Held at Cambridge University’s Churchill College, the Churchill Papers contain a priceless collection of more than one million documents written by or belonging to the former British Prime Minister, who was born 141 years ago today.

The Churchill Papers now joins treasures such as the UK’s Magna Carta, France’s Bayeux Tapestry and Iran’s Persian epic poem, the Shahnameh in being added to the Memory of the World Register.

The Memory of the World Project is an international initiative to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climatic conditions, and wilful and deliberate destruction. It calls for the preservation of valuable archive, library and private collections all over the world, as well as the reconstitution of dispersed or displaced documentary heritage, and the increased accessibility to and dissemination of these items.

Sir Winston Churchill has become a global icon and his stand against fascism in 1940 is widely seen as a critical moment in 20th century history. The archive in Cambridge contains a wealth of unique drafts, letters and papers that are not duplicated elsewhere.

Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “The archive of Sir Winston Churchill is unique and irreplaceable. It is the evidence that underpins the story of one of the most remarkable leaders of the modern era, whose stand against fascism in 1940 helped shape the world of today.

“It includes his original annotated notes for his famous international broadcasts and correspondence with the great politicians, military leaders, authors, scientists and thinkers of his age.”

Churchill’s post-1945 papers were passed to Churchill College in 1969 by his widow Clementine Churchill. The college built and opened the Churchill Archives Centre in 1973 and Sir Winston’s pre-1945 papers were transferred to the Centre from Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1974-75.

The archive allows unrivalled access into the life, times and mind of Churchill; from his early correspondence with his family, right through to letters from the 1950s where he called for a summit with the Soviet Union.

But it is the material related to his stand against Hitler and fascism that represents the heart of the collection. Among the notes and drafts for his many great speeches are his annotated copies of his ‘finest hour’ speech in June 1940.

Packwood said: “The page is covered with his handwritten annotations in red and blue ink. It highlights how much care and attention Churchill put into this speech. He knew how much was riding on this. The country was facing a huge national crisis. France had capitulated and Britain was facing the prospect of attack and invasion.

“As you move from first draft to finished speaking notes the speech undergoes a transformation. The final note is set out in a blank verse format, set out like the Book of Psalms. It looks like poetry, it brings it to life, it gives him, I think, the rhythm, it enables that great Churchill oratory. Nowhere is that more evident in this speech than in the very final page, that great crescendo.”

All images are reproduced with the permission of the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust. Images of the speech and childhood letter are also copyright of the Estate of Winston S Churchill courtesy of Curtis Brown, London.

Other treasures of the archive include his speeches on the rise of Nazism and Munich in 1938, his opposition of communist domination of Eastern Europe in 1946 – including the speech where he coined the term ‘iron curtain’ – and letters where he wrestled with the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb.

The Churchill Papers also contain material relating to political reform and social change in Britain, British policy in India, the shaping of the Middle East and Europe and the rise of the United States as a global power.

As well as his letters to US Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, the archive holds letters to Charles De Gaulle, Stalin, six British Prime Ministers, Gandhi, Nehru and writers, painters and actors such as HG Wells, Walter Sickert and Laurence Olivier.

Dr Alice Prochaska, Chair of the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust, which owns the papers for the nation, said: “It is a fantastic privilege and a very great pleasure to see the Sir Winston Churchill Archive inscribed at as part of the Memory of the World.  This amazing documentary resource brings benefit to scholars, schools and citizens: a legacy to future generations from one of the world’s greatest leaders; and a source of endless fascination and inspiration for students and citizens in every nation.”

We’re exposed to music for nearly 20% of our waking lives. But much of our musical experience seems to be a mystery. Why does some music bring us to tears while other pieces make us dance? Why is it that the music that we like can make others agitated? And why do some people seem to have a natural ability to play music while others have difficulty carrying a tune? Science is beginning to show that these individual differences are not just random but are, in part, due to people’s personalities.

My colleagues and I have published research showing that people’s musical preferences are linked to three broad thinking styles. Empathisers (Type E) have a strong interest in people’s thoughts and emotions. Systemisers (Type S) have a strong interest in patterns, systems and the rules that govern the world. And those who score relatively equally on empathy and systemising are classified as Type B for “balanced”.

Research from the past decade has shown that 95% of people can be classified into one of these three groups and that they predict a lot of human behaviour. For example, they can predict things such as whether someone studies maths and science, or humanities at university. For the first time, we have shown that they can predict musical behaviour, too.

Matching music with thinking style

To study this phenomenon, we conducted multiple studies with over 4,000 participants. We took data on these participants’ thinking styles and asked them to listen to and indicate their preferences for up to 50 musical excerpts, representing a wide range of genres. Across these studies, we found that empathisers preferred mellow music that had low energy, sad emotions, and emotional depth, as heard in R&B, soft rock, and singer-songwriter genres. For example, empathising was linked to preferences for “Come Away With Me” by Norah Jones and Jeff Buckley’s recording of “Hallelujah”.

On the other hand, systemisers preferred more intense music, as heard in hard rock, punk and heavy metal genres. Systemisers also preferred music with intellectual depth and complexity as heard in avant-garde classical genres. For example, systemizing was linked to preferences for Alexander Scriabin’s “Etude opus 65 no 3”. Importantly, those who are Type B, had a tendency to prefer music that spans more of a range than the other two thinking styles.

In our most recent study, published in the Journal of Research of Personality, we found that people’s personality traits can also predict their musical ability, even if they don’t play an instrument. Our team worked with BBC Lab UK to recruit over 7,000 participants and assess them for five distinct personality dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism/emotionality stability. We also asked them to conduct various tasks that measured their musical ability, including remembering melodies and picking out rhythms.

We found that, next to musical training, the personality trait of openness was the strongest predictor of musical sophistication. People who score highly for openness are imaginative, have a wide range of interests, and are open to new ways of thinking and changes in their environment. Those who score low on openness (or who are “closed”) are more set in their ways, prefer routine and the familiar, and tend to have more conventional values. We also found that extroverts who are often more talkative, assertive, and excitement-seeking had greater singing abilities.

Furthermore, we could apply this even to people who did not currently play a musical instrument, meaning there are people who have a potential for musical talent but are entirely unaware of it.

Music therapy

These new findings tell us that from a person’s musical taste and ability, we can infer a range of information about their personality and the way that they think.

This research shows there are factors beyond our awareness that shape our musical experiences. We hope that these findings can be of help to teachers, parents, and clinicians. Based on information about personality, educators can ensure that children with the potential for musical talent have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument. Music therapists can use information about thinking style to help tailor their therapies for clients, too.

We are also interested in how knowledge gained from science can help children and adults on the autism spectrum who have difficulties with communication, as we recently wrote in the journal Empirical Musicology Review. This could also help people process emotions after experiencing a psychological trauma and when grieving a loss. In fact, initial findings from our lab suggest that people who experienced a traumatic event in childhood engage with music quite differently in adulthood than those who did not experience a trauma.

If you want to find out how you score on musical ability, preferences, and personality, you can take these tests at www.musicaluniverse.org.

David Greenberg, PhD candidate, psychology, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

Andy Martin spent much of the past year with author Lee Child as he wrote the 20th novel in his Jack Reacher series. Here he describes Child’s bold approach to writing.

Nobody really believes him when he says it. And in the end I guess it is unprovable. But I can put my hand on heart and say, having been there, and watched him at work, that Lee Child is fundamentally clueless when he starts writing. He really is. He has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. And the odd thing is he likes it that way. The question is: Why? I mean, most of us like to have some kind of idea where we are heading, roughly, a hypothesis at least to guide us, even if we are not sticking maps on the wall and suchlike. Whereas he, in contrast, embraces the feeling of just falling off a cliff into the void and relying on some kind of miraculous soft landing.

Of course he is not totally tabula rasa. Because he, and I, had a fair idea that the name Jack Reacher was going to come up somewhere in this, his 20th novel in the series.

It’s probably a defensive reflex gesture, but I sometimes like to joke that, when I had this crazy idea of writing a book about a novelist working on a story from beginning to end, I first contacted Amis/Tartt/Franzen/Houellebecq and when they were unavailable I only asked Lee Child as a desperate last resort. The reality is he was the first writer I thought of. He has always struck me as a blessed (and I don’t mean by that successful) and exemplary incarnation of what Borges called “the spirit of literature”. He is, more than anyone I can think of, a pure writer, with a degree zero style. Maybe sub-zero. He doesn’t plan. He doesn’t premeditate. He loves to be spontaneous. Which explains two things: One: that he said yes to my proposal. “I’m starting Monday”, he wrote, “so if you want to do this you’d better get over here.” And, two: that he also said: “I have no plot and no title. Nothing.”

When I got there, on September 1 of last year, to his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, overlooking Central Park, just up the street from where John Lennon once lived (and where he was shot dead by a deranged fan), all he had was sublime confidence. And a title, which he had come up with the night before: Make Me. He just liked the sound of it.

Pencilled in

It had to be September 1. It’s a ritual with him: 20 years to the day since he went out and bought the paper and a pencil with which to write his first novel, Killing Floor. (It had to be a pencil: he decided he couldn’t really afford anything better, having just been sacked from his job in television). When he sat down to write the first sentence, all he had in his head was a scene, a glimpse of a scene: a bunch of guys are burying someone, a big guy, using a backhoe (or JCB). He had no idea who they are, why they are doing this, or who the big guy is either, other than that his name is Keever.

