ac.uk/celebration-samuel-butler-project.

 

In a disused railway arch, Richard Burton guns down the man who framed him before charging across overgrown scrubland with the law in pursuit.

Dereliction surrounds on all sides as the corrupt life of his character – gangster Vic Dakin – unravels. Residents peer over the balconies of grimy tower blocks to watch Dakin get cornered by police.

In 1971, the makers of Villain needed a suitably gritty location to shoot the dénouement of this now little remembered British thriller, so, like a number of similar films of the era, they chose the urban decay of the borough of Battersea – which 50 years prior had been a thriving centre of industry. 

Now, 40 years on from Burton’s foray into the crime genre, this very spot is about to become the site of one of the largest regeneration projects in London’s history, called Nine Elms, including an extension of the Northern Line.

Battersea is the subject of a new Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project from Cambridge’s Department of Architecture, looking at how film – fiction, documentary and amateur footage – has, often inadvertently, captured the changing fortunes of this part of south London.

Sifting through hundreds of hours of footage, the project aims to create a cinematic “archaeology” of Battersea, by building layers of scenes and clips from films that depict precise areas of the borough at different points of the 20th century.

Researchers are investigating a hugely diverse range of film, from Ealing comedies to social realist drama, Pathe news, amateur super 8 right up to modern YouTube clips.

“The plan is to map for the first time a large number of movies onto a map of a city to chart its evolution in terms of the fabric, but also social change,” said Professor François Penz, who is leading the Cinematic Geographies of Battersea project with colleagues from the Universities of Liverpool and Edinburgh as well as English Heritage.

The project came about through discussions between Penz, Professor Richard Koeck from the University of Liverpool and his former Cambridge colleague Professor Andrew Saint, who now heads up English Heritage’s Survey of London.

The Survey was created in 1894, a year before the advent of cinema, with a mission to record every parish in London – one it still pursues today, with each parish taking between three and four years to survey.

“I kept in touch with Andrew, and we often talked about how film depicted sweeping changes in London, so we put together this pilot project,” said Penz.

“At the time, he was working on Battersea, so we decided to start there, which has been great as it’s a movie-rich area, as well as one that has been through – and about to go through – huge changes.”

Penz notes that Battersea is a space where “a lot of the cinematic crime in British films was committed,” and that south London in general is prone to dystopian depictions.

Key films, such as Ken Loach’s sixties ‘kitchen sink’ drama Poor Cow, also reveal battles between classes, and contain moments of high architectural significance.

“In addition to ‘longitudinal’ century-wide study, we also engage in detailed ‘cross-sectional’ study – taking a few films and studying them scene by scene, even frame by frame.”

Penz highlights a single cut in Poor Cow that takes the main character from Victorian terrace to ‘brutalist’ concrete: “Suddenly she’s in the Winstanley Estate – an icon of modernism – then shiny and new, now sadly run down and high in crime.”

“Many of the Victorian backstreets seen in such films were cleared to make way for estates, and now only exist in films.”

^{Screenshot from Ken Loach's Poor Cow}

A key touchstone for the philosophy underpinning this research is the idea of the ‘soft city’, as set out by the writer Jonathan Raban in his 1974 book of the same name.

Raban describes “the city as we imagine it… soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration and nightmare” to be “as real, maybe more real, than the hard city on can locate on maps.”

For Penz, this is the essence of the Battersea Project: “People experience space physically and emotionally, their perceptions influenced by representations in the culture they are exposed to.”

“The ‘soft city’ of illusion is found in cinema. We aim to uncover this side of Battersea to complement the Survey of London’s ‘hard’ documentation of streets, churches and so on – together providing a more holistic vision of what an area is and has been.”

One of the main goals of the project is to use the layers of film history to provide a living ‘lieu de memoire’ – or site of memory – that the community can both share in and contribute to.

To do this, the team are using digital techniques to both “triangulate” the locations these cinematic fragments were filmed in, then pin the historical layers of film to the site on modern digital maps using geo-tagging, technology familiar to most users of Google Maps.

All this information is being built into a smartphone app, along with the Survey of London records, so that the public can experience both the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sides of their neighbourhood “in situ”- and eventually even add footage themselves.

The team plans to launch the app later in the year, combining it with screenings of some of the films – in surprisingly relevant locations.

“We want to resurrect the ghost cinemas of Battersea,” said Penz. “Can you believe that Battersea doesn’t have any cinemas anymore! At one time, there were around 25 – as described in the Survey of London – often ‘shopfront’ cinemas, with back rooms holding maybe 40 seats.”

“For example, one is now a bank, and its current manager remembers going to see movies there as a child. We hope to project films with key local scenes that were shown in some of these old cinemas.”

Penz aims to combine the film clips in the app with details of former cinemas and even, when possible, the programmes of the day: “The app could tell you that the scene of a certain film was shot where you stand, show you the clip, then tell you it was shown at this ghost cinema that stood a mile, say, in that direction, on this date and what else was on there at the time.” 

While Penz admits it’s difficult to research, the team are working closely with the British Film Institute and other local organisations. He says this level of detail would “unlock moments in history, and help to crystallise common local memories that can connect communities.”

While the Battersea project is a pilot, Penz can see the methodology being replicated, and is considering extending to further afield, and not just north of the Thames.

“We’ve created a research platform with Nanjing University in China. We want to look at how this translates to other cultures. How can this be applied in a Chinese context where differences in spatial understanding and variations in screen language may result in a double translation effect? The effects of globalisation on how ‘sites of memory’ form in localities is, I think, a fascinating possible direction for this research.”

The final act of the Cinematic Geographies of Battersea will be a conference at CRASSH on 3 and 4 October 2013 on the theme of Cinematic Urban Geographies.

www.cinematicbattersea.blogspot.co.uk

A smartphone app that tracks people’s feelings and works out what might be triggering peaks in their mood, using the data invisibly captured by their phones, has been developed by researchers.

The free app, called “Emotion Sense” has just been launched and is available for Android. It takes advantage of the fact that smartphones are increasingly capable of collecting information about where we are, how noisy our environment is, how much we are moving around, and who we communicate with.

Unlike other, similar, research projects, Emotion Sense then combines systematically-gathered data from a wide range of sensors with the user’s own report about their mood, which is entered through a system designed by psychologists. First, the user is asked to mark how they feel using an on-screen matrix called an “emotion grid”. Based on their response, the phone then conducts a brief survey, to clarify their emotional state.

By cross-referring both sets of data, the app’s designers hope that it will accumulate a very precise record of what drives people’s emotional peaks, showing, for example, when they are likely to be at their most stressed, or when they feel most relaxed. This could prove particularly valuable for helping people who need specialist psychological support.

Emotion Sense is also a live research project. The University of Cambridge-led team behind it previously carried out lab-based investigations in which participants were asked to record their feelings in a diary. The new system allows them to gather data about both the drivers of people’s moods, and how far smartphones can record this, in a “real world” setting.

Dr Neal Lathia, a research associate in the University’s Computer Laboratory, explained: “Behind the scenes, smartphones are constantly collecting data that can turn them into a key medical and psychological tool. Any smartphone now comes with numerous sensors that can tell you about aspects of your life, like how active you are, or how sociable you have been in the past 24 hours. In the long term, we hope to be able to extract that data so that, for example, it can be used for therapeutic purposes.” 

The app was created as part of a wider project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, called “Ubiquitous and Social Computing for Positive Behaviour Change” (or “UBhave”). Its overall aim is to see how far mobile phones can be used to monitor people’s behaviour and, where appropriate, change it for the better to improve their health and well-being.

“Most people who see a therapist may only have an appointment once every fortnight,” Dr Cecilia Mascolo, a reader in mobile systems at the Cambridge Computer Lab said. “Many, however, keep their phones with them most of the time. In terms of sheer presence, mobiles can provide an ongoing link with a person.”

Researchers have long been interested in the potential of mobile phones to monitor people’s behaviour. By combining the data from the GPS, accelerometer, and microphone with a log of the user’s calling and texting patterns, a study of a person’s smartphone can offer a very useful record of their habits, activities and routines.

Previous research by the Emotion Sense team focused on the potential of the microphone, tracking users’ conversations to work out how they were feeling. The research now seeks to exploit a wider range of sensors, combined with self-reporting from the user themselves, who can input data about how they feel.

When Emotion Sense is opened for the first time, only one sensor is “unlocked”. The app spends roughly a week collecting data from this sensor and testing it against the user’s emotional state. At the end of this, the user is asked to complete a short life-satisfaction survey, which unlocks a new sensor. After about eight weeks, a full range of sensors has been tested. This systematic approach provides the researchers with valuable data for study, but it is also designed as a “journey of discovery” for the user, giving them a step-by-step insight into what might be influencing their own mood swings.

Mood itself is registered through a system designed by psychologists within the research team. At different times of the day, the app sends the user a notification, rather like receiving a text message, asking them about their mood. These can be set to pop up on the phone as little as twice a day, and assess the user’s mood using a custom-designed “emotion grid”, followed by a survey.

The grid has two axes, one stretching from “negative” to “positive” feelings, and one from “active” to “inactive”. Using their touchscreen, the user simply chooses the point on the grid that reflects how positive and active they feel. For example, a point close to the top right indicates high positivity and activity, suggesting that they feel energised or excited.

Uniquely, this general overview is then refined by a short survey, which asks the user to clarify exactly how they feel. The entire process takes about two minutes to complete.

“Most other attempts at software like this are coarse-grained in terms of their view of what a feeling is,” Dr Jason Rentfrow, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, said. “Many just look at emotion in terms of feeling happy, sad, angry or neutral. The aim here is to use a more flexible approach, to collect data that shows how moods vary between people . That is something which we think is quite unique to the system we have designed.”

The code which is used in Emotion Sense to collect sensor data from people’s phones is also being made available on an open-source basis so that other researchers can conduct their own experiments. It can be found at http://emotionsense.org/code.html. For information about the app in general, visit: http://emotionsense.org

The Rutherford Schools Physics Project, led by Cambridge University Professor of Theoretical Physics Mark Warner, and Cavendish Laboratory Outreach Officer Dr Lisa Jardine-Wright, will work collaboratively with teachers, schools and other partner universities to deliver extension materials, on-line learning, workshops for students and support for physics teachers.

The DfE has agreed to support the project with a £6.9million grant over five and a half years, with an intermediate review after three years.

“University physics is ideally suited to students who are fluent in mathematics and have an appetite for problem-solving,” explains Professor Warner. “Universities want to admit students who are beginning to demonstrate that they think like physicists. 

“This includes them sketching diagrams to assess a problem, deconstructing problems, sifting information, assembling ideas from different areas of physics, and using their mathematical skills.”

“The Rutherford Schools Physics Project will provide extension materials for students and support for teachers in developing these key skills and methods, working within the framework of the existing A-level curriculum.”

Professor Warner hopes that the learning resources and activities offered by the project will enable more students from all backgrounds to gain physics expertise beyond school level, encourage more students to apply for physics, engineering and mathematics at highly-selective universities throughout the UK, and equip them to best demonstrate their academic potential.

The Department for Education’s grant will allow the project to deliver a mix of on-line learning, independent study, and work in schools with teachers. Cambridge computer science experts will develop an on-line delivery platform inspired by the successful use of MOOCs in the USA.

The Rutherford School Physics Project will develop its resources in close collaboration with teachers and schools.  Experienced physics teachers will lead CPD sessions and masterclasses, while the Project will work in close partnership with schools interested in teaching their own students and those from surrounding schools on a regular basis. This may include schools with less experience of supporting students into Physics at university.

The programme continues the Cavendish Laboratory’s longstanding commitment to working with schools to widen participation, raise aspiration and skills, and to encourage young people to consider studying physics at university, including Physics at Work, and the Senior Physics Challenge. 

"The Cavendish has a longstanding tradition of recruiting, training and inspiring physics students," said Professor James Stirling, Head of the Physics Department. "Working closely with school students and their teachers has become an increasingly important part of this. The Rutherford Schools Physics Project will add tremendous value to this work, and I am delighted that the Department is playing a leading role."

The project will also work closely with its two sister initiatives, the Cambridge Mathematics Education Project, led by Professor Martin Hyland and also supported by the DfE, and “i-want-to-study-engineering.org”, led by Professor Richard Prager and supported by the Underwood Trust. 

“Since Archimedes, mathematics and physics have been inseparable, and the interdependence continues into the 21st century,” said Professor Warner. “Applications of physics, including in engineering, biology and chemistry, have transformed the world.

"Physics both underpins these related disciplines and makes fundamental advances in our understanding of our world. This mathematical basis, and the excitement of focussing on problem solving, are the driving force of the Rutherford Schools Physics Project.

“The project team is delighted to receive the DfE’s support for our initiative, which will equip prospective physics, maths, and engineering students with the skills and powers of analysis needed for university studies. This grant will enable us to reach almost all school physics students in the UK, and to work with their teachers.

“We hope that the project will result in an increase in the number of talented and ambitious young physicists with the skills to make strong applications to university.”

Secretary of State Michael Gove said "Professor Warner's brilliant project will give state school pupils access to advanced materials so they can develop problem-solving skills in maths and physics. Cambridge University physicists will provide support for science teachers and online resources enabling many more state school students to succeed at university.”

Flooding, landslides, crop failure, water shortages. Across the globe, the frequency with which humans are suffering the ill effects of climatic variability and extreme weather events is on the increase. Can natural environments be used effectively to help people adapt to the effects of climate change? The first systematic review of this question – facilitated by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) Collaborative Fund for Conservation – finds much evidence of their effectiveness.

"The delays in international agreements on ways to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions mean that planning to counter the impacts of climate change is a necessity,” said Robert Munroe, Climate Change Officer at BirdLife International. “Governments of all countries should be making plans to protect us against these impacts.”

One adaptation option is to invest in costly, large-scale structures such as sea walls, irrigation systems and dams. But while their short-term impact is clear, these solutions lead to ever-increasing maintenance costs and often have negative impacts on local ecosystems and biodiversity.

“International policy makers are having to think about the different approaches they could take, but the problem is that they don’t have enough information to make informed decisions,” said Munroe.

“Hard-engineered sea walls have a limited life span, and we know that they change wave and tidal currents, often to the detriment of saltmarshes or mangroves that act as a natural buffer to storm surges and coastal erosion. Do we really want to lose these buffers and face increasing costs of sea wall maintenance?” asked Dr Iris Möller, Deputy Director of the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit in the Department of Geography.

“There’s anecdotal evidence from events like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that villages surrounded by mangroves were significantly less affected by the tsunami than more exposed areas,” she added. The mangroves may have saved thousands of lives and properties by absorbing a large proportion of the energy in the waves.

But local anecdotal evidence is not enough to provide a reliable measurement of the effectiveness of an approach. Now a review has been completed of the effectiveness of natural approaches to buffering the effects of climate change. Termed Ecosystem-based approaches for Adaptation (EbA), this relatively new concept incorporates approaches that have been used for a long time to address climatic variability, but not necessarily in the context of adaptation to climate change.

“We wanted to understand what the research evidence tells us, in terms of the relative importance of ecosystems as opposed to hard-engineering solutions to the same problem,” said Dr Bhaskar Vira in the Department of Geography. Vira, Möller, Dr Tom Spencer (Director of the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit) and Dr Andreas Kontoleon (Department of Land Economy) worked with climate change policy expert Munroe at BirdLife and climate change expert Dr Nathalie Doswald at the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, as well as with the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. They looked at published studies from around the world in which a wide range of EbA had been assessed. The step-by-step detail of their systematic review method was published in Experimental Evidence in 2012, which will enable it to be replicated for consistency in future studies.

“The systematic review is very specific: we sifted out the most relevant published studies and compiled evidence from them on the different interventions being used and how effective they have been,” said Vira. The team found that activities related to EbA have been used across the globe to address a broad range of climatic hazards and impacts.

Interventions include the sustainable management of wetlands and floodplains to act as floodwater reservoirs and provide important water stores for times of drought, and the conservation and restoration of forests and natural vegetation to stabilise slopes and regulate water flows, preventing flash floods and landslides due to increased rainfall. Most of the approaches were reported by the studies to be effective in reducing human vulnerability to the effects of climate change, climatic variability or natural hazards.

“The results are providing general guidance on the circumstances in which an EbA may be useful,” said Vira. “There are cases where it isn’t necessarily going to be helpful – if you live in Gloucestershire and you’re about to get flooded, you can’t start planting trees, you have to use sandbags. These interventions take time, and there are limitations to their effectiveness.”

“It’s important to work towards fully informed decision-making between alternative adaptation approaches,” said Munroe. “Large-scale infrastructural solutions may tend to be pursued because the financial costs are clear and their short-term effectiveness at buffering hazards has been tested by engineers. But by constraining natural ecological cycles, they may increase social vulnerability in the medium to long term. We found some discussions on the comparison between ecosystem-based and other kinds of approaches to adaptation, which are valuable for policy makers.”

“We also realised there are some real knowledge gaps,” added Möller. “We need information on the costs as well as the benefits, and on whether monitoring systems have been put in place to assess the long-term effectiveness of these approaches. With respect to ecosystems as coastal protection, for example, we need to know exactly how much energy mangroves and marshes absorb and what we can do to maximise and maintain the effect.”

The project collaborators recognise that the divide between scientific research and policy making must be bridged if governments are to make the best decisions for long-term adaptation to climate change. “Our partnership with NGO colleagues meant the project has both academic rigour and a built-in pathway to impact,” said Vira. The Collaborative Fund for Conservation, which was established with the generous support of the Arcadia Fund, was set up explicitly to foster these innovative partnerships.

The team’s collective range of contacts has enabled them to disseminate their results and recommendations. Their presentations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban in December 2012, and the distribution of briefing papers and guidance documents, have drawn the attention of decision-makers at the highest levels to the possibilities of ecosystem-based approaches.

“A technical workshop on EbA, likely to involve 70 countries, was recently convened by the Climate Change Convention,” said Munroe. “Our work contributed to the momentum that resulted in this decision. It’s really exciting as it’s the first time the Convention has met to discuss this approach.”

“EbA is an important tool in the adaptation toolkit, which has often been ignored because the evidence base had not been made clear,” said Munroe. “Employing it alongside other adaptation options will result in much more sustainable responses to the effects of climate change in both developed and developing countries.”

By chemically sampling the atmospheres of two dead stars in the Hyades cluster 150 light years away, researchers at Cambridge and NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the building blocks for Earth-sized planets formed around the stars while they lived.

The study offers insight into what will happen in our solar system when our Sun burns out 5 billion years from now. It is published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The dead stars - called white dwarfs - are the burned-out cores of Sun-like stars. The finding suggests that terrestrial planets formed around these white dwarfs when they were young stars.

Researchers found the white dwarfs’ atmospheres “polluted” with silicon - rocky material that makes up Earth and other terrestrial planets in our solar system.

This silicon pollution likely occurred when the dwarf’s gravity shredded asteroids that got sucked in to its pull, after asteroid belts were initially disrupted by the gravity of surviving Jupiter-sized planets - with debris settling into a ring around the dead stars similar to the rings of Saturn. 

“When these stars were born, they built planets, and there’s a good chance they are retaining some of them,” said lead investigator Dr Jay Farihi of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy.

“The rocks we are seeing are evidence for the Lego building blocks of planets. Both of these stars show asteroids being thrown around, which tells us that rocky planet assembly is common.”

Although the cluster is relatively young at 625 million years old, the dead stars provide clues as to what might happen when our Sun eventually burns out:

After exhausting its hydrogen fuel, the Sun will likely puff up to a red giant and destroy several terrestrial planets including Earth, losing mass as it ejects outer layers.

The balance of gravitational power between the Sun and Jupiter would change, wreaking havoc on the asteroids in the belt located between Mars and Jupiter. Some of these asteroids could veer too close to the Sun’s gravity, breaking them into debris that could be pulled into a ring around our dead Sun - similar to the inferred rings around the Hyades white dwarfs.

To conduct the new analysis, researchers used Hubble’s powerful Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to divide the stars’ ultraviolet light into its constituent colors, providing information on the chemical elements in the atmosphere.

The silicon-carbon ratio in the stars’ atmospheres rules out everything except for rock, according to researchers, who say they have chemical evidence that this material is “at least as rocky as the most primitive bodies” in our own solar system.

“The one thing the white dwarf pollution technique gives us that we just won’t get with any other planet-detection technique is the chemistry of a planet,” Farihi said.

“Based on the silicon-to-carbon ratio in our study, for example, we can actually say that this material looks like the stuff in our back yard. If you put this stuff into the hand of any human being they would be able to tell you this is a rock, they wouldn’t need to be a scientist. It’s something familiar to all of us.”

The debris most likely polluted the white dwarfs’ atmosphere when asteroids wandered too close to the stellar relics. “Basically, you need planets to throw the rocks around. It’s pretty hard to imagine another mechanism than gravity that causes material to rain down onto the star.”

Farihi suggested that asteroids less than 100 miles across were probably gravitationally torn apart by the white dwarfs. The pulverized material was pulled into a ring that could superficially resemble Saturn’s rings. The dusty material swirling in the rings eventually settled onto the stars.

The researchers estimated the asteroid’s size by measuring the amount of dust consumed by the stars, about 10 million grams per second - equal to a small river. They then compared that measurement with those from previous observations.

The team plan to analyze more white dwarfs using the same technique to identify not only the rocks’ composition but also their parent bodies. “We have been using our solar system as a kind of a map, but I don’t know what the universe does,” Farihi said. “The universe might be doing something different. We really want to build up a picture of the different families rocks.

“The beauty of this technique is that whatever the universe is doing, we’ll be able to measure it. Is there another recipe for life? The chemistry can tell us. Hopefully, with Hubble and the upcoming ground-based 30-meter telescopes, we’ll be able to tell a story.

“We can build a picture of hundreds of these things and tell how often it looks like Earth and how often it looks weird and strange. Who knows, maybe we’ll find stuff we haven’t thought of yet.”

For more information, please contact fred.lewsey@admin.cam.ac.uk

Ten years ago Dr Robert Henderson held admissions interviews for Emmanuel College in a house shared with third year undergraduates.

The students who lived in the house tried to make the waiting area more friendly. They bought a pink fluffy hippo and put it on the chair on the downstairs landing.

There were two sorts of candidates, Dr Henderson found. Those who picked up the hippo, put it on the floor, and sat on the chair, and those who waited next to the chair, looking at the hippo with suspicion.

“I believe there are Cambridge graduates in their 30s saying to each other, “thank God I passed the hippo test!” he told his audience of 180 state school teachers from across the UK.

Of course, there is no devious hippo test, and no rugby ball challenge, and no newspaper waiting to be set on fire. The state school teachers, who had come to Cambridge for the 2013 Teachers Conference, were advised that the only thing an applicant should expect at their interview is to be asked subject-focused questions to which they don’t immediately know the answer, and that they should be prepared to think out loud while tackling the question.

The interview workshop, delivered by Dr Robert Henderson, Senior Tutor and Admissions Tutor for Science, Emmanuel College, and Dr Sam Lucy, Admissions Tutor for Newham College, was the final session in a three-day programme designed to give teachers the latest information about the University’s application and selection processes, and to offer an insight into student life at Cambridge through staying and dining in a Cambridge College.

Louise Rodgers and Dominic Sinnett travelled from Leeds to take part in the Conference.

“The 2011 Conference was extremely useful, for practical tips about interviews, and the contacts with the Colleges,” said Louise, Head of 6th Form at Lawnswood School, Leeds.  “The main benefit for me this time has been the confirmation that I’m doing the right thing for my students.  It’s just as important to check that you are doing it right as it is to learn new things.”

“It has been good to experience the sincerity of the University’s commitment to reaching out,” said Dominic, Director of 6th Form at St Mary’s, Menston.  “The academics have been clear about what they are looking for – and about the fact there are no tricks!

“We want the same thing -  students who are engaged, and knowledgeable, and who are encouraged to love learning, and who think creatively and discuss ideas.

“The Conference has given me clarity about what I am trying to achieve, and ideas to take back to school. It’s been an opportunity to remember what matters in education.”

Alison Haselden, Year Manager at St Wilfrid’s C of E Academy, Blackburn, is also back at the Conference for the second time.

“I wanted to come back to reinforce what I’d learnt in 2011, and to pick up on the finer details."

For Alison, the Conference is an opportunity for working with others. “The opportunity to talk to the academics and get their views on recent developments as well as the concerns that we share, and talking to other schools – it’s a unique atmosphere and opportunity.

“I feel able to go home and empower my students and able to raise the aspirations of all students in our Academy.”

Dr Mike Sewell, Director of Admissions for the Cambridge Colleges, said “There has been an invigorating buzz throughout the whole event, sustained by the commitment and thoughtful engagement of the teachers.

“We hope they will take home to their students the message that Cambridge is a welcoming, accessible and friendly place to study as well as an exciting one rich with academic opportunities, and that the chance come and study here is open to all with the ambition and aptitude.

“The Conference has helped us to begin new conversations and strengthen existing relationships. We look forward to keeping these lines of communication flowing openly and freely in the future.”

• The 2013 Teachers’ Conference was supported by The Sutton Trust and Cambridge International Examinations.

I often find myself wondering what Britishness is: where it begins, where it ends and whether certain individuals can ever claim it without their claims being questioned. It’s been a good few years for reflection on our national identity. Margaret Thatcher’s recent passing inspired editorials, articles and interviews considering her legacy – her rescue or deformation of this thing we call ‘Britain’. The Olympics last year saw the most unrestrained celebrations of Britishness – and the most transcendent presence of the Union Jack – that many of us have ever witnessed. The riots in 2011 incited numerous pronouncements on why the rioters, because of their actions or – as David Starkey would have it in his infamous declaration on Newsnight that ‘the white have become black’ – because of their colour, were not, really, British like we are.

Add to this UKIP, the Scottish referendum, a royal marriage, the EU, educational reform pitched as a part of international economic competition, and the ever-present and seemingly ever-intensifying fear of immigrants, what is and isn’t Britishness has been, recently, everywhere.

I wonder what Britishness is in part because British national identity sits at the centre of my research. I’ve just completed a project that analyses the writing of World War II-era Caribbean migrants to Britain. This cohort, whose ranks include the likes of V S Naipaul, Samuel Selvon and George Lamming, arrived in and around the time of the Empire Windrush, landed in this country as British citizens, but quickly discovered that – despite their passports and full inculcation within a British educational system that taught them more about the ‘mother country’ than about their own home islands – they were not considered ‘British’ at all.  They were outsiders; members of a body of migrants initially welcomed as supporters of post-War reconstruction but then quickly refigured into strange presences and problematic occupants of the state. While they are ‘not workshy,’ claimed a Times columnist in 1954, ‘two immigrants have the productivity of about one good English workman’; they are ‘said not to like working in high temperatures, rather surprisingly, and some managers think the explanation is to be found in their inferior physique[s].’

The Caribbean writers I have spent the last several years reading, whose historical context I have slowly come to understand, were valued as authors only insofar as their work represented an ‘authentic’ image of the Caribbean and highlighted their difference from their British readers – the unspoken ‘us’ in the Times article above. Their reviewers praised depictions of places where, in the words of the Observer, the TLS and the Times of the era, ‘the problems of colour and of political freedom have brought conflicts for which no real solution is in sight’; where ‘the western heritage from the ancient Greeks is absent’; where the people are ‘emotional and excitable as children’. Difference, a not-us-ness, a not-Britishness, was sought and discovered by social and cultural commentators wherever they chose to look. The Caribbean colonies from which migrants sprung were regarded as fundamentally odd – as other worlds – as anything other than places owned, populated, and controlled by Britain for hundreds of years.

The reaction to this generation of Caribbean migrants rose again to my mind when reading Granta magazine’s current issue, devoted to their new crop of best ‘Young British Novelists’. As in any collection of this kind, some of the works selected shine brighter than others but what struck me as much as the merits of  the writing itself was the interesting way these writers’ ‘Britishness’ had to be framed. In light of all I’ve written above, it was unsurprising to see that the issue’s Introduction included comment on its authors’ origins, stating that there ‘are three writers with African backgrounds; one who was born in China and began only recently to write in English; another brought up on her parents’ sugar-cane farm in New South Wales; one from Pakistan, another from Bangladesh, a third a second-generation Indian from Derbyshire’. It was unsurprising, too, to see that this selection required the justification that ‘not once during our proceedings did we talk about the need for diversity, or gender balance, or a multiplicity of background’. These editorial reflections, for me, simply underscored the fact that not all Britons are created equally: that, for some, their ‘Britishness’ requires institutional support, and can never be straightforwardly claimed. The introductory comments also anticipate the type of online criticism offered in a response to an article about the Granta issue on the Telegraph website. Any number of comments could be selected, but my favourite, penned by someone using the pseudonym ‘sedge’,  lamented that Granta’s list promoted ‘mostly women and ethnic meeenorideees’, that ‘a celebration of multiculturalism […] seems more important that the quality of the writing these days’.

I often find myself wondering what Britishness is, in part, because of who I am. Born in Birmingham but raised in the United States, possessing clear memories of training my tongue to flatten the round vowels of the Midlands into the As and Os of New York, my own Britishness is something I and others have frequently questioned. (Often, here in the UK, I’m asked, ‘Where are you from?’; the common response to my response, ‘No, no. Where are you really from?’)

Thinkers in the field of postcolonial studies often present national identity as invented, as ‘narration’, as ‘imagined’, as a concept that is performed and policed, that requires constant assertions of what it is through declarations of what, and who, it isn’t. For many postcolonial scholars the nation is thus illegitimate, a way to construct out-groups – mainly foreigners and migrants, and in-groups – mainly the rich and/or educated in ways that enable exploitation. For many in this field, literature reveals the ways that aspects of national identity, presented as shared, singular traits – stiff upper lips, hard work, tolerance, fair play – are undermined by the day-to-day. In my eyes, literature does this and more besides. It is also a means to see the characteristics that transcend the nation, that make the writing of people born at all times in all places unite in ways that showcase something important that binds us tighter than the passports we carry. Whether that makes the nation, and Britain in particular, a notion that has reached its sell-by date remains, for me, open, undecided – a question that sits fixed as the final reason why I keep wondering what Britishness is.

Dr Malachi McIntosh's research in the Faculty of English and King's College focuses on representations of migrant and minoritised communities in contemporary Caribbean, British and American literature. He is a co-founder of the Contemporaries research group in the English department www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/contemporary/

For more information about the discussion, which is free and no registration required, visit http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2411/ 

Almost nothing persists to reveal the existence of Jews in the Byzantine Empire – no buildings or synagogues, coins or seals, pots or pans, charms or amulets. Such evidence of everyday life simply hasn’t survived for this now-vanished people, despite their living in a region that stretched from the southern Balkans, across Turkey to Crete and Cyprus for almost a millennium until the late 15th century.

Yet, evidence there is – if you look hard enough: inscribed on toppling tombstones, referenced in medieval travelogues and documented in fragments of Hebrew manuscripts that have only recently been deciphered. But because these threads are scattered so widely, often inaccessibly or in fragments, Byzantine Jewry has been largely neglected in histories both of the Empire and of the faith.

Now, new research is not only filling these gaps – and, in so doing, showing how the Jewish population had a distinctive identity and unique culture – but is also breathing new life into the sources. The key to the approach is the use of a geographic information system (GIS). Similar to the advanced technology that underpins Google Maps and the global positioning systems now used in millions of cars, GIS combines a relational database with an interactive map. Like these tools, the map is dynamic – when a question is asked of it, the system pulls data from the database to produce a map that gives specific information about a specific location at a specific time.

Although GIS has been around for some 50 years, its use in research had largely been restricted to the geographical sciences. Today, however, the tool is increasingly being used by researchers to map behaviours and events onto the landscape, whether it’s the relationship between the built environment and obesity, or emergency planning for terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

And now, historians such as Professor Nicholas de Lange, who leads the study Mapping the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire in the Faculty of Divinity, are turning to GIS as a means of managing and interrogating complex collections of data that relate to a defined location, and disseminating the information via the internet.

Maps have always been a linchpin of historical study but, as de Lange explained, GIS and the advent of web maps are providing new scope for visualising trends in historical data: “What’s exciting about GIS is it allows us to move into a different dimension. Conventional maps are two dimensional – they show the situation in a geographical area at a given point in time. We are adding a third dimension that frees maps from being static snapshots – it can be viewed backwards and forwards in time, instantly revealing changes.”

“The interactive nature of GIS is ideal for allowing researchers to investigate varied types of information quickly,” added Dr Gethin Rees, who built the GIS-enabled database in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Umeå in Sweden. “Users can assess the relevance of particular places to particular Jewish individuals or communities, and compare the data over whatever time period best suits them.” The resulting website was launched in March 2013 and is freely available to specialists and nonspecialists alike.

“We are trying to tell an historical story through the medium of a searchable map,” said de Lange. “In a history book, the author will inevitably have made judgements about the data they decide to show on a map, and this information can become outdated. GIS circumvents this – our database aims to have all of the data that are currently available, and that becomes available in the future. Inclusivity is important because the relatively unexplored nature of the subject means that it’s impossible to predict all the uses to which historians and other researchers will put the data.”

To this end, research associate Dr Alexander Panayotov, with the assistance of three researchers based in Italy, Greece and Turkey, has been painstakingly assembling data that can be dated and located relating to the presence of Jewish communities in the Empire from 650 until the end of the 15th century.

One of the richest sources of information is the writings of the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, who passed through Byzantium on his way to the Holy Land in the mid-12th century. His travelogue describes the location of Jewish communities, the number of Jews or Jewish households in each place, their communal leaders, social status, religious schools and sects.

Other sources of knowledge about Byzantine Jewish life include Hebrew inscriptions on tombstones that help to place individuals in specific locations at specific times; deeds, personal correspondence and legal documents, such as the marriage settlement and dowry in 1022 between Namer son of Elkanah and Eudokia daughter of Caleb, which provide social and economic history; and Hebrew manuscripts that contain the date and place of their writing. All the information these provide is being added to the growing database.

To date, around 1,000 separate sources have been analysed, describing over 1,000 individuals living at 150 locations and participating in 100 different occupations.

One of the greatest challenges the researchers have faced is the fact that GIS was designed for use with empirical data – facts and figures that are assured. “When you consider the age-related damage and fragility of many of the medieval sources, precision and reliability are sometimes compromised,” explained Rees. “Given the scarcity of information, even such problematic data cannot be overlooked in a project of this type. Luckily GIS is capable of handling ‘imperfect data’ much better than conventional maps and it’s possible to provide a digital indication of the uncertainty surrounding an event. That way, the user can judge whether to accept the evidence or not.”

The Byzantine Empire is held by scholars to be an important historical link between the ancient empires of Greece and Rome – with their rich cultural and intellectual traditions – and the modern world. Some have suggested that, without this link, the nature of European civilisation would have been very different.

“The Jewish population was a very interesting minority group in this time period,” explained de Lange, whose research was funded by the European Research Council. “We have learned through this project that Jews were engaged not only in a wide range of trades, but also in farming, and even owned property and lands, unlike Jews in much of Latin Europe.”

Thanks to the new digital resource, fresh insights can be gained into the involvement of Jews in trade, the effect of political change on their lives, the movement of Jewish communities around the Mediterranean and the factors that influenced the development of Jewish residential quarters in cities.

“Past scholarship tells us that historians have not been able to see some of these relationships clearly,” Rees added. “For instance, the importance of silk has been over-emphasised, probably based on Benjamin of Tudela’s interest in writing about this occupation. We now know that silk production makes up only a tiny fraction of the overall references to Jewish occupations.”

Acknowledging that the use of GIS for historical research is still in comparative infancy, the researchers are aware that it’s not easy to predict how the technology will develop. But by taking steps to ensure that their data are available in formats that allow others to link to the dataset and re-use it in the future, their hope is that it will interlock with other digital projects, to provide a seamless historical resource that criss-crosses time and place.

Paterson’s remarkable poetic and conceptual projects, inspired by her collaboration with leading scientists and researchers across the world, consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change.  Along with several other recent artworks, the exhibition also features a major new piece by the artist: Fossil Necklace. 

The piece, described by Andrew Nairne, Director of Kettle’s Yard as “highly original and imaginative”, is constructed from more than 170 carved fossil beads, each one representing a moment in time, and together charting the evolution of life on earth. The oldest fossil used is over 3.5 billion years old.

Paterson was inspired to create the necklace by her work with scientists at the Sanger Institute. The Institute’s Dr Chris Tyler-Smith explains: “We can all appreciate how fossils can be transformed into beads on a necklace to become a work of art (…) But how does genetics fit in? The answer is simple: DNA. There really is a ‘tree of life’ linking every living and extinct species. Fossils and DNA both provide partial glimpses of the same tree. The information is complementary”.

The necklace will be displayed in St Peter’s Church, next to Kettle’s Yard. Also displayed, in the main Kettle’s Yard Gallery, are other pieces that address themes of time and scale in different ways, including Paterson’s Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand project, achieved in collaboration with nanotechnology experts.

The exhibition will run from 26 April to 23 June 2013.

Curated by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and supported by Arts Council England, Thresholds saw ten of the most talented poets writing today matched with institutions such as Cambridge University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. 

From National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke’s poem Archaeopteryx about the world’s oldest bird in the Museum of Zoology, to Don Paterson’s A Pocket Horizon, based on an object in the Whipple, the poets have each written at least one work based on their unique access to Cambridge’s world-class collections during their two-week residencies. 

Members of the public can see all the commissioned poems in full from today at http://www.thresholds.org.uk 

Speaking at the finale event at the Fitzwilliam Museum on Wednesday night, when the poems received their premieres in front of a live and online audience, Carol Ann Duffy spoke of the project’s tremendous success at engaging not only the poets and museums themselves – but also the wider community, especially school groups and young people.

She said: “This is a threshold; a word that implies so much - a door that’s already open and it’s been up to us to step inside. The poets understood the idea and stepped inside the museums ready to talk and learn and write and blur the artificial boundaries between the arts and sciences. Having seen all the new poems, I’m stunned by what they have achieved.

“Every museum has had to think a bit differently about their collections, they’ve had a poet-in-residence who has asked them to look at the world through the lens of poetry and reading, as well as through their collections and research. This work must continue into the future, inspiring new writing and connecting collections and museums with each other, and with new audiences who are eager to listen and learn.”

Launched last year at the University’s Festival of Ideas, Thresholds saw 860 attendees at 12 events and poetry readings. One of the fundamental aims of the project was to engage with hard-to-reach individuals and form new connections with those from areas of low cultural engagement.

This aim was spectacularly achieved with 397 young people taking part in workshops run by the poets, including pupils from nearby Manor School and Soham Village College, as well as pupils from Red Balloon in Cambridge, who work with vulnerable and bullied youngsters.
One of the pupils from Soham said: “I was expecting it to be boring and when I told my friends they were like ‘I’d rather be in school’. Actually I’ve really enjoyed it and I’d rather be here than in school.” Another said: “It’s nice to have time to write what you want, to have freedom about what you want to write.”

Imtiaz Dharker, who was poet-in-residence at Cambridge University Library, said: “For me, Thresholds was another education. I grew up thinking science was a separate subject from art. What I learned from all my great guides at the Library has found its way into my poetry, not just in the project in many more of the poems I am working on. I need to keep coming back to fill up the fountain.”

The poets and their places of residency were: Sean Borodale - Museum of Classical Archaeology; Gillian Clarke - Museum of Zoology; Imtiaz Dharker - Cambridge University Library; Ann Gray - Cambridge University Botanic Garden; Matthew Hollis - The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences; Jackie Kay - Kettle’s Yard; Daljit Nagra - Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; Don Paterson - Whipple Museum of the History of Science; Jo Shapcott - The Polar Museum; Owen Sheers - The Fitzwilliam Museum.

Helen Taylor, Project Manager, and the driving force behind Thresholds, added: “This unique project has exceeded almost all of our expectations.  Our tenThresholds poets became a catalyst for a creative process which invited museums, collections, young people and new audiences to step over the thresholds of Cambridge University Museums and collections.  We have ten new poems with more to come and a community of poets, museums, young people and members of the public who have stepped inside and are eager to continue the conversation. ”

Intellectual repression and technological backwardness imperilled the efficiency of Soviet intelligence and left Stalin completely unprepared for the German invasion in June 1941, according to a forthcoming book on the history of 20th century Soviet intelligence.

Jonathan Haslam, professor of the history of international relations, says the degree to which repression and lack of technological advancement affected the Special Service [codes and ciphers] is "shocking", as was the massacre of personnel in the late thirties. He states: "The degree of inefficiency of the GRU's immediate predecessors in the thirties was also quite a surprise."

Professor Haslam is to publish the first book on the history of all the Soviet intelligence organisations, including the GRU [military intelligence] and the Special Service as well as the KGB. He will speak about his research, which will be published next year by OUP, as part of the Cambridge Series at the Hay Festival at 2.30pm on 24 May.

Professor Haslam says it is important to see the role of Soviet intelligence agencies in the round, rather than through the eyes of only one agency. The KGB, which is by far the best known agency, deals only in human intelligence and with a focus on the civilian rather than military targets.

The reason the KGB is almost the only agency researched is, says Professor Haslam, that by far the greatest leak of material from the former Soviet Union has been that of KGB documents and notes from such documents: notably the Mitrokhin archive [a collection of notes made secretly by KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin], of which a small portion was edited courtesy of MI6 by Christopher Andrew and the files of Alexander Vasiliev, who obtained access while a trusted Russian historian and later absconded with his notes to the United States. The GRU has held tightly to its secrets, as has the Special Service, says Professor Haslam.

He describes the research process as "slow and painstaking", mainly as a result of difficulties in accessing material other than that obtained by Andrew and Vasiliev. However, uncovering information which has never before been published is, he says, "very rewarding".

For Professor Haslam, one of the most surprising findings was the degree of negligence with which codes and ciphers (decryption) were treated under Stalin and his immediate successors.

Has the system changed substantially since the end of the Cold War, though? Professor Haslam says: "Undoubtedly awareness of past errors has improved matters, but institutions and old ways of thinking do not change rapidly. They are glacial, as generations tainted by poor practice die away. Competition with the main adversary is a much greater influence than the truths of history!"

More information: http://www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas/2013/03/28/hay-festival/ For tickets: www.hayfestival.org

Intellectual repression and technological backwardness imperilled the efficiency of Soviet intelligence and left Stalin completely unprepared for the German invasion in June 1941, according to a forthcoming book on the history of 20th century Soviet intelligence.

Jonathan Haslam, professor of the history of international relations, says the degree to which repression and lack of technological advancement affected the Special Service [codes and ciphers] is "shocking", as was the massacre of personnel in the late thirties. He states: "The degree of inefficiency of the GRU's immediate predecessors in the thirties was also quite a surprise."

Professor Haslam is to publish the first book on the history of all the Soviet intelligence organisations, including the GRU [military intelligence] and the Special Service as well as the KGB. He will speak about his research, which will be published next year by OUP, as part of the Cambridge Series at the Hay Festival at 2.30pm on 24 May.

Professor Haslam says it is important to see the role of Soviet intelligence agencies in the round, rather than through the eyes of only one agency. The KGB, which is by far the best known agency, deals only in human intelligence and with a focus on the civilian rather than military targets.

The reason the KGB is almost the only agency researched is, says Professor Haslam, that by far the greatest leak of material from the former Soviet Union has been that of KGB documents and notes from such documents: notably the Mitrokhin archive [a collection of notes made secretly by KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin], of which a small portion was edited courtesy of MI6 by Christopher Andrew and the files of Alexander Vasiliev, who obtained access while a trusted Russian historian and later absconded with his notes to the United States. The GRU has held tightly to its secrets, as has the Special Service, says Professor Haslam.

He describes the research process as "slow and painstaking", mainly as a result of difficulties in accessing material other than that obtained by Andrew and Vasiliev. However, uncovering information which has never before been published is, he says, "very rewarding".

For Professor Haslam, one of the most surprising findings was the degree of negligence with which codes and ciphers (decryption) were treated under Stalin and his immediate successors.

Has the system changed substantially since the end of the Cold War, though? Professor Haslam says: "Undoubtedly awareness of past errors has improved matters, but institutions and old ways of thinking do not change rapidly. They are glacial, as generations tainted by poor practice die away. Competition with the main adversary is a much greater influence than the truths of history!"

More information: http://www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas/2013/03/28/hay-festival/ For tickets: www.hayfestival.org