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Reducing number of infectious malaria parasites in donated blood could help prevent transmission during transfusion

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Malaria is a blood-borne disease caused by the malaria parasite – in west Africa, this is mainly Plasmodium falciparum. The parasite is mainly transmitted to humans through mosquito bites. In sub-Saharan Africa, malaria infection is endemic and a substantial proportion of the population carries the parasite, even when individuals do not show any symptoms. Only a few blood centres screen donor blood of the parasite and hence there is a high risk of malaria transmission through transfusion.

Because of resource limitations, the most common red blood cell product transfused is whole blood. A half of all blood donors in Ghana carry detectable levels of malaria parasites in the blood and as many as one in four (between 14-28%) of blood recipients become infected.

The Mirasol pathogen reduction technology system, developed by the US-based Japanese company Terumo BCT, has been developed to treat whole blood using ultraviolet light energy and riboflavin (vitamin B2) to reduce the parasite load and to inactivate white blood cells. It has been shown to reduce P. falciparum load in vitro and to maintain adequate blood quality during 21 days of cold storage.

In a study published today in The Lancet and funded by Terumo BCT, researchers report the results of the African Investigation of the Mirasol System (AIMS) trial, which explored whether the use of blood treated with Mirasol would prevent the transmission of malaria to patients with anaemia being supported with whole blood transfusion.

“In developing countries, blood supplies are often contaminated and blood banking systems cannot afford the newest technologies for detecting blood-borne pathogens,” explains Professor Jean-Pierre Allain from the Department of Haematology at the University of Cambridge. “Technologies aimed at reducing the levels of parasites or infectious agents in the blood could benefit individual patients and also health-care systems.”

The trial involved 214 patients, 107 of whom received Mirasol-treated blood, the remainder of whom received the normal blood products. Overall, 65 patients who previously were free of detectable parasites were transfused with blood retrospectively found to contain parasites – 28 of these blood products had been treated with Mirasol, 37 were untreated.

The incidence of transfusion-transmitted malaria was significantly lower for those patients who received the treated blood (one out of 28 patients, or 4%) compared to the untreated group (eight out of 37 patients, or 22%).

At the same time, the safety profile did not differ for patients receiving treated or untreated whole blood units. The treated whole blood group had fewer allergic reactions to the transfusion (5% vs 8%) and fewer overall reactions (8% vs 13%), possibly because of the technology also inactivates white blood cells including immune cells.

The researchers recognise that the overall number of transmissions was small, reducing the power of the study, but believe it still provides a clear indication that the Mirasol system could make a dramatic difference to the number of cases of malaria transmission via blood transfusion.

“This could be a real game-changer for blood safety in sub-Saharan African,” adds Dr Shirley Owusu-Ofori from the Transfusion Medicine Unit, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Kumasi, Ghana. “Reduced transfusion-transmissions of infectious agents means a more stable blood supply, reduced costs for the treatment of preventable infections, and direct benefits to women and children who are especially vulnerable to malaria.”

Reference
Allain, JP et al. Effect of Plasmodium inactivation in whole blood on the incidence of blood transfusion-transmitted malaria in endemic regions: the African Investigation of the Mirasol System (AIMS) randomised controlled trial. Lancet; 23 April 2016

Declaration of interests
Jean-Pierre Allain, Alex Owusu-Ofori and Shirley Owusu-Ofori have received grants from Terumo BCT. Susanne Marschner is an employee of Terumo BCT. Raymond Goodrich is an employee of Terumo BCT and owns patents assigned to Terumo BCT. Sonny Michael Assennato declares no competing interests. Terumo BCT did not interfere with the basic design of the study, nor in the conducting of the trial or the interpretation of the data.

A technique for reducing the number of infectious malaria parasites in whole blood could significantly reduce the number of cases of transmission of malaria through blood transfusion, according to a collaboration between researchers in Cambridge, UK, and Kumasi, Ghana.

This could be a real game-changer for blood safety in sub-Saharan African
Shirley Owusu-Ofori
Blood transfusion bags

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UK’s top student hackers compete for cyber security

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The best student hackers in the UK will take place in a cyber security competition this weekend, in order to demonstrate and improve their skills both as attackers and defenders in scenarios similar to the TalkTalk hack and the leak of the Panama Papers.

The event, hosted by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in partnership with Facebook, will bring together 10 of the UK’s Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research– the first time they have taken part in such an event together. The hacking event will take place on Saturday, 23 April.

Cyber security is considered one of the biggest threats facing our economy and infrastructure today, and talented hackers are being recruited by government and other agencies to fight cyber criminals. This hacking event will showcase the best student hackers in the country.

The students will be working on challenges which require them to exploit some common vulnerabilities - the very type that underpinned recent high-profile hacking incidents.

Each of the 10 universities is sending a team of four students to this ‘Capture the Flag’-themed event. Throughout the afternoon, the hackers will attempt to solve a series of puzzles, with the winners gaining points; and compete in a series of challenges by attempting to hack the other teams.