So he wrote the following sentence: “Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy.” I was looking over his shoulder, but I was about a couple of yards or so behind him, perched on a couch, so I had to peer hard at the screen. All I could make out was the “-ing”. It was enough for me. Good start I thought: participle, verb, action. I had to know more. But he didn’t know more, at this point. We discussed the first couple of pages, when they popped up out of his printer. He knew it had to be third-person. No dialogue, but he tried to capture something of the vernacular in a Flaubertian style indirect libre. And Reacher, when he gets off the train in the small town of Mother’s Rest, in the midst of “nothingness”, has no absolutely no idea what is going on.

Which was exactly how Lee Child felt. For the next few months I looked on with a degree of anxiety. Maybe he would never finish this one. The whole project looked doomed. Reacher was wandering around this small town, trying to work out mainly why it was even called Mother’s Rest. He didn’t even know that Keever was a dead man at this point. He was a fairly useless detective, because he couldn’t even figure out what the crime was, let alone solve it.

Wandering spirit

So too Lee Child. He wandered around New York, then drifted off to the West Coast, then Madrid, then Sussex, and still had no idea what the hell was going on in his book. If it was a book. Around Christmas time I spoke to him on the phone and he said: “Maybe it’ll make a good short story.” And added: “Maybe I should go back and work in television. I hear it’s improved a lot since my day.” And tossed in stray remarks like: “I guess I’m all out of gas.” He was partly winding me up of course – if he didn’t finish then neither would I. But after Phase One in his writing (what he calls “the gorgeous feeling” of the beginning) there is a Phase Two, which puts him in mind of Sisyphus and his travails. He struggles and meanders. Smokes more and drinks more black coffee, if it is possible to drink more black coffee. Puffs on the occasional joint in hope of inspiration finally striking.

Some time in January, it started to crystallise in his mind and he gave me the Big Reveal. Looking back at my notes, I see that I said to him, in a tone of mixed awe and horror: “You evil mastermind bastard.” I realised that there was a simple mistake I had been making all along. I had been mixing him up with his hero Jack Reacher. Whereas I now realised what I should have realised long before that he was also every single bad guy he had ever dreamed up. All those fiendish plots were actually his. The role of Reacher was to stop him plotting and for all I know taking over the world. Reacher keeps the author in check.

‘He stopped, so I stopped’

Then, in his phrase, it was the “marathon sprint” to the end. He got to the final page on April 10, 2015, surviving on a diet of Sugar Smacks and Alpen and toast, garnished with mucho caffeine and nicotine.

Having feared he would never get to the end, I was not sure I really wanted him to finish. Or whether I should be there to watch. It really seemed as if I was transgressing and crossing the line into some sacred place. I was bearing witness to the creative process dying. But without which the book itself could never be born. Last word: “needle”. “Moving … needle”. The whole book was there.

He stopped, so I stopped. That was the rule. I started when he started, so I had to finish when he did, or the day after anyway. No additions, no time for further reflection. It all had to be done according to the same principle he had adopted. Even before he had written the first sentence, he turned to me and said: “This is not the first draft, you know”. “Oh - what is it then?” I asked naively. “It’s the ONLY DRAFT!” he replied, with definite upper case or at least italics in his voice. He didn’t want to change anything, so neither could I.

Hence it took me several months to work out why it was that he worked in this fundamentally terrifying, angst-inducing way. Actually several explanations have occurred to me: sloth for one. He just can’t be bothered. And then there is what he says, which is that he would be “bored” if he knew what was coming next. But contained in that statement is a hint of what I think is the case and in fact is the secret of his whole writing.

Lee Child writes his books as if he were the reader not the writer. When he is sitting at his desk in that back room in Manhattan he is only typing. The real work takes place when he is “dreaming”, when he is being just another reader, wondering what is coming next, waiting to find out. It probably explains too why he allowed me to look over his shoulder and watch his sentences taking shape even before he knew how they would end. He feels a natural sympathy with readers because he is one.

I sometimes like to claim - with absurd grandiloquence - that my book is some kind of first in the history of mankind, sitting around watching another guy write a whole book: but in fact that would be a lie, because I had to run off from time to time so as not to curl up and die of involuntary inhalation. But the “first” that I really would like to lay claim to is this: I am the first reader of a Lee Child novel to read it slowly. I had to keep stopping because he kept stopping. Because he really had no idea what was coming next. “Why did you stop there?” I asked him one day, feeling he hadn’t really written enough for that day. “I had to stop there,” he said. “I have no idea who that guy in the Cadillac is.”

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

Research at the University of Cambridge to support the UK’s infrastructure and cities has received further backing in the form of two major funding initiatives. The Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) has secured a further five years of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Innovate UK; while the UK Collaboratorium for Research in Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC), of which Cambridge is a partner, has secured £138 million of funding, to be match funded from other sources, as part of last week’s spending review.

The additional funding to CSIC will allow it to build on its significant achievements over the past five years to become a widely-recognised hub for the infrastructure and construction industry, bringing together leading academics and industrialists, developing a faster route for innovation adoption, providing an ecosystem for building confidence in new innovations and enabling their timely implementation and exploitation.

“CSIC will continue to engage with business leaders and decision makers in key markets to ensure that our work continues to meet industry needs, and that industry leaders are well informed of the value that ‘smart’ innovations in infrastructure and construction can bring to their business,” said Jennifer Schooling, Director of CSIC. “CSIC’s ability to deliver value is unrivalled. Our outputs present real opportunities to make major improvements in how we create new infrastructure.”

There has already been substantial impact of CSIC’s activities in terms of the wide variety of tools and technologies - including fibre optic strain measurement, UtterBerry ultra-low power wireless sensor motes, vibration energy harvesting devices and CSattAR photogrammetric monitoring system - recently deployed on some of the largest civil engineering projects including Crossrail, National Grid, London Underground, CERN and the Staffordshire Alliance.

The application of CSIC’s capability and knowledge is now being broadened to new markets including water infrastructure, highways and power.

“Securing this funding for the next five years offers a wide range of opportunities to take CSIC’s work forward and embed a culture of innovation adoption in the infrastructure and construction industries,” said Schooling. “CSIC cannot achieve this alone – working with industry is the key to our success to date and we always welcome approaches from industry partners seeking to collaborate.”

Professor Philip Nelson, CEO, EPSRC, said: “The Centre will continue its leading role within the UK by increasing the lifetime of ageing infrastructure, making it more resilient, and making construction processes more efficient by using smart sensing technology. This collaborative research between academia and industry will increase the UK’s competitiveness, lead to savings quantified in millions of pounds and provide technology that can be exported for UK based companies.”

Kevin Baughan, Director of Technology and Innovation at Innovate UK said: “The work of CSIC has helped to demonstrate the value of smart infrastructure to the construction industry, and this is reflected in the recognition of innovation at the heart of the future plans of the construction leadership council. By extending funding for a further five years, we underline our support for their commitment to raise the commercialisation bar even higher. This will help companies of all sizes grow through leveraging the excellent UK science base in smart infrastructure.”

UKCRIC is a collaboration of 14 UK universities which aims to provide a knowledge base to ensure the long-term functioning of the UK’s transport systems, energy systems, clean water supplies, waste management, flood defences and the development of SMART infrastructures.

Outside national security and medicine, UKCRIC will be one of the largest collaborative research projects in the UK. Current national and international partners include: Bristol City Council, Network Rail, Mott MacDonald, Buro Happold, Atkins, National Grid, DfT, EDF and Thames Water, with many more partners to follow. In order to tap further into the UK’s expertise and creativity UKCRIC’s founding core of 14 universities will be expanded over the coming years.

Cambridge will receive funding through UKCRIC which will be used to support research in the application of advanced sensor technologies to the monitoring of the UK’s existing and future infrastructure, in order to protect and maintain it.

UKCRIC programmes will integrate research on infrastructure needs, utilisation and performance through experiments, analysis, living labs and modelling. This will provide a new combination of decision support tools to inform infrastructure operators, planners, financiers, regulators, cities, and government on the optimisation of infrastructure capacity, performance and investment.

Recently, an auction of a dinosaur skeleton, discovered in Jurassic-aged rocks in the US, was held in West Sussex, England. The skeleton was that of a largely complete, immature, three-metre long carnivorous dinosaur: Allosaurus fragilis– “delicate strange reptile”. It was anticipated that the specimen would sell for somewhere in the region of £300,000-£500,000. Interestingly, bidding stopped before the reserve price was reached, so the specimen is still on the open market.

The price or value of fossils has a history that is practically as long as the science of palaeontology (the study of fossils) itself. Believe it or not, the tongue-twister “she sells seashells on the seashore” has its origin in the work of one of the earliest and most celebrated fossil collectors, Mary Anning. Mary lived during the early decades of the 19th century and had the knack of finding fossils, including those of seashells – bivalves, brachiopods, belemnites and ammonites – along the shores of Dorset and in the crumbling Jurassic cliffs, which she then sold.

Dinosaurs are fossils and do have a value, but I am only really interested in their value as scientific objects. Here are some of the discoveries that really have made a difference to science.

Megalosaurus

Pride of place must go to Megalosaurus bucklandi“Buckland’s big reptile” – because it proved to be the earliest discovered and scientifically described dinosaur.

It’s remains, though incomplete, began to be collected from quarries at the village of Stonesfield in Oxfordshire in about 1815. The bones, teeth and jaws were passed to Oxford University Museum, where they still reside, and were studied by the greatest living anatomist of the time Georges Cuvier, who visited Oxford (and its custodian William Buckland) from Paris to see the material.

William Buckland (with Cuvier’s help) described these fossils in a scientific article published in 1824. Buckland as well as Cuvier deduced that the bones belonged to a gigantic reptile, the like of which had not been seen before. Over the next decade and half more large fossil reptile bones were recovered in England and reviewed by the British anatomist Richard Owen. In 1842 Owen decided that these fossils were so utterly different from any known reptiles that they deserved to be classified as a completely new group of giant fossil reptiles: Dinosauria– “terrible, or fearfully great, reptiles”. Prior to 1842 nobody had heard of dinosaurs, the rest is, in essence, history. And Megalosaurus was the first.

Archaeopteryx

Charles Darwin profoundly disturbed the established Victorian world and galvanised scientific interest in evolution when he published his book On the Origin of Species in 1859. With masterly circumspection, his book laid out the reasons for concluding that organic life had changed or evolved over the immensity of geological time.

By an astonishing coincidence, a fossil was discovered in a quarry in southern Germany just one year after the publication of Origin. This fossil comprised the major part of the crow-sized, delicately-boned skeleton of a creature that was named by Richard Owen Archaeopteryx lithographica (“ancient wing on writing stone”).

The fossil was extraordinary because around the bones were seen the impressions of feathers (which of course implied that this was a bird) yet what was also seen in the skeleton were clear traces of teeth (no bird has teeth), hands with three well-developed clawed fingers (no bird has clawed fingers of that type) and its tail comprised a long string of small bones from which radiated a fan of feathers (no bird has a long string of tail bones).

This animal was an absolutely perfect “missing link” that connected living birds with feathers, to the group of scaly reptiles with teeth in their jaws, clawed fingers and long bony tails. Just a few years after this discovery was announced a friend and colleague of Darwin’s, Thomas Henry Huxley, suggested on the basis of the structure of Archaeopteryx, that birds and dinosaurs (not just any old reptile) were close relatives.

Not many agreed with Huxley at the time, but he has been proved to have been absolutely correct. Its original remains are preserved at the Natural History Museum, London.

Diplodocus

Andrew Carnegie was a profoundly wealthy industrialist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the latter half of the 19th century. After he had amassed his fortune, Carnegie began to spend his money philanthropically. News came to him of the discovery of impressive dinosaur skeletons in the American mid-west so he decided he wanted one for his new museum (The Carnegie Museum) in Pittsburgh. So he financed expeditions to northern Wyoming and southern Utah to find some more dinosaurs. And find them they did, including a near complete skeleton of the biggest dinosaur discovered to date.

The skeleton was named Diplodocus carnegiei– "Carnegie’s double-beam". The entire animal, as reconstructed (with just a few additions for completeness, such as “borrowed” front feet from another animal altogether) was over 25 metres long and dwarfed in size and completeness anything discovered up to that date.

So proud of this dinosaur was Carnegie that he had many copies cast in plaster and sent to museums around the world. The giant dinosaur in the main hall of the Natural History Museum in London is a cast of Carnegie’s Diplodocus.

Deinonychus

In the mid 1960s a young palaeontology professor, John Ostrom from Yale University was exploring the badlands of Montana looking for dinosaur fossils. What he found was to change our understanding of dinosaurs, their biology and behaviour in the most extraordinary way. Ostrom discovered the scattered remains of a medium-sized predatory dinosaur which he studied and then named Deinonychus antirrhopus– “Terrible claw with a counterbalance”.

He realised that this animal was a fast moving, highly intelligent, keen-sighted predator (not at all the slow, lumbering and slow-witted image of the dinosaur that was current at the time). He also showed that it was remarkably bird-like in its anatomy, and suggested that the bird similarities suggested that birds and small predatory dinosaurs were so closely similar that birds probably evolved from them.

These were highly controversial views at the time, even though they echoed the early ideas of Thomas Huxley in the 1860s. They also posed serious biological questions: if birds and dinosaurs of this type are related could it be that some dinosaurs were more like birds in a biological sense? The debate raged for decades.

Scelidosaurus

I include this dinosaur, which is somewhat less heralded than the others, because it really ought to have been a dinosaur that changed the world.

In 1858 dinosaur bones were discovered in the Jurassic cliffs at Charmouth and soon a nearly complete skeleton of this dinosaur was excavated and given to Richard Owen (the person who invented the Dinosauria) at the British Museum in London.

In the 1860s, Owen named it Scelidosaurus harrisonii– "Harrison’s shoulder reptile", but almost inexplicably failed to grasp the importance of its anatomy, or the way in which it pointed to the divisions between differing dinosaur groups and, in fact, why dinosaurs had proved so difficult to understand at the time.

Owen had the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone before him, yet he failed to grasp its importance. The probable reason why such an insightful scientist missed such an important moment is that he was simply too busy, including setting in motion the plans to have an entirely new national museum built. Without Owen the Natural History Museum in London, where the original bones of Scelidosaurus still lie, would not have been constructed. In fact, I am studying them at this very moment – hence my undoubted bias.

Sinosauropteryx

In 1996 an astonishing discovery was made in Liaoning, China. It comprised a virtually complete skeleton of a small, predatory dinosaur (smaller than, but generally similar to, Deinonychus).

It was described briefly in 1998 and named Sinosauropteryx prima– “First Chinese reptile wing” – but the most extraordinary feature associated with this fossil was that on the rocky slab upon which the skeleton was displayed there were traces of a wispy, dark-staining material that formed a sort of fringe following the body outline, as well as forming a dark spot in the area of the eye, and also formed a dark mass in the area of the gut/body cavity. The conditions of exceptional fossil preservation associated with these rocks in Liaoning seemed to preserve some remnant of the body tissues of the original animal.

Most intriguing was the fringe of tissue around the body: it looked like fur. The implication was that it had an epidermal covering (outer coat), perhaps an insulating layer. Given Ostrom’s earlier work on Deinonychus, the suggestion was made that this was indeed an insulated dinosaur that was able to keep its body warm (rather like a modern bird using fine down-like feathers that might have been preserved as a halo-like fringe when fossilised).

This and subsequent discoveries demonstrated the wisdom of Huxley’s intuition based largely upon Archaeopteryx and the validity of Ostrom’s work on Deinonychus. We now know that many (but not all) dinosaurs were feathered, and that some were capable of flight and some were indeed the progenitors of modern birds.

David Norman, Reader in Paleobiology, Curator of Palaeontology, Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

Following the statement of Prime Minister David Cameron to the House of Commons entitled: "Prime Minister’s Response to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the Extension of Offensive British Military Operations to Syria", Dr Veronika Fikfak and Dr Hayley J Hooper discuss the questionable international legality of military action, the strategic use of parliament and its potential impact upon the emerging Consultation Convention, and the responsibility of MPs to hold government to account across a broad range of relevant domestic issues.

They analyse the impact of the way government shares intelligence information with the House of Commons, especially in light of the 2003 Iraq conflict, highlighting several relevant but under-discussed rules. Finally, they discuss the role of party political discipline on armed conflict votes.

Dr Fikfak researches in the fields of public law, human rights and international law. She is particularly interested in the interface between domestic and international law and is currently writing a monograph on the role of national judges in relation to international law. Dr Hooper is currently a Fellow at Homerton College, and her doctoral research at Balliol College, University of Oxford concerned the use of "closed" or "secret" evidence in the context of judicial review of counterterrorism powers, and its extension to civil procedure more broadly.

Drs Fikfak and Hooper are currently co-authoring a monograph on parliament's involvement in war powers entitled Parliament's Secret War (forthcoming with Hart Bloomsbury, 2016).

Law in Focus is a series of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty. Law in Focus is available on YouTube, or to subscribe to in iTunes U.

Other collections of video and audio recordings from the Faculty of Law are available at Lectures at Law.

More than 100 alumni and rowers marked the start of work on University of Cambridge's new boathouse with a traditional turf cutting ceremony held jointly by construction firm for the project Morgan Sindall and the three University rowing clubs.

The two-storey, four-bay boathouse, which will accommodate up to 50 boats, will house the Cambridge University Boat Club, Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club and Cambridge University Lightweight Rowing Club. The start of work on the project was the culmination of eight years of fundraising, with donations having come from hundreds of Cambridge alumni as well as the University.

Ewan Pearson, a Cambridge Blue and chairman of the project, said: “We are delighted to have selected Morgan Sindall to construct this boathouse; it will bring our three clubs together under one roof for the first time. We have now reached the final stage in the development of new and world-class facilities for the scholar-athletes from the three clubs that row for the University against Oxford in the annual Boat Races. These facilities will greatly help us to boost our competitiveness.”

The building will be completed in October next year and will include a kitchen area, crew and coaches rooms, and two large changing rooms with shower facilities. It will have brickwork cladding, a distinctive zinc covered roof, external landscaping to the surrounding gated area and its own car park.

Bob Ensch, area director at Morgan Sindall, said: “We’re very pleased to be starting work on this important scheme which means so much to both current and former rowers. The boathouse has an important role to play as the hub and heart of the crews’ activities. These are athletes of the highest calibre and the boathouse has been designed to provide future generations of Cambridge rowers with a great base from which to train for the next 100 years.The three rowing squads will be able to start using the site from the beginning of their academic year as they start their preparation for the 2017 boat races.”

A growing number of Christian denominations, particularly within Protestant traditions, are softening their stance on transgenderism and embracing trans people as congregants and ministers, a new study suggests.

While the Church in general has a reputation for intransigence on questions of gender and sexuality, the research, which mapped the official positions of different denominations around the world, points to “a slow, sometimes grudging, but growing momentum for change among Christians within Protestantism especially.”

The Church of England, Lutheran denominations in Scandinavia, and numerous Churches in the United States are described as leading the shift towards a state of broad-based acceptance in which trans people are able to minister, teach and marry in their affirmed gender.

At the same time, the study acknowledges that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches remain officially opposed to transgenderism. “The overwhelming majority of the 2.1 billion Christians in the world belong to Churches which are officially unsympathetic to the claims of transgender people,” it observes.

The research was carried out by the Reverend Duncan Dormor, who is Dean of Chapel and Director of Studies for Theology at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. He undertook the study having been asked to outline Christian attitudes towards transgenderism for a book, The Legal Status of Transsexual and Transgender Persons.

The mapping exercise assessed the official positions of as many major Christian denominations as possible, drawing in particular on any formal statements that these Churches had issued. These were then grouped together by type, in order to provide a sense of which dominant viewpoints currently define Christianity as a whole.

The results suggest that many Churches have, within the last few years, become far less conservative on transgender issues than is traditionally assumed.

The study adds: “The ministry and marriage of transgender Christians has as often been grudgingly accepted as positively embraced, mostly within the last decade, and frequently in the face of significant unease of internal opposition. Nevertheless, there is growing momentum for change; for acceptance and welcoming of transgender Christians.”

The challenge transgenderism poses to some Christian denominations is rooted in “theological anthropology” - in simple terms a faith-based understanding of the human condition and what the difference between the sexes means. Many conservative Christians believe that God created two distinct forms of human - male and female - and that these sexed differences are an essential characteristic of what it means to be human.

In response, during the latter half of 20th Century, various groups emerged on the fringes of mainstream Christianity that not only welcome and affirm transgender Christians, but actively campaign for their rights. These developed into pan-Christian activist groups.

The new study suggests that ideas from these groups are now percolating through to moderate, mainstream Christianity as well. In particular, Protestant Churches, which focus heavily on pastoral responsibilities in the community and emphasise toleration of difference, are becoming increasingly open-minded towards trans people.

Much of the progress has taken place in the United States, where in 1996 the Presbyterian Church of Atlanta became the first mainstream Christian denomination to allow a religious leader, Erin (previously Eric) Svenson, to remain in post following surgery to change gender. Since then groups such as the Presbyterian Church USA (in 2010) and the Episcopal Church (in 2012) have followed suit, by welcoming the ordination of transgender clergy.

In Europe, change has come about not only from inside Christianity, but also from external legislation changes recognising transgender people, which has obliged Churches to adapt. Scandinavia, which incorporates some of the most progressive nations in the world in terms of the inclusion of LGBT people, also has some of the most inclusive churches, the study says.

The research also singles out progress made within the Church of England. Even though a clear position on transgenderism has yet to be drawn up by its governing body, the General Synod, there are currently at least eight transgender priests serving within the Church, of whom six were ordained prior to transition.

Equally, while the Church secured an exemption under the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 for clergy who did not wish to solemnise the marriage of transgender people, the survey points out that it also protected the rights of transsexual parishioners to use their parish church.

Further, when the Act was debated in the House of Lords, a number of bishops from the Church of England played a vital role in preventing the progress of an amendment that would have given religious bodies greater power and autonomy to restrict the participation of transgender people in the Church.

“The developing positions of these Churches illustrates that religion’s perspective on transgenderism is less monolithic than is sometimes believed,” Dormor said. “It is important to remember that it is plural and accommodates a diversity of views. It seems highly likely that the developments we have seen over the last decade or so will continue.”

The report acknowledges that similar developments are unlikely to take place in the Catholic Church, which remains formally opposed to transgenderism. It does, however, suggest that unofficially the Church’s attitude towards trans people may soften under Pope Francis, compared with his two predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

“Gender is one area in which Pope Francis to some extent represents intellectual continuity with the previous two Popes, but unlike them he does not see gender in exclusively ideological terms,” Dormor added.

“People or communities who are marginalised or suffering are a priority for him. That means that while the Catholic Church will continue to fight the EU on gender legislation, it may simultaneously become more responsive to groups of people and individuals who need to be supported because of their marginalised status.”

The study appears in The Legal Status of Transsexual and Transgender Persons, published by Intersentia.  

Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological “hardware” – it happens inside our skulls. Technology and science are now converging on a possible future where similar intelligence can be created in computers.

While it is hard to predict when this will happen, some researchers suggest that human-level AI will be created within this century. Freed of biological constraints, such machines might become much more intelligent than humans. What would this mean for us? Stuart Russell, a world-leading AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and collaborator on the project, suggests that this would be “the biggest event in human history”. Professor Stephen Hawking agrees, saying that “when it eventually does occur, it’s likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.”

Now, thanks to an unprecedented £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust, the University of Cambridge is to establish a new interdisciplinary research centre, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, to explore the opportunities and challenges of this potentially epoch-making technological development, both short and long term.

The Centre brings together computer scientists, philosophers, social scientists and others to examine the technical, practical and philosophical questions artificial intelligence raises for humanity in the coming century.

Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Director of the Centre, said: “Machine intelligence will be one of the defining themes of our century, and the challenges of ensuring that we make good use of its opportunities are ones we all face together. At present, however, we have barely begun to consider its ramifications, good or bad”.

The Centre is a response to the Leverhulme Trust’s call for “bold, disruptive thinking, capable of creating a step-change in our understanding”. The Trust awarded the grant to Cambridge for a proposal developed with the Executive Director of the University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh. CSER investigates emerging risks to humanity’s future including climate change, disease, warfare and technological revolutions.

Dr Ó hÉigeartaigh said: “The Centre is intended to build on CSER’s pioneering work on the risks posed by high-level AI and place those concerns in a broader context, looking at themes such as different kinds of intelligence, responsible development of technology and issues surrounding autonomous weapons and drones.”

The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence spans institutions, as well as disciplines. It is a collaboration led by the University of Cambridge with links to the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the University of California, Berkeley. It is supported by Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). As Professor Price put it, “a proposal this ambitious, combining some of the best minds across four universities and many disciplines, could not have been achieved without CRASSH’s vision and expertise.”

Zoubin Ghahramani, Deputy Director, Professor of Information Engineering and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, said:

“The field of machine learning continues to advance at a tremendous pace, and machines can now achieve near-human abilities at many cognitive tasks—from recognising images to translating between languages and driving cars. We need to understand where this is all leading, and ensure that research in machine intelligence continues to benefit humanity. The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence will bring together researchers from a number of disciplines, from philosophers to social scientists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists, to help guide the future of this technology and  study its implications.”

The Centre aims to lead the global conversation about the opportunities and challenges to humanity that lie ahead in the future of AI. Professor Price said: “With far-sighted alumni such as Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, and Margaret Boden, Cambridge has an enviable record of leadership in this field, and I am delighted that it will be home to the new Leverhulme Centre.”

In August 1939, the operational head of Britain’s Government Communication and Cypher School, Alistair Denniston, wrote to the Foreign Office about the need to recruit “men of the professor type” into the wartime code-breaking hub at Bletchley Park in order to help combat the Nazi threat.

Following the horror of marauding attacks in Paris, the British prime minister has announced he will be recruiting a further 1,900 personnel to the Security and Intelligence Agencies. “Professors” may also be able to add value to these organisations and wider society. The government should not forget the wealth of talent available within our universities to offer insight and depth to the judgments of decision-makers.

In my capacity as champion to the Partnership for Conflict, Crime & Security Research, I organised a workshop recently where four leading academics discussed how best to get research on religion and contemporary security challenges in front of politicians, policymakers and the press, to help them deliver better service to the public. The academics were historian of Muslim thought Robert Gleave; Kim Knott who researches ideologies, beliefs and decision-making; Peter Morey who explores trust between Muslims and non-Muslims, and John Wolffe who works on the interface between religion and security.

One key message from this debate was that those in positions of authority and influence must overcome the tendency to regard religious issues as marginal until they become a security risk. Religion is poorly understood, and while academic focus on definition can be dismissed as pedantry, there is a need for clarity when talking about religion and security – to avoid millions of devout people around the world being swept into a bucket labelled “terrorist”.

Improve religious literacy

For instance, research helps us to draw a distinction between religion and faith. Religion is defined by creed, doctrine, framework and practice; whereas faith is more personal, abstract, emotional and often at some distance from the teachings of established religious institutions.

We must improve religious literacy among politicians, policymakers, the press and the general public. In a security context, this should include a more nuanced understanding of the variants of institutionalised religion, while comprehending the universe occupied by men and women of faith.

A single office of responsibility in the government could act as a conduit for informing and shaping policy and legislation relating to religion and religious issues, including those linked to security and violence. An immediate priority for the office should be to inform efforts to address radicalisation, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice. This wouldn’t carry any extra cost if one of the government’s chief scientific advisors was asked to undertake this work, tapping into the wealth of expertise addressing these issues inside the nation’s universities.

Opinion-formers, including those in the press, must also resist the simplistic temptation to describe religion as the motive for acts of violence. In the same way, “Third World” insurgents during the Cold War, such as those in North Vietnam, were too easily defined by the Communist ideology they embraced.

How to dispel alienation

But closer attention needs to be paid to the relationship between faith and alienation. There is a wealth of research – including historian Kate Cooper’s work into the radicalisation of early Christian martyrs over 1,500 years’ ago – that can help us understand how alienation, especially of young people, leads to a sense of hopelessness that translates all too readily into violent resolve.

We must galvanise support for the public sector, faith groups and charities to promote engagement between polarised communities. But this is not a simple matter of issuing a commandment from on-high that: “thou shalt engage in mutually informative dialogue and develop trustful relationships”.

Evidence and experience, for instance from Northern Ireland, shows how different the certainties of macro-political strategies can be from micro-realities, leading to communities being filled with mistrust and disillusionment. Interventions tailored to dispel alienation and build trust must reflect local circumstances, with a strong emphasis on “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” solutions.

There are some powerful examples of how the arts can operate to communicate religious difference in our complex, multicultural society, but common artistic endeavor can also help heal divisions. For example, the UK-based Berakah Choir works to transcend barriers of faith and culture through collaborative activities, allowing the individual voice to be heard working in harmony with others to build a common humanity. There is much that could be achieved at a low cost to harness the arts to counter alienation.

Draw on academics as an asset

Western governments are deploying a range of strategies and tactics to deal with the threat posed by the so-called Islamic State. David Cameron is recruiting more spies, and parliament is discussing profound changes to the way in which digital intelligence is collected.

But we must not ignore the invaluable supply of knowledge and insight available from our men and women in academia. Research can provide evidence-based context to contemporary challenges, including an enlightened understanding of the place of religion and faith in a security context.

We can stop mistakes being made in terms of misguided policies and knee-jerk reactions. And researchers can help the design and deployment of interventions that make a real difference, focusing limited resources effectively.

It has been said that the scholars working in Bletchley Park saved countless lives and took one or more years off the duration of World War II. Let us hope that politicians, policy-makers and the press are enlightened enough to make full use of the contribution that university researchers can make to today’s security challenges.

Tristram Riley-Smith, Associate Fellow, Centre for Science and Policy; Director of Research, Department of Politics & International Studies, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

Two new monster movies are being released in the lead-up to Christmas, and each sports a very different kind of beast. There’s the man-made creation of Victor Frankenstein in the latest rendition of Mary Shelley’s gothic tale, a grotesque creature cobbled together from “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house”. And then there’s Krampus, an American re-working of the evil Austrian counterpart to Father Christmas.

The word “monster”, as this shows, covers all manner of things. Man-made, such as Frankenstein, folkloric demons such as Krampus, and then there are also the classical images of exotic peoples with no heads or grotesquely exaggerated features, or the kinds of impossible chimerical beasts inhabiting the pages of medieval bestiaries.

The etymology of monstrosity suggests the complex roles that monsters play within society. “Monster” probably derives from the Latin, monstrare, meaning “to demonstrate”, and monere, “to warn”.

So monsters, in essence, are demonstrative. They reveal, portend, show and make evident, often uncomfortably so. How they have been created over the centuries is much more indicative of the moral and existential challenges faced by societies than the realities that they have encountered. Though the modern Gothic monster and the medieval chimera may seem unrelated, both have acted as important social tools.

Early modern monsters

Until relatively recently in history, monsters close to home, such as deformed babies or two-headed calves, were construed as warnings of divine wrath. Monstrous depictions in newspapers and pamphlets expressed strong political attitudes. Traditional monstrous beasts such as basilisks or unicorns, that were banished to distant regions in maps, represented a frightening unknown: “here be dragons” effectively filled cartographic voids.

Simultaneously, however, monsters represented the wonderful diversity of divine creation, a playful “Nature” that produced a multitude of strange forms. Exotic beasts brought to Europe for the first time in the 16th century, such as armadillos or walruses, were often interpreted as “monstrous”. More accurately, they were made into monsters when they were defined as such: as things that did not fit into the accepted natural categories. An armadillo became a pig-turtle, while a walrus was a sea-elephant.

Beasts that subverted what was expected in some way actually reinforced categories by clarifying the defining criteria for these groups. By transgressing, they helped to determine boundaries. Because to define a deviant form, such as a “deformed” baby or calf, or a “monstrous” exotic creature, you have to define “normal”.

For example, the simple definition of a “bird” was something that had two legs, two wings, could fly and walk. Then two new creatures arrived in the 16th century that seemed to violate this definition. First, birds of paradise were brought to Europe in 1622 as trade skins with stunning, colourful plumes but no legs or wings. Their limbs were removed by the hunters who supplied the birds in New Guinea. The birds were interpreted by European naturalists as heavenly creatures that never landed, inhabiting the boundary between the avian and the angelic.

At the other end of the avian spectrum, Dutch sailors landing on Mauritius at the end of the 16th century encountered dodos. Though rarely brought to Europe physically, the descriptions and detached parts of dodos were used by naturalists to depict ungainly, fat birds. Not only did dodos not fly, they could hardly walk.

The dodo was therefore depicted as vast and gluttonous in late 17th-century accounts. It greedily consumed everything it came across, even hot coals. It was described as nauseatingly greasy to eat: one bird could apparently feed 25 men. This image was created by writers who had never seen the bird, and is not supported by current paleobiological evidence. The idea of the avian glutton embodied European anxieties about the rapacious colonial trading activities in the Indian Ocean, which brought a surfeit of riches to Europe. The engorged dodo became a scapegoat for the European sin of gluttony.

Monsters, therefore, are not self-evident; they are created to serve certain roles. Making things monstrous also added value. They became commercially lucrative things: oddities, curiosities and rare things were very marketable.

The market for monstrosity further motivated the literal creation of monsters: “mermaids” were assembled from pieces of fish, monkeys and other objects while “ray-dragons” were created from carefully mutilated and dried rays. These objects could be sold to collectors or displayed in menageries and freak-shows. Writing about and portraying virtual monsters helped to sell books and pamphlets.

Modern-day monsters

So how do we use our monsters today? One of the two monsters set to hit cinemas displays the dangers of hubristic human enterprise (Victor Frankenstein); the other provides a dark embodiment of Christmas-spirit gone awry (Krampus). Such monsters are images that embody the cultural or psychological characteristics that we as a society find difficult to acknowledge. By excising them, through fantastical narratives, we rid ourselves of the undesirable attributes they are perceived to carry. The cathartic consumption of monster-culture provides us with a safe, removed space to explore and excise social anxieties.

It also offers the illusion of absolution from them by externalising anxieties into ridiculous figures, such as Krampus. Monsters such as this proffer us pastiches of moral messages in easily-swallowed forms that both highlight their potential threat, and soothe us by defusing it.

Though it may not seem so, this has always been the most important role that monsters have played: they horrify us, yes, but ultimately their function is to remove what we find horrifying about ourselves. So we can recoil at the gory construction of Frankenstein’s monster, or shriek at the toothy maw of Krampus for a few hours, then leave them happily behind when the credits roll.

Natalie Lawrence, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

No-one knows how many human beings are trafficked each year. Reliable, comparable, and up-to-date figures for this worldwide trade are notoriously hard to come by. By its nature, trafficking in human beings (THB) is a furtive and fast-changing phenomenon – and one that is both difficult and dangerous to research.

It is estimated that there exist between 21 million (International Labour Organization) and 31.4 million (United Nations) victims of trafficking and modern slavery.  This shadowy trade overlaps and converges with the legitimate global economy, with illegal trades such as the internet’s ‘dark web’ and smuggling, as well as with illicit commerce – and, of course with terrorism.

Attempts to define THB, which is often mistakenly used synonymously with ‘people smuggling’, have resulted in no fewer than 22 definitions in academia (Salt & Hogarth, 2000). The EU, for example, earmarked 18 October as its ‘Anti-Trafficking Day’ while the UK calls the same date ‘Anti-Slavery Day’. While academics and policy-makers debate about the semantics, people continue to be bought, sold, and exploited like chattels.

Efforts to curtail this vile underground trade have been notably ineffective. Owing mainly to a lack of partnerships and knowledge-sharing between governments, NGOs, and supranational organisations, the number of people helped, according to the US Department of State, is small (around 48,000 or approximately 0.12% of the total) and the number of criminals convicted lamentable (around 4,000 or roughly 0.8% of the total).

If we are to gain an understanding of THB, convict more traffickers, and protect more victims and potential victims (following the current best practice from the USA of 4Ps – prevention, protection, prosecution and partnerships), we need to pinpoint and share the key data associated with it – and fathom the complex mechanisms used to enable and facilitate it. Research by Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe, for example, has shown that many victims are re-victimised within criminal justice systems which, failing to recognise their true predicament, prosecutes them as complicit criminals and/or illegal immigrants.

My research suggests that traffickers should not to be seen and explained through a moralistic lens as simply depraved persons. These are cynical business men and women who, spotting a gap in the market and by satisfying denied demand, seek to maximise profits and minimise risk, while considering the human beings they buy and sell as commodities.

Risk is minimised by THB being a ‘silent’ crime. Cases are extremely hard to prosecute and high conviction clearance rates difficult to achieve, for many reasons. Profits are maximised because people can be sold and re-sold, while being ruthlessly exploited (my research has found cases where the victim was ‘visited’ by up to 100 ‘clients’ each day). My research in Greece has corroborated findings in other countries that people can change hands up to 15 times, unlike drugs which can be sold only once and weapons two or three times – human beings are markedly more lucrative to criminals.

THB and slavery is thought to generate profits of approximately $31.6 - $150 billion per annum, making the trafficking of human beings the third most profitable transnational organised crime (although and unlike smuggling of persons, THB is not always transnational – internal trafficking takes place within a country’s borders), after drugs and counterfeit goods. The human costs of this most inhumane of crimes, which strips people of their basic human rights, are incalculable and damaging to all communities involved.

Lack of consensus about what constitutes trafficking in human beings led the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime (which was supplemented by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children) to devise an all-encompassing and lengthy, legal definition for ‘trafficking in persons’.

The UN definition came into effect on 25 December 2003 (and still has not been ratified by many countries as of today). It frames the crime (Act + Means + Purpose = THB), clearly within terms of coercion, threat of force, and abuse or exploitation of the vulnerable by the powerful. This description broadly matches public perceptions of THB.

Nonetheless, there is an even more insidious type of THB. It exists on the blurred boundaries of what is illegal or illicit and what is not – and it’s called ‘happy trafficking’.  This concept, shocking in its seeming contradictory nature, was first used some eight years ago to describe a novel THB typology – one in which female victims are sold a ‘happy’ story of a worthwhile employment opportunity in another country.

This positive even joyful narrative is, ironically and tragically, peddled by women who have usually been THB victims themselves. The psychological incentives behind the entrapment of these women are many and diverse, and my research has found that most frequently it is due to: severe despondence, confusion, spite, profiteering/not knowing other form of employment, Stockholm syndrome, and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Typically, these female victims, much like their ‘happy’ female recruiters, are poor, illiterate, powerless and, therefore, desperate.

‘Happy trafficking’ is not just a global reality but also a growing reality. Its increase presents a huge challenge at a time when society is both increasingly globalised and increasingly unequal. So, what is happy trafficking and who are the people involved in it?

My initial research focuses on sex-THB (or trafficking of human beings for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation) in and via Greece, and suggests that ‘happy trafficking’ can be divided into two distinct categories: trafficking of victims recruited mainly by women; and trafficking of victims recruited mainly by men.

In the first category, the female trafficker is frequently an acquaintance of the victim, or comes from the same region, and has usually been trafficked herself. Thus, she is able to feign a sense of happiness which reinforces her narrative and recruitment efforts. In the second category, the male trafficker, known in THB slang as ‘lover-boy’, deploys charm and seduction, frequently via the internet, and dupes girls (usually) into various forms of exploitation (eg marriages of convenience, benefits fraud, etc).

Let’s look first at trafficking of women recruited by women via ‘happy trafficking’. Participants of THB engage in a criminal trade that involves multiple layers, networks and areas of expertise. Examples include recruiters, debt-collectors, enforcers, transporters, and accountants/money launderers. Division of labour (whether within a criminal group or via outsourcing to external specialists) is a strategy that helps to spread risk and avoid detection.

Physical and psychological abuse is combined with financial incentives to turn victims into recruiters. Traffickers grant some victims who (due to sexually-transmitted infections and/or age) are no longer profitable, a degree of freedom. They are rewarded with token amounts of cash and gifts, while being coerced through other means to return to their home countries in order to recruit women. These are the women who, frequently, employ the technique of ‘happy trafficking’ in their recruitment efforts.

The adjective ‘happy’, in this case, refers to the victims-turned-traffickers’ practice of claiming to have had a positive experience in legitimate jobs in the West or elsewhere, hiding the fact that they have, for example, been forced into prostitution and therefore, been sexually, physically and psychologically abused for years on end.

Anti-trafficking researchers and experts maintain that these victims of ‘happy trafficking’ are subjected to a subtle form of psychological coercion with the result that they believe they will be rewarded if they comply and be punished if they do not. Finding themselves trapped, they become ‘happily’ complicit.

Some women who have been trafficked instead of recruiters, become pimps, brokering illegal or illicit commercial sexual transactions. Organised criminal groups (OCGs) employ women to run brothels, partly because criminal justice systems (CJSs) tend to be more lenient to female criminals than to male. In many parts of Eurasia, for instance, researchers have found that female prisoners are released when pregnant or mothers of children, and receive, due to bias, lighter sentences than men, often because they are found guilty only of low-level offences.

The second ‘lover-boy’ type of ‘happy trafficking’ is devious in different ways, but again focuses on recruiters working for OCGs. When men pose as ‘boyfriends’ and groom women to trust them and willingly travel with them, it is extremely difficult for law enforcement and border patrol agencies to identify the duplicitous and nuanced nature of what is going on – and even to prove that a criminal activity is taking place.

My research has shown that, frequently, the trafficker ‘marries’ his victim in order to obtain visas for EU countries or, in other cases, sends her alone overseas, claiming a delay in his departure and instructing her to meet a ‘friend’ on arrival. That ‘friend’ is usually part of the same OCG and almost always, a slave-trader and/or a brothel owner.

These sham marriages, or as EUROPOL calls them ‘marriages of convenience’, as a product of ‘happy trafficking’ and as cover, neatly eliminate the need for enlisting (and paying) a corrupt border official – for corruption is a historic, vital enabler of THB.  Furthermore, when a recruiter presents himself as a genuine spouse, the waters are conveniently muddied. How can a victim be aware of her predicament when she is travelling happily alongside the person she perceives to be her husband (or fiancé) on a plane or train, bound for a rich country where opportunities and jobs abound?

Once these women (and victims of ‘lover-boy’ trafficking are overwhelmingly female) have arrived at their destination, their ‘husbands’  or their ‘friends’, take away their travel documents and identity cards, holding them captive and exploiting them in many ways, in a country where they probably do not speak the local language and may well be perceived as illegal immigrants.

The total budget of combined global efforts to combat THB is around $350 million per annum, or just 0.23% of THB’s annual profit. In matters of THB, as in other crimes, law enforcement bodies and CJSs struggle to keep pace with the ingenuity of OCGs which increasingly make use of the internet as a facilitator and exploit established legal business structures – such as travel and au pair agencies – as cover and/or as enticing parts of the contrived, ‘happy’ recruitment story. That is where scholars and researchers must step in to foster partnerships and exchange evidenced-based findings.

With a view to contributing to such partnerships, I recently visited EUROPOL at The Hague at the invitation of its director, Rob Wainwright, who believes in the importance of partnerships with academia. I was appointed a member of EUROPOL’s Platform for Experts, EPE – an invitation-only, secure collaboration web platform for experts in a variety of law enforcement areas. EUROPOL has discovered that OCGs do indeed recruit using both types of ‘happy trafficking’, alongside the use of the internet. An emerging trend is for victims to come from the European middle classes, perhaps due to the ongoing socioeconomic crises in source countries.

Moreover, EUROPOL’s experts shared new trends related to transnational organised crime. OCGs self-launder their proceeds, exploit family and/or ethnic networks to run their operations, depend chiefly on cash transactions, and sometimes exploit their victims as cash couriers as well. Additionally, they have found that in order to launder their proceeds, OCGs invest in cash-intensive businesses, such as petrol stations or strip-clubs, which provide a veneer of legality.

‘Happy trafficking’ is just one of many recruitment techniques, employed by the perpetrators of the pernicious and illegal trade in human beings. Strong partnerships between law enforcement agencies and academia will contribute to reciprocal knowledge-sharing, as well as to more effective methods of confronting and curtailing such phenomena. I hope that my own research will contribute, in part, to the reduction of the crime-related suffering of others. 

George Papadimitrakopoulos is a postgraduate researcher and Alexander S Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Scholar at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge.

Salt Lake City’s preservation of the Wasatch watershed is an important model for protecting urban water sources through land use regulation and conservation, which could have important implications for preserving future water supplies against the effects of climate change in the American West, according to a new study. This example is currently absent from academic literature on ecosystem services, meaning that conservation discussions are instead dominated by models that focus on financial, ‘market-based’ incentives to protect watershed areas, which the researchers argue could be inappropriate in many circumstances.

The most prevalent model for water resource preservation is that of New York City’s Catskills/Delaware watershed, which is based on upstream resource users being paid to avoid harmful practices that might affect water flows and water quality, typically by beneficiaries who are downstream. These ‘market-based’ approaches (also known as Payments for Watershed or Ecosystem Services) have been widely promoted, but risk neglecting alternative approaches that do not always require monetary transactions to improve environmental outcomes.

In contrast, Salt Lake City’s management strategy allows regulated use of the watershed area for public recreation (unlike other forested catchments in the US where public access is prohibited to preserve water resources). In the Wasatch case, this means that the upstream catchment remains accessible, including for high impact uses such as skiing and mountain biking. Researchers argue that it is vital to consider these alternative strategies for solving the increasing water scarcity in the American West.

“While regulatory exclusion is often thought of as the only viable alternative to market-based incentives in managing ecosystem services, the management of the Wasatch watershed provides a third, yet under-recognised, successful conservation strategy for water resources,” says Libby Blanchard, lead author of the study from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Geography.

“The dominance of the Catskills example in discussions of watershed protection provides an unduly limited, and historically incomplete, perspective on interventions to secure water resources, and limits policy discussions about alternative conservation approaches,” she adds.

In the American West, unprecedented droughts have caused extreme water shortages. The current drought in California and across the West is entering its fourth year, with precipitation and water storage reaching record low levels. Droughts are ranked second in the US in terms of national weather-related economic impacts, with annual losses just shy of $9 billion. With water scarcity likely to increase due to advancing climate change, the economic and environmental impacts of drought are also likely to get worse. 

“The chances of a ‘megadrought’ – one that lasts for 35 years or longer – affecting the Southwest and central Great Plains by 2100 are above 80% if climate change projections are not mitigated,” says Blanchard. “As the West faces more frequent and severe droughts, the successful protection of watersheds for the ecosystem services of water capture, storage, and delivery they provide will be increasingly important.”

“The sufficient and effective protection of watersheds will become more challenging, so awareness of alternative, successful strategies is critically important,” adds Bhaskar Vira, co-author of the study also from Cambridge’s Department of Geography. “The management of the Wasatch is one such strategy that should be more widely recognised amongst policymakers and researchers alike seeking effective solutions to water scarcity.”

The economic and instrumental value of the Wasatch watershed was noticed by Salt Lake City’s government as early as the 1850s, when the first legislation to protect the city’s natural resources was passed. Salt Lake City uses two tools to protect its watershed: purchasing land for conservation, and regulating land use by restricting a variety of activities within the watershed such as cattle grazing. Recreation is not altogether restricted, but is negotiated with the local community to allow public use. The Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest is one of the most heavily visited national forests in the US, with 7 million annual visitors.

“Salt Lake City has been able to preserve the natural capital that protects its watershed while allowing recreational use. The preservation of the watershed actually boosts recreation, providing visitors with natural landscapes and unadulterated settings for mountain biking, hiking, skiing, and fly-fishing,” says Blanchard.

The city raises funds to buy land within the watershed through a surcharge on water customers’ monthly bills, which provides around $1.5 million each year to protect watershed lands from development. Since 1907, the city has managed to purchase over 23,000 acres of the watershed.

“Despite the popularity and power of the Catskills narrative to promote the preservation of ecosystems via market-based incentives, we found that this narrative is at best partial, and quite possibly flawed,” says Blanchard.

“The Wasatch’s absence in the ecosystem literature results in an incomplete perspective on interventions to secure watershed ecosystem services and limits policy discussions in relation to alternative conservation approaches. It is vital that such alternatives are given more recognition in order to find effective solutions for the protection of natural capital in the future.”

Reference:

Blanchard, L et al. "The lost narrative: Ecosystem service narratives and the missing Wasatch watershed conservation story" Ecosystem Services, December 2015. The paper can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2015.10.019 

Libby Blanchard’s research is funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust.

Inset image: Recreation in the Wasatch watershed (Libby Blanchard).

The University of Cambridge announced today the gift of £35 million from the estate of Ray Dolby, founder of Dolby Laboratories and its world-renowned Dolby Noise Reduction, Dolby Surround, and successor audio signal processing technologies, which have revolutionised the audio quality of music, motion pictures, and television worldwide.

The gift to Pembroke College is the largest gift to a Cambridge College in modern times and will make possible the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Court. The gift is also the largest single gift so far in the £2 billion fundraising campaign for the University and Colleges of Cambridge that launched in October.

Ray Dolby, who died in 2013 at the age of 80, received his PhD from Cambridge in 1961 as a Marshall Scholar and was a graduate student and Research Fellow at Pembroke College. It was in Cambridge that he met his future wife Dagmar and studied at the University’s world-renowned Cavendish Laboratory of Physics.

In 1965, he founded Dolby Laboratories in London and invented the Dolby System, an analog audio encoding system that forever improved the quality of recorded sound. He moved the company in 1976 to San Francisco, where it has been headquartered ever since and where it unveiled its new 16-storey headquarters in September.

Dagmar Dolby said: “The University of Cambridge played a pivotal role in Ray’s life, both personally and professionally. At Cambridge, he gained the formative education and insights that contributed greatly to his lifelong groundbreaking creativity, and we also began a wonderful lifetime together there.”

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Leszek Borysiewicz, said: “Ray Dolby’s bequest is an eloquent statement of his devotion to the University and all that it meant to him. This gift will create a spectacular setting in which future students will benefit from the University’s education and begin to make their own mark in the world of innovation, as Ray did with such notable impact.”

The Master of Pembroke College, Chris Smith, said: “Pembroke is extraordinarily grateful to Ray and Dagmar Dolby for their generous support for the College’s expansion and all that it will mean to future generations. As our students receive their own formative educations and contemplate the world before them, they could be in no more appropriate setting than the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Court.”

The University’s current fundraising campaign will focus on Cambridge’s impact on the world and will feed into the dynamic environment of the Cambridge technology cluster, helping to drive innovation and entrepreneurship. More than £590 million has already been raised, including this gift, and 30,000 donors have already given to the campaign.

Other notable gifts by Americans – announced previously – include the following: $27 million (£17.5 million) by Bill and Weslie Janeway for the Faculty of Economics and Pembroke College; and, $25 million (£16.4 million) by Jamie Walters and Dr Mohamed El-Erian for Queens’ College and the Faculty of Economics. Dr El-Erian is Co-Chair of the campaign.

The University's long history as a catalyst for scientific innovation spans its close links to the Cambridge’s high-tech cluster and to the San Francisco area and Silicon Valley, as Ray Dolby’s legacy demonstrates.

Researchers, from the MS Society Cambridge Centre for Myelin Repair, identified that the ‘vitamin D receptor’ protein pairs with an existing protein, called the RXR gamma receptor, already known to be involved in the repair of myelin, the protective sheath surrounding nerve fibres.

By adding vitamin D to brain stem cells where the proteins were present, they found the production rate of oligodendrocytes (myelin making cells) increased by 80%. When they blocked the vitamin D receptor to stop it from working, the RXR gamma protein alone was unable to stimulate the production of oligodendrocytes.

In MS, the body’s own immune system attacks and damages myelin, causing disruption to messages sent around the brain and spinal cord; symptoms are unpredictable and include problems with mobility and balance, pain, and severe fatigue. The body has a natural ability to repair myelin, but with age this becomes less effective.

Professor Robin Franklin from the MS Society Cambridge Centre for Myelin Repair and the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Stem Cell Institute, who led the study, says: “For years scientists have been searching for a way to repair damage to myelin. So far, the majority of research on vitamin D has looked at its role in the cause of the disease. This work provides significant evidence that vitamin D is also involved in the regeneration of myelin once the disease has started. In the future we could see a myelin repair drug that works by targeting the vitamin D receptor.”

Dr Susan Kohlhaas, Head of Biomedical Research at the MS Society, said: “More than 100,000 people in the UK have multiple sclerosis and finding treatments that can slow, stop or reverse the worsening of disability is a priority for the MS Society. We’d now like to see more studies to understand whether taking vitamin D supplements could, in time, be an effective and safe treatment for people with MS.

She continued: “For now though, this is early stage research that’s been done in the laboratory and more work is needed before we know whether it would hold true in people with MS. It’s not a good idea, however, to be deficient in vitamin D and we’d encourage anybody who thinks they might be to speak to their GP.”

Following this research, scientists will need to understand more about the underlying biology of this receptor before considering how the vitamin D receptor could be safely and effectively targeted in future trials in people with MS.

Reference
Guzman de la Fuente, A et al. Vitamin D receptor–retinoid X receptor heterodimer signaling regulates oligodendrocyte progenitor cell differentiation. Journal of Cell Biology; 7 Dec 2015

Adapted from a press release by the MS Society

Tomorrow will see history made on Twickenham Stadium’s hallowed turf as it hosts the Women’s Varsity Match for the first time.

The match, which has alternated between Oxford University's Iffley Road and Cambridge's Grange Road stadiums for the past 27 years, will kick off at Twickenham at 11:30am.

Captain Nikki Weckman said: “The switch to Twickenham Stadium is immensely important because it really puts women’s rugby on a much bigger, much more visible platform for people who are interested in the sport, or who want to try out women’s rugby.

“Speaking to students, male and female, it’s generating quite a buzz that we’re going to Twickenham this year. So I’m hoping it will encourage more people to try out the sport and see how much fun it can be. “

She paid tribute to previous team captains who had pushed for the move. “The captains and presidents of the past several years have really been the driving force behind the move to Twickenham, but it wouldn’t have happened without the support of the club and our sponsors.”

Cambridge's women will be looking to build on the 47-0 victory over Dark Blues at Grange Road earlier this year in the 28th meeting of the two teams. The Cambridge side also boasts President of the first Women's Boat Race crew to race on the Tideway last year, Caroline Reid, as a winger. 

But Weckman remains cautious, particularly as Oxford’s new coach Gary Street led England Women to their first rugby World Cup title last year. “We came out very well in the last match but it is a new year, a new team and Oxford have a wonderful coach this year who I know will be driving them hard so the last thing I want to do is underestimate them,” Weckman said.

“But I have full confidence in our team because of the effort that they’ve been putting in. Our last match we won 117-nil, which was a nice confidence boost.

“But the Varsity Match is the biggest match. Academically Oxford and Cambridge have always challenged each other and it’s the same in sports. That’s the big challenge – to prove yourself better than The Other Place.”

The men’s ‘Battle of the Blues’ tomorrow (kick-off 2:30pm) will see Wales and British and Irish Lions centre Jamie Roberts become the first current international to play in the Varsity Match since Dan Vickerman in 2009.

Roberts, who is studying for an MPhil in Medical Science (Surgery), will be joined by first-time Blues Simon Davies, Oliver Clough, Dave Spelman, Ian Nagle and James Kilroe as Cambridge bids to deny Oxford a record sixth successive win.

Vice-Chancellor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz will be among the crowd at Twickenham cheering on the Blues.

The Women’s Varsity Match kicks off at 11:30am. The Varsity Match (men’s) kicks off at 2:30pm. Live coverage of the Women’s Match will be streamed on www.bbc.co.uk/sport. The Varsity Match (men’s) will be screened live on BBC2 from 2pm-4.30pm. For further details, see www.thevarsitymatch.com.

• Update: Cambridge won the Women's Varsity Match 52-0 with tries by Alice Middleton, Anna Wilson, Lara Gibson and Chloe Withers. Oxford won the Varsity Match (men's) 12-6. Cambridge Women’s Varsity captain Nikki Weckman said after the match: "We were expecting Oxford to put up a pretty big fight and they did. What we weren’t expecting was to put so many points on the board! All the hard work everyone put in, in every training session – they really pulled it out today.”

A team of experts from the Universities of Aberystwyth, Cambridge and Glasgow have drawn on historic records to build a clearer picture of the flooding.

They conclude that 21st-century flood events such as Storm Desmond are not exceptional or unprecedented in terms of their frequency or magnitude, and that flood frequency and flood risk forecasts would be improved by including data from flood deposits dating back hundreds of years.

Dr Tom Spencer from the University of Cambridge said: “In the House of Commons on Monday (December 7), the Environment Secretary called the flooding in north-west England ‘unprecedented’ and ‘consistent with climate change trends’. But is this actually true?

“Conventional methods of analysing river flow gauge records cannot answer these questions because upland catchments usually have no or very short records of water levels of around 30 or 40 years. In fact, recent careful scientific analysis of palaeoflood deposits (flood deposits dating back hundreds of years) in the UK uplands shows that 21st-century floods are not unprecedented in terms of both their frequency (they were more frequent before 1960) and magnitude (the biggest events occurred during the 17th–19th centuries).”

Professor Mark Macklin, an expert in river flooding and climate change impacts at Aberystwyth University, said: “UK documentary records and old flood deposits dating back hundreds of years indicate that these floods are not unprecedented, which means we are grossly underestimating flood risk and endangering peoples’ lives.

“In some areas, recent floods have either equalled or exceeded the largest recorded events and these incidences can be ascribed to climate variability in Atlantic margin weather systems.

“It is of concern that historical data suggests there is far more capacity in the North Atlantic climate system to produce wetter and more prolonged flood-rich periods than hitherto experienced in the 21st century. Looking forward, an increased likelihood of weather extremes due to climate change means that extending our flood record using geomorphology science must be placed at the centre of flood risk assessment in the UK.”

Professor Macklin suggests that new approaches to flood risk analysis be adopted to include instrumental, documentary and most importantly palaeoflood records.

He added: “Current approaches using flood frequency analysis and flood risk assessment based on 40-50 year long flow records are far shorter than the design life of most engineering structures and strategic flood risk planning approaches. They are not fit for purpose now, let alone in a changing climate.”

Professor John Lewin from the University of Aberystwyth said: “What is needed, is far more resilience for already-developed floodplains, and much more serious insistence that future floodplain development should be virtually curtailed. Somewhere along the line floodplain development has been allowed by local authorities and the UK government to continue regardless.”

Dr Larissa Naylor from the University of Glasgow said: “These floods and the 2013/14 storms have shown us that our landscape is dynamic rather than static – where rivers reshape floodplains and erosion remodels our coastline – with large economic and social costs. We need to urgently consider how we plan our cities and towns, and rebuild in the wake of large flood and storm events, to live safely in our changing landscape.”

Spencer, Lewin, Macklin and Naylor are members of the British Society for Geomorphology’s Working Group on Stormy Geomorphology, who are currently finalising a global state-of-the-art analysis of the role geomorphology science can play in an age of extremes in the Wiley journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms. 

In 2015, members of the University’s Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Schools Outreach Group (CAPSOG) worked with 134 primary and secondary schools to give students potentially life-changing educational opportunities both at school and across the University.

CAPSOG’s members include the Department of Engineering, the University’s eight Museums and Botanic Garden, the Cavendish Laboratory, the Millennium Mathematics Project, St Catharine’s College and several other Offices.

The Cambridge Admissions Office’s HE Partnership organised 4,400 student interactions through in-school workshops, visits to Cambridge Colleges and departments, and residential trips to partner universities including East Anglia, Bedfordshire and Nottingham.

The Millennium Mathematics Project’s work included co-ordinating STIMULUS, a programme which sees Cambridge undergraduates supporting local schools with their maths, science and computing lessons. In 2015, STIMULUS created 361 student volunteer placements which led to around 9,000 interactions with local pupils.

Meanwhile, the University of Cambridge’s Museums and Botanic Garden hosted 2,930 students in Post 16 education as well as working with Year 7 and 8 students.

Schools in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough now also have a direct way of developing a relationship with the collegiate University through a dedicated Area Link College, St Catharine’s. In 2015, the College organised events which led to more than 1,500 student interactions.

Matt Diston, CAPSOG’s Widening Participation Project Coordinator said

“This year even more local state schools students have taken part in aspiration-raising events run by the University of Cambridge. The opportunities which CAPSOG members offer range from giving expert advice on applying to Higher Education to doing experiments in world-class laboratories. 

“We would like to encourage even more state schools in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough to get in touch to discuss ways that we can help to inspire, advise and encourage their students as they seek to broaden their horizons and plan their futures."

We are currently experiencing the largest mass migration since WWII, with over 59 million people displaced worldwide due to conflict, persecution or violations to their human rights.  Nearly one in four of these displaced individuals are girls who are at increased risk of violence, poverty and child marriage.

As part of an innovative initiative to educate displaced girls to counter these devastating effects, University of Cambridge together with the Georgetown Institute of Women, Peace and Security spearheaded a gathering of some of the world’s leading experts last week. The aim of the meeting was to develop a research agenda that will provide policymakers with the information they need to make evidence-based policy decisions on improving education for girls affected by conflict, particularly those who are forced to flee their homes.

The meeting was in support of commitments made by the US and UK for an initiative called Let Girls Learn that was launched in March by US First Lady Michelle Obama to increase access to education and enhance learning for girls around the world. As a critical part of the initiative, last week’s meeting focused on girls who have been displaced by conflict, identifying the gaps where research is most needed and exploring ways to address the issues facing this vulnerable population.

Now, with the world’s media focused on the Syrian refugee crisis, the complicated, heartbreaking fate of the worlds’ refugees has been brought to the fore of public consciousness.  Syrian refugees, however, are only a portion of the tens of millions escaping their respective homelands, with many coming from other poverty and conflict stricken countries, to include Somalia and Afghanistan. Displaced for years, if not decades, many children face the prospects of growing up in countries which themselves face over-stretched education systems, such as Jordan, Kenya and Pakistan. Adolescent girls are particularly vulnerable because of an increased risk of poverty, sexual violence and early marriage. As a result, only around one in four refugee adolescents are in secondary school, with girls most likely to be out of school.

Participants at the meeting agreed that there was a need for a stronger evidence-base focused on the education needs of adolescent girls, including in protracted crisis situations. This is both important to fulfill their right to education, but also as means to promote social cohesion and combat extremism through education.

University of Cambridge Vice Chancellor Leszek Borysiewicz, himself the child of Polish immigrants, led the meeting along with Ambassador Melanne Verveer, from the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. Remarking on the fact that policymakers need compelling, actionable evidence if they are to prioritize funding education over other pressing issues facing refugees, Vice Chancellor Borysiewicz said: “Girls’ education matters wherever you are in the world, and is one of the best investments that governments can make. In refugee settings, education needs to be seen as a key part of the response by humanitarian and development agencies. However, it competes with many other pressing priorities – including food, shelter and healthcare. Funders will need clear evidence on how education programmes can be implemented effectively, so that they will actually make a difference on the ground.”

Professor Pauline Rose, who leads the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the University of Cambridge, and is leading the partnership on Cambridge’s behalf, explains the importance of overcoming barriers to girls’ education in conflict settings, saying, “It is vital that we smooth disrupted transitions that adolescent girls face in their education journey in conflict-affected settings – this means addressing the obstacles these girls face from home to school, and from school to work. We urgently need a stronger evidence-base to guide policymakers in making sure these girls are not denied their right to education and can support social cohesion for future generations.”

With Christmas just around the corner, many will be finalising plans to see their families over the festive period. Yet for others, family relationships are challenging, distant and a source of pain. In some cases, relationships break down entirely leaving people estranged from close relatives.

Results from a new online survey of people estranged from family members that I conducted with the charity Stand Alone, has shown how difficult Christmas can be. The survey was completed by 807 people who identified as being estranged from a parent, sibling or an adult child.

Almost all identified the holiday season as the most challenging time of year, describing feelings of loneliness, isolation and sadness. These feelings and experiences are in direct contrast to the idealised images of happy families around the dinner table that feature in Christmas advertising and the media at this time of year. One respondent said:

Everyone always says ‘what family plans do you have for holidays?’ and look at you funny when you say none. It’s hard to explain to people why you don’t want to be with your own parents.

Two-thirds of the respondents felt there was a stigma about family estrangement. They described feeling judged or blamed – and feeling that estrangement was a taboo subject about which there is little understanding or acknowledgement.

No two estranged relationships looked alike. Yet common factors often led to estrangement, such as having mismatched expectations about family roles and relationships, clashes in personality and values, and emotional abuse.

Estrangement was found to be more complex than simply a lack of contact or communication between family members. Although most of the respondents who were estranged from a parent, sibling or an adult child had no contact whatsoever with this individual, approximately 25% had contact that was minimal in nature. These results are similar to those of Australian social worker Kylie Aglias, who has distinguished between family members who have no contact at all (physical estrangement) and those whose contact is infrequent, perfunctory, and often uncomfortable (emotional estrangement).

We also found that estranged relationships change over time and that cycles in and out of estrangement are common. Of those who said they wished that their estranged relationship was different, most wanted a relationship that was more loving, warm and emotionally close.

What can be done to help?

When it came to getting support, respondents said those friends and support services which offered them emotional and practical support and took the time to listen to them and show them understanding were the most helpful. They found it unhelpful when they felt friends or counsellors dismissed them or when they felt they had been judged and blamed for the estrangement.

It would be wrong to assume that all those experiencing estrangement wish for there to be reconciliation in the future. Feelings about the future of estranged relationships were varied. Of those who were estranged from a mother or father, most felt that there would never be a functional relationship between them in the future. Yet for those who were estranged from an adult son or daughter, most felt that there could be a functional relationship in the future or were unsure of the future direction of the relationship.

Four out of five respondents also reported that there had been a positive outcome from their experience of estrangement. These included feeling more free and independent, feeling happier and less stressed, and having gained a greater insight or understanding of themselves and relationships more broadly.

By listening to the hidden voices of people who are estranged from close relatives, we can begin to move beyond assumptions about what families could or should look like and begin conversations about families and family relationships as they really are.

Lucy Blake, Research Associate at the Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.