An example of the type of challenges the hackers may face is to hack into a server and attempt to keep the other teams from getting in for as long as they can. The Panama Papers hack likely involved exploiting vulnerabilities in Wordpress and Drupal and the competitors may be tasked with finding similar holes in other software.

Facebook has chosen to visualise the progress of the game on a board loosely based on the classic game Risk. The goal is to conquer the world, with points awarded for each country that is captured. Each country has a couple of challenges based on different areas of cyber security, and students must be able to extract the ‘flag’ to claim the points for that country.

In addition to the teams taking part in the event in Cambridge, other students from the participating universities will also be able to take part in the event remotely, in order that additional students can polish their hacking skills.

“We have a huge cyber security skills gap looming in the UK, and we need to close it,” said Dr Frank Stajano of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, Head of the Cambridge Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. “Training our students for those challenges closes the gap between theory and practice in cyber security education. With any type of security, you can’t develop a strong defence against these types of attacks if you’re not a good attacker yourself – you need to stay one step ahead of the criminals.”

These hacking events also help highlight the different challenges involved in attack and defence. “Attacking is more difficult in general because there is no guaranteed recipe for finding a vulnerability, but in many ways it’s actually easier,” he said. “If you’re defending something, you have to keep absolutely everything safe all the time, but if you’re attacking, all you’ve got to do is find the one weak point and then you’re in – like finding the one weak point in the Death Star that allowed it to be destroyed. When attackers and defenders run on similar platforms it is also the case that, if you attack your opponents, they may reverse-engineer your attack and reuse it against you.”

In a meeting last year, Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama agreed to strengthen the ties between the UK and the US, and to cooperate on matters of cyber security affecting both countries.

A ‘Cambridge 2 Cambridge’ cyber security competition, held last month at MIT, was one of the outcomes of the meeting between the two leaders, who also expressed a desire that part of this cooperation should include an improvement in cyber security teaching and training for students.

From next year, some of the exercises prepared for these events will be part of the undergraduate teaching programme at Cambridge.

“Our team was able to gel well together, and that feeling of being ‘in the zone’ and working seamlessly together in attacking other teams, scripting our exploits and rushing to patch our services was fantastic,” said computer science undergraduate Daniel Wong, following last month’s Cambridge 2 Cambridge event.

“Maybe somewhat surprisingly for a computer hacking competition, the Cambridge 2 Cambridge event was also an exercise in interpersonal skills, since effectively collaborating with people you have just met under significant time pressure in a generally stressful environment does not come naturally, but I was very fortunate to have had teammates that really made this aspect feel like a walk in the park,” said fellow computer science undergraduate Gábor Szarka, a co-winner of the $15,000 top team prize at the Cambridge 2 Cambridge event.

The Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR) scheme is sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, Government Communications Headquarters, the Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance and Research Councils UK.

The 10 universities sending a team to Saturday’s event are: Imperial College London, Queens University Belfast, Royal Holloway University of London, University College London, University of Birmingham, University of Cambridge, University of Kent, University of Oxford, University of Southampton, and University of Surrey. 

Students from the UK’s top cyber security universities will compete in Cambridge this weekend, in part to address the country’s looming cyber security skills gap.

We have a huge cyber security skills gap looming in the UK, and we need to close it.
Frank Stajano
A backlit laptop computer keyboard

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First performance in 1,000 years: ‘lost’ songs from the Middle Ages are brought back to life

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‘Songs of Consolation’, to be performed at Pembroke College Chapel, Cambridge on April 23, is reconstructed from neumes (symbols representing musical notation in the Middle Ages) and draws heavily on an 11th century manuscript leaf that was stolen from Cambridge and presumed lost for 142 years.

Saturday’s performance features music set to the poetic portions of Roman philosopher Boethius’ magnum opus The Consolation of Philosophy. One of the most widely-read and important works of the Middle Ages, it was written during Boethius’ sixth century imprisonment, before his execution for treason. Such was its importance, it was translated by many major figures, including King Alfred the Great, Chaucer and Elizabeth I.

Hundreds of Latin songs were recorded in neumes from the 9th through to the 13th century. These included passages from the classics by Horace and Virgil, late antique authors such as Boethius, and medieval texts from laments to love songs.

However, the task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1,000 years ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musicians would recognise them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct ‘lost’ music from this era – precisely because the pitches are unknown.

Now, after more than two decades of painstaking work on identifying the techniques used to set particular verse forms, research undertaken by Cambridge University’s Dr Sam Barrett has enabled him to reconstruct melodies from the rediscovered leaf of the 11th century ‘Cambridge Songs’.

“This particular leaf – ‘accidentally’ removed from Cambridge University Library by a German scholar in the 1840s – is a crucial piece of the jigsaw as far as recovering the songs is concerned,” said Dr Barrett.

Part detective, part musical time traveller, Barrett’s scholarly groundwork has involved gathering together surviving notations from the Cambridge Songs and other manuscripts around the world and then applying them to the principles of musical setting during this era.

“After rediscovering the leaf from the Cambridge Songs, what remained was the final leap into sound,” he said. “Neumes indicate melodic direction and details of vocal delivery without specifying every pitch and this poses a major problem.

“The traces of lost song repertoires survive, but not the aural memory that once supported them. We know the contours of the melodies and many details about how they were sung, but not the precise pitches that made up the tunes.”

After piecing together an estimated 80-90 per cent of what can be known about the melodies for The Consolation of Philosophy, Barrett enlisted the help of Benjamin Bagby of Sequentia – a three-piece group of experienced performers who have built up their own working memory of medieval song.

Bagby, co-founder of Sequentia, is also a director of the Lost Songs Project which is already credited with bringing back to life repertoires from Beowulf through to the Carmina Burana.

Over the last two years, Bagby and Barrett have experimented by testing scholarly theories against the practical requirements of hand and voice, exploring the possibilities offered by accompaniment on period instruments. Working step-by-step, and joined recently by another member of Sequentia, the harpist-singer Hanna Marti, songs from The Consolation of Philosophy have now been brought back to life.

Added Barrett: “Ben tries out various possibilities and I react to them – and vice versa. When I see him working through the options that an 11th century person had, it’s genuinely sensational; at times you just think ‘that’s it!’ He brings the human side to the intellectual puzzle I was trying to solve during years of continual frustration.”

While it’s unclear whether Boethius ever wrote Consolation’s poetry to be sung, the Roman philosopher recorded and collected ideas about music in other hugely influential works. During the Middle Ages, until the end of the 12th century, it was common for great works such as Boethius’ to be set to music as a way of learning and ritualising the texts.

There have been other attempted settings of The Consolation of Philosophy across the centuries; especially during the renaissance and the 19th century when melodies were invented to sound like popular songs of the day. 

But it was the rediscovered leaf of the Cambridge Songs that allowed the crucial breakthrough in being able to finally reassemble the work as it would have been heard around 1,000 years ago.

Originating in the Rhineland in the first half of the 11th century, the Cambridge Songs makes up the final part of an anthology of Latin texts that was held in Canterbury before making its way to Cambridge University Library by the late 17th century.

In 1840, a Germanic scholar cut out an important leaf and returned home. For 142 years, Cambridge presumed it lost before a chance discovery by historian and Liverpool University academic Margaret Gibson in 1982.

During an unscheduled visit to a Frankfurt library, Gibson enquired as to whether they had any Boethius manuscripts and was told of a single leaf in their collections. Gibson immediately recognised the leaf as coming from a copy of Consolation and its likely importance for the number of neumes it contained.

Gibson then got in touch with Cambridge University medievalist Christopher Page, then a PhD candidate, who realised this was the missing leaf from the Cambridge Songs and secured its return to the city nearly a century and a half after its disappearance.

“Without this extraordinary piece of luck, it would have been much, much harder to reconstruct the songs,” added Barrett. “The notations on this single leaf allow us to achieve a critical mass that may not have been possible without it.

“There have been times while I’ve been working on this that I have thought I’m in the 11th century, when the music has been so close it was almost touchable. And it’s those moments that make the last 20 years of work so worthwhile.”

Saturday’s performance, 'Songs of Consolation from Boethius to the Carmina Burana', takes place at Pembroke College Chapel from 8pm-9.30pm. Tickets are £20, £15 (concessions) and £5 for students and are available from songsofconsolation.eventbrite.co.uk or from Pembroke College Porters’ Lodge.

An ancient song repertory will be heard for the first time in 1,000 years this week after being ‘reconstructed’ by a Cambridge researcher and a world-class performer of medieval music

There have been times while I’ve been working on this that I have thought I’m in the 11th century, when the music has been so close it was almost touchable.
Sam Barrett
Detail from the Cambridge Songs manuscript leaf that was stolen from and then recovered by Cambridge University Library.

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Opinion: The man who taught infinity: how GH Hardy tamed Srinivasa Ramanujan’s genius

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Throughout the history of mathematics, there has been no one remotely like Srinivasa Ramanujan. There is no doubt that he was a great mathematician, but had he had simply a good university education and been taught by a good professor in his field, we wouldn’t have a film about him.

As the years pass, I admire more and more the astonishing body of work Ramanujan produced in India before he made contact with any top mathematicians. Not because the results he got at the time changed the face of mathematics, far from it, but because, working by himself, he fearlessly attacked many important and some not so important problems in analysis and, especially, number theory – simply for the love of mathematics.

It cannot be understated, however, the role played by Ramanujan’s tutor Godfrey Harold Hardy in his life story. The Cambridge mathematician worked tirelessly with the Indian genius, to tame his creativity within the then current understanding of the field. It was only with Hardy’s care and mentoring that Ramanujan became the scholar we know him as today.

Srinivasa Ramanujan.Wikimedia

 

Determined and obsessed

In December 1903, at the age of 16, Ramanujan passed the matriculation exam for the University of Madras. But as he concentrated on mathematics to the exclusion of all other subjects, he did not progress beyond the second year. In 1909 he married a nine-year-old girl, but failed to secure any steady income until the beginning of 1912, when he became a clerk in the Madras Port Trust office on a meagre salary.

All this time, Ramanujan remained obsessed with mathematics and kept working on continued fractions, divergent series, elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series and the distribution of primes. By 1911, Ramanujan was desperate to gain recognition from leading mathematicians, especially those in England. So, at the beginning of 1913, when he was just past 25, he dispatched a letter to Hardy in Cambridge with a long list of his discoveries –- a letter which changed both their lives.

Although only 36 when he received Ramanujan’s letter, Hardy was already the leading mathematician in England. The mathematical scene in England in the first half of the 20th century was dominated by Hardy and another titan of Trinity College, J.E. Littlewood. The two formed a legendary partnership, unique to this day, writing an astounding 100 joint papers. They were instrumental in turning England into a superpower in mathematics, especially in number theory and analysis.

Hardy was not the first mathematician to whom Ramanujan had sent his results, however the first two to whom he had written judged him to be a crank. But Hardy was not only an outstanding mathematician, he was also a wonderful teacher, eager to nurture talent.

Genius unknown

After dinner in Trinity one evening, some of the fellows adjourned to the combination room. Over their claret and port Hardy mentioned to Littlewood some of the claims he had received in the mail from an unknown Indian. Some assertions they knew well, others they could prove, others they could disprove, but many they found not only fascinating and unusual but also impossible to resolve.

Godfrey Harold Hardy, Ramanujan’s mentor.Wikimedia

 

This toing and froing between Hardy and Littlewood continued the next day and beyond, and soon they were convinced that their correspondent was a genius. So Hardy sent an encouraging reply to Ramanujan, which led to a frequent exchange of letters.

It was clear to Hardy that Ramanujan was totally exceptional: however, in spite of his amazing feats in mathematics, he lacked the basic tools of the trade of a professional mathematician. Hardy knew that if Ramanujan was to fulfil his potential, he had to have a solid foundation in mathematics, at least as much as the best Cambridge graduates.

It was for Ramanujan’s good that Hardy invited him to Cambridge, then, and he was taken aback when, due to caste prejudices, Ramanujan did not jump at the chance. As a Brahmin, Ramanujan was not allowed to cross the ocean and his mother was totally opposed to the idea of the voyage. When, in early 1914, Ramanujan gained his mother’s consent, Hardy swang into action. He asked E.H Neville, another fellow of Trinity College, who was on a serendipitous trip to Madras, to secure Ramanujan a scholarship from the University of Madras. Neville’s wrote in a letter to the university that “the discovery of the genius of S. Ramanujan of Madras promises to be the most interesting event of our time in the mathematical world …"

Ramanujan sailed for England in the company of Neville, and arrived in Cambridge in April 1914.

Fearless mentoring

I cannot but admire Hardy for his care in mentoring Ramanujan. His main worry was how to teach this astounding talent much mathematics without destroying his confidence. The last thing Hardy wanted was to dent Ramanujan’s fearless approach to the most difficult problems. To quote Hardy:

The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations, and theorems of complex multiplication, to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was, on the formal side at any rate, beyond that of any mathematician in the world … It was impossible to ask such a man to submit to systematic instruction, to try to learn mathematics from the beginning once more.

On the other hand there were things of which it was impossible that he would remain in ignorance … so I had to try to teach him, and in a measure I succeeded, though I obviously learnt from him much more than he learnt from me.

 

Jeremy Irons as GH Hardy and Dev Patel as Srinivasa Ramanujan in The Man Who Knew Infinity.Warner Bros

 

For almost three years, things went extremely well. In 1916 Ramanujan got his BA from Cambridge and his research went from strength to strength. He published one excellent paper after another, with a great deal of Hardy’s help in the proofs and presentation. They also collaborated on several great projects, and published wonderful joint papers. Sadly, in the spring of 1917 Ramanujan fell ill, and was in and out of sanatoria for the rest of his stay in Cambridge.

By early 1919 Ramanujan seemed to have recovered sufficiently, and decided to travel back to India. Hardy was alarmed not to have heard from him for a considerable time, but a letter in February 1920 made it clear that Ramanujan was very active in research.

Ramanujan’s letter contained some examples of his latest discovery, mock theta functions, which have turned out to be very important. A main conjecture about them was solved 80 years later, and these functions are now seen as interesting examples of a much larger class of mock modular forms in mathematics, which have applications to elliptic curves, Borcherds products, Eichler cohomology and Galois representations– and the nature of black holes.

Sadly, Ramanujan’s recovery was short-lived. His illness returned and killed him, aged just 32, on April 26 1920, leaving him only a short time to benefit from his fellowship of the Royal Society and fellowship of Trinity.

Ramanujan’s death at the height of his powers was a tremendous blow to mathematics. His like may never be seen again, and certainly such a partnership as that which Hardy and Ramanujan built will not either.

 

The ConversationBéla Bollobás, Professor of Pure Mathematics, 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.

Béla Bollobás (Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics) discusses the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan and the influence of his tutor Godfrey Harold Hardy.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (middle) with fellow scientists at Cambridge.

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Opinion: There’s no such thing as a natural-born gambler

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The fight to recruit online gamblers in the UK is at fever pitch. If you googled “play live blackjack” in March, it cost an advertiser £148.51 to be the first ad that came up. In fact, 77 of March’s top 100 most expensive keywords were about gambling. With this relentless clamour to grab attention, you might think gambling was hardwired into human nature; that we were doomed to cave in to the enticements of bookmakers and casinos.

In truth, huge swathes of the planet just didn’t gamble. No cards, no dice, not even a coin flip, and we’re not talking about a thousand years ago either; in some areas it is just 50 years since gambling arrived. We can say with confidence that 150 years ago betting on contests was absent from the indigenous peoples of most of South America, almost all of Australia, most of the Pacific Islands including the vast islands comprising New Guinea and New Zealand, most Inuit and Siberian peoples, and a great many peoples of southern Africa.

My own fieldwork in Highland Papua New Guinea showed the introduction of gambling occurred in the 1950s– in other words, within living memory. If whole populations don’t or didn’t gamble, well it can’t very well be a universal human trait. So why didn’t they?

Those looking for an easy answer would say that these people were isolated and marginal, but we know that was not the case at all. For instance, there have been huge polities spanning the Amazon, and trade networks that bridged the Pacific well before Captain Cook. How easy it would have been to pick up some dice, or make them when you got home.

On a roll.Christa Lohman/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

 

Risk aversion

You might well counter that these people were just isolated from “us”. In fact, contact with the West and the presence of gambling just don’t correlate.

But lets say that non-gamblers were too far removed from the great gambling traditions to pick it up directly, despite the evidence. The enormous variety of gambling and the breadth of forms it has taken across the world both in the past and today strongly suggests that gambling is not a hard idea to invent. The real question should therefore be why was gambling not worth inventing or adopting? Under what conditions is gambling a silly idea?

Another piece of common wisdom says that gambling is more prevalent among people who face greater risk in their lives, but this is not the answer either. While the correlation holds for some people in some countries that already gamble, many of the peoples who didn’t gamble at all had a far riskier time of things than peoples who do.

So there is nothing innate about gambling that simply must bubble to the surface, but this doesn’t mean gambling addiction is not real or serious either. Many of those indigenous peoples who once didn’t gamble now have very high levels of problem gambling. It is one thing to say gambling is not in our genes, and quite another to say that some people aren’t predisposed to develop a dependency on gambling when it is around them.

Gambling… Summer Fete style.David Edwards/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

 

If it wasn’t isolation, and it wasn’t lack of risk, or lack of imagination, why have many of us gambled so much while many others who didn’t at all have now taken it up so quickly? Simple. We have money and a stratified society with a lot of economic inequality and they didn’t.

Easy money

Money may seem a self-evident thing, but it is surprisingly hard to make a hard and fast distinction between what we all know to be money and things like shell currencies. Like money itself, its definition can easily slip through our fingers. What people who have adopted money tell anthropologists, however, is that what matters is that money has more uses, is more portable, more easily hidden, and easier to spend. Many people in those societies that were new to money took up gambling as a way to access or direct this slippery new kind of wealth.

Inequality is another good indicator for gambling, both statistically and on the ground. Where I did my fieldwork, gambling arrived with the return of the first migrant labourers, young men who, along with a knowledge of gambling, brought back what seemed like huge wealth, and who had the potential to upend traditional hierarchies.

As with so many non-gambling societies, it was new inequalities that made gambling seem a good idea for some. And for all its problems, one has to admit that it is a very exploratory, profound way to engage with money. In gambling, by mutual agreement, players pit their monies against each other, making less into more (or more into less) while cutting out the laborious market system. This also explains why Mao Tse-Tung and the leaders of so many other communist (read anti-inequality) uprisings made banning gambling a first priority.

Turning in his grave..Steven Woodward/Flickr

 

Joining the game

What does all this tell us about our lust for online gambling, which seems so lucrative for Google as well as the betting firms? We have been gambling for a long time, long enough for it to seep into our collective psyche and appear completely natural, but as recently as medieval times our kings blamed our gambling on French influence.

We have gone through fits and spurts of gambling, but probably the most important was in the 17th century, when mercantilism upset the economic order of the day, while new forms of accurate measurement and a more widespread currency system spurred us to think more in numbers, bending our minds towards gambling.

It is certainly profitable for the gambling industry that we think of ourselves as a nation of instinctive gamblers. But think again. That the risk taker in us becomes an online gambler tells us much more about how we internalise present day economic inequality and the way technology makes money ever easier to spend than it does about our animal instincts.

Anthony J. Pickles, Research Fellow in Anthropology at Trinity College, 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.

Anthony Pickles (Division of Social Anthropology) discusses why gambling is a relatively modern invention.

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Two Honorary MAs awarded for outstanding service

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Sue Edwards MA

The Executive Assistant to the Mayors of Cambridge for almost 40 years and The Queen’s representative in Cambridgeshire will both be honoured by the University of Cambridge today.

The honorary degree of Master of Arts (MA) will be conferred on Sue Edwards, who worked for the City Council from leaving school as a teenager until her retirement last November, and on Sir Hugh Duberly, HM Lord-Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire.

The Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, will admit them to their degrees during a Congregation in the Senate-House, after Latin speeches by the University's Orator, Dr Rupert Thompson.

Edwards was born in Cambridgeshire at Landbeach, and began work in the Town Clerk's Department at The Guildhall at 15. Early duties included delivering post to the Colleges and other addresses in the City, but she soon moved to the Mayor's Office, where she supported and advised the mayoralty in its civic and charitable work for the next 39 years.

She worked for 34 mayors during that time, assisting with Royal and VIP visits to Cambridge and civic ceremonies, often working with the University and partners across the Cambridge community.

As well as ensuring continuity across the yearly transition from one mayor to another, Edwards nurtured the City’s international profile and helped to build links with Heidelberg in Germany and with Szeged in Hungary in her other role as Civic and Twinning Officer.

Described as an outstanding servant of the City and of the local community by former Mayor of Cambridge, Dr George Reid, she has also been made a member of St John’s College this year.

Dr Reid said: "The University has customarily honoured a few from the wider society of its own locality who by qualities of character, service and achievement recognisably – though not always in ways easily defined – stand out as exceptional.  Sue is one such person, as became ever-clearer during my time on the City Council and unmistakeably plain when I held office as Mayor of the City of Cambridge in 1990-91.

“The honour thus bestowed by the University is immensely appreciated by its recipients, but gives great pleasure on a much wider scale.

“At a personal level I am especially delighted that my own College has seen fit to bring into its membership someone of her qualities who did not matriculate in the usual way.”

Sir Hugh Duberly is HM Lord-Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, the Crown's non-political representative in the County with responsibility for escorting Her Majesty the Queen and other members of the Royal Family when they visit, and 'upholding the dignity of the Crown'.

Sir Hugh, who has been a member of Wolfson College since 2006, has contributed widely across public life in Cambridgeshire and the region over many years.

He was an independent councillor, chairing the Ely Diocesan Board of Finance since 1992, a Crown Estate Commissioner and former chair of both the Papworth and Shuttleworth Trustees and the Governors of Kimbolton School.

He has also been President of the Country Landowners' Association.

Sir Hugh has also encouraged civic, voluntary, business and social activities across Cambridgeshire, supported the Reserve Forces and Cadets, attended in person or by deputy Citizenship Ceremonies and had responsibilities for the selection of new magistrates. High Sheriff of the County 1991-2, Duberly was appointed CBE in 1996 and knighted as a KCVO in 2015.

Since becoming Lord-Lieutenant in 2003, Royal visits to the University and its Colleges and to the City have been frequent, making his advice and support essential to all those involved in hosting.

Former Head of the Vice-Chancellor’s Office, at the University of Cambridge, Matthew Moss, had responsibility for the University’s contact with the Households of The Queen and members of the Royal Family over Royal visits and so worked closely with Sir Hugh as Lord-Lieutenant.

He said: “We’re colossally grateful to Sir Hugh for his careful guiding hand over the past 10 years.  Not every county in the UK has a thumping great university in it, and the University of Cambridge gives Cambridgeshire’s Lord-Lieutenant a great deal of business - we work in close partnership.

“HM The Queen visits the University and Colleges not infrequently as does the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge, and of course Prince Philip visited up to five times a year in the 30-odd years he was Chancellor.

“These visits are hugely important occasions for Collegiate Cambridge and require a great deal of collaborative effort – but they help us celebrate the amazing impact our researchers and lecturers and support staff have, so it’s important to get it right.

“Sir Hugh has been a brilliant friend and a wise adviser, and I’m thrilled that the University is recognising him in this way.”

 

Assistant to 34 Cambridge mayors and HM Lord-Lieutenant honoured by the University of Cambridge

The University has customarily honoured a few from the wider society of its own locality who by qualities of character, service and achievement recognisably stand out as exceptional. Sue is one such person,
Former Mayor of Cambridge, Dr George Reid
Sue Edwards Master of Arts

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How human sexuality is documented: what can we learn from questionnaires and life writing?

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Homosexuality was illegal in both East and West Germany until the late 1960s. Yet as early as the turn of the 20th century a physician called Magnus Hirschfeld began to gather statistical information about Homosexualität und Bisexualität. His survey asked people, predominantly men, about their sexual preferences. It was sent to, among others, more than 5,700 German metalworkers and 3,000 male students in Berlin.

Another measure by which Hirschfeld sought to document sexual behaviour was his ‘psychobiological questionnaire’. He is said to have collected over 40,000 completed forms. By today’s standards, his questions were biased and often clichéd. The survey, for example, asked respondents to report on their play behaviour as children: “Did you prefer to play with boys or girls? Did you prefer boys’ games, such as throwing snow balls, play-fighting, hobby-horses, soldiers, etc, or did you prefer feminine child play, such as dolls, cooking, crocheting, knitting?”

Hirschfeld was an activist and champion of sexual rights. Psychoanalysts such as Freud, who defined the era in terms of a growing interest in sexuality, were not concerned with statistics. But Hirschfield was keen on numbers. His motto was per scientiam ad justitiam (justice through science). He sought to educate the public about the prevalence of a variety of human sexual expressions – and in 1904 he claimed that homosexuals made up more than two per cent of the population.

As a result of his studies, Hirschfeld faced legal prosecution. In 1903 he surveyed students at a Berlin university about their sexual orientation. At a rally, he was accused of impudence, molestation and seduction – and later forced to pay a large fine as retribution to a number of students for offence caused by his questionnaire.  Undaunted, in 1919 he founded an Institute of Sexology which, until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933, was a hub for research and activism.

At a workshop for young people taking place next Monday (25 April 2016), Dr Ina Linge, AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellow at the Department of German and Dutch, will talk briefly about Hirschfeld’s ‘psychobiological questionnaire’ and make a connection between what it reveals and life writing (diaries and autobiographies) dating from the same period. She will be joined by Professor David Spiegelhalter (Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics), author of Sex by Numbers: What Statistics Can Tell Us About Sexual Behaviour.

Linge and Spiegelhalter hope to prompt a discussion of the successes, and failures, of the documentation of human sexuality over the last 100 years. Linge has a background in literature (both German and English) and the history of science and medicine. This breadth of scholarship enables her to bring together life writing and the history of sexology in order to look at how the two intersect. Her research throws a light on the ways in which gender – and in particular sexual and gender ‘difference’ – was framed by those who felt that they did not conform to norms.  

“I’m interested in how ‘queer’ bodies appear in a variety of settings and spaces in these autobiographical texts,” says Linge. “One of the spaces that I’ve been looking at is the encounter with the medical or sexological practitioner and ‘difference’ under the medical gaze. Sexual sciences of the early 20th century were closely linked with the medical sciences and sought to understand the biological origin of sexuality. Yet, descriptions of physical bodies are often strikingly absent from queer life writings.”

The idea of an individual’s sexuality being ‘framed’ or ‘staged’ (placed within a wider context) is critical as it taps into the concept of ‘liveability’ which has been extensively written about by the contemporary gender theorist Judith Butler. She argues that when categories of recognition frame us too firmly, life becomes unliveable. But when there is an absence of framing, life also seems unliveable.

This double nature of framing is represented, for example, in the language used in queer life writings. A protagonist might struggle to find a language that explains their experiences as a Transvestit, a word Hirschfeld used to describe transgender people. Linge says: “Such an identity category can offer a powerful sense of community and belonging. But in order to be recognised as a ‘transvestite’ and dress in the desired clothes, one often had to undergo medical examination and run the risk of police persecution.”

Linge’s research draws attention to a range of autobiographical writing from the early 20th century. The author of A Man’s Maiden Years (published in 1907) was brought up as a girl who felt that her true nature was that of a man. The story was published under the pseudonym N O Body, a name signifying physical absence. AMan’s Maiden Years has a direct link with Hirschfeld: he wrote an afterword to the memoir and also helped the author to transition from female to male.

Hirschfeld argued that people are located on a scale somewhere between the opposing poles of man and woman, neither of which is reached completely in one person, and that all people, to varying degrees, contain both female and male characteristics.

He also believed that homosexuality was inborn. As such, it was considered a physical affliction that could be diagnosed by looking at the homosexual body. He argued that homosexuality had physical markers – such as wider hips - and that one day it would be possible “to diagnose the Uranian [member of a third sex] as soon as he enters the world”.

Linge says: “Of course, we would not accept this explanation today. But we shouldn't forget that Hirschfeld, himself gay and an occasional cross-dresser, stood up for sexual equality and the elimination of anti-homosexual laws. To be able to 'diagnose' homosexuality meant that it could then be considered as a natural, and thus ‘normal’, variation of the sexual spectrum – and most importantly, no longer a crime.”

For Hirschfeld, medical photography, a technology new to science, appeared as a powerful aid to the diagnosis of ‘sexuelle Zwischenstufen’ (sexual intermediate types). The photographs of medical examination that Hirschfeld includes in his many publications are meant to be viewed with a coolly medical gaze to discover the truth of nature.

In comparison, a text such as A Man’s Maiden Years might seem to avoid giving a clear description of the body, a body that photography would necessarily reveal. In his memoir, N O Body recounts the experience of being examined by a doctor who exclaims “You are as much as man as I am!” and then goes on to explain that only a ‘minor bit of surgery’ is needed.

“Yet although neither body nor surgery is directly described, as readers, we learn the details that really matter here. For the first time, a medical practitioner recognises the difference of the protagonist’s body and promises a solution. This medical framing, which offers the promise of a livable life, and its narrative framing, matter much more than any description of physical traits,” says Linge.

“Photography, too, is mediated by such narrative framing. In one example [see main image], Hirschfeld published a series of three photographs that read like a text from left to right. They show progression from demure woman to upright man with confident posture. The naked body alone would not tell this story. Both photography and life writing illustrate that the queer body can be truly understood only by looking at its staging and framing within a narrative structure.”

In 1933, Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology was destroyed and his library, which included his collection of completed questionnaires and many examples of life writing, was publically burned. What followed was a time of devastating persecution of gay, lesbian and transgender people under the Nazi regime. Hirschfeld died in exile and his work for LGBT rights was silenced for many decades.

“Almost a century after Hirschfeld, the language we have at our disposal to describe gender and sexuality has diversified, with such words as ‘queer’, ‘pansexual’ and ‘cisgendered’. Even Facebook has added options for over 50 genders to choose from. This is reminiscent of the categories that rapidly multiplied at the turn of the century in the works of Magnus Hirschfeld and others, from the homosexual, to the ‘invert’, the ‘Uranian’, and other ‘sexual intermediate types’,” says Linge.

“We might claim that current understanding of gender and sexuality is more sophisticated and that we have achieved a level of equality unheard of in Hirschfeld’s time. But perhaps we also have to face the fact that it has taken us a century to return to the wealth and diversification of language about sexuality and gender. Hirschfeld’s work, and the life writings that sprung up around him, established a starting point for LGBT rights.”

For more information about the Sex in Six Objects series, and details of how to sign up, go to https://sexinsixobjects.com/ The series is aimed at people aged between 16 and 25. The workshops are free of charge.

At a workshop next Monday (25 April 2016), Dr Ina Linge and Professor David Spiegelhalter will lead a discussion about the historical documentation of human sexuality – from questionnaires to the diaries of cross-dressers. The event (part of a series titled Sex in Six Objects) is open to people aged 16 to 25.

Hirschfeld, himself gay and an occasional cross-dresser, stood up for sexual equality. 'Diagnosis' of homosexuality meant that it could be considered as a natural, and thus ‘normal’, variation of the sexual spectrum – and most importantly, no longer a crime.
Ina Linge
Illustration from Magnus Hirschfeld’s ‘Sexuelle Zwischenstufen: Das männliche Weib und der weibliche Mann’

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Call to arms: how lessons from history could reduce the ‘immunisation gap’

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An outbreak of measles in Disneyland sounds like a fairytale gone bad. Yet, in January 2015, states across the USA began reporting measles among individuals who had visited the Disneyland Resort in California the month before. All because a visitor to the resort had unwittingly carried the virus into the ‘Happiest Place On Earth’.

The virus is so contagious that 90% of those close to ‘patient zero’ had been at risk of being infected if they were not already immune. Epidemiologists later concluded that “substandard vaccination compliance” was likely to blame for the outbreak. Six months later, the state of California made vaccination mandatory: from July 2016, all children enrolling in school must be fully vaccinated.

Measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases have been on the rise globally in recent years. France, for instance, seemed close to eliminating measles in 2007, but in the following four years, reported a dramatic outbreak of more than 20,000 cases, with 80% of reported cases occurring in unvaccinated people.

These recent events have highlighted the ‘immunisation gap’ – the trend for parents not to have their child vaccinated because of anxiety about unforeseen health consequences. But without a certain threshold of vaccination in a community – so-called herd immunity – the unvaccinated become especially vulnerable.

Yet, vaccinations are considered to be one of the greatest public health achievements in history. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, says historian Dr Stephen Mawdsley: “We have largely forgotten what it’s like to face an epidemic sweeping through a population.” Vaccinations, it seems, have become a victim of their own success.

But this isn’t the first time that ‘vaccine hesitancy’ has threatened public health. “During the first half of the 20th century, America faced a terrifying disease – polio,” he adds. “As many as 57,000 new cases were being reported every year in the early 1950s. Not only was this a painful illness, it had grave economic consequences. Thousands of survivors required expensive acute and convalescent care, and many suffered from lasting paralysis.”

Although the polio virus could strike anyone, young children were particularly affected, inspiring the term ‘infantile paralysis’. Despite a vaccine being available, few teenagers and adults sought its protection because they believed they were not sufficiently at risk to warrant paying for the course of three inoculations.

Mawdsley’s research, just published in the Journal of Cultural and Social History, has uncovered how young people themselves became the answer to the problem, in what might be the first, largest and most successful case of teen health activism of the time. This fight waged against vaccine noncompliance in 1950s America, he suggests, could provide important lessons for the world today.

It was while hunting through the archives of the March of Dimes (MOD) – a fundraising campaign set up by polio survivor President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his law partner Basil O’Connor – that he made the discovery. “Who’d have thought that, after suffering terrible epidemics and fear, Americans would have a very mixed reaction towards polio vaccination? Or that those in the ‘vaccination gap’ would help to fill it.”

A range of social, economic and political factors complicated the delivery of a comprehensive vaccination programme. Teens, in particular, were a demographic group that was difficult to reach. Two years after the vaccine was licensed in 1955, as many as 30% still had no inoculations, and a third of all new cases were in teens. The public health message wasn’t getting through, and new strategies were needed.

Celebrities helped the cause. ‘Presley Receives a City Polio Shot’ proclaimed the New York Times in 1956, as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll offered his arm for vaccination before appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. But the real drivers of the message were a group of teenagers gathered together by the MOD-financed National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP).

“Growing consumerism and rising purchasing power and recreational time spurred the emergence of an assertive teen culture by the late 1950s,” explains Mawdsley. “Many national organisations began to recognise teens as important consumers with cultural influence. By tapping into this segment of society, the NFIP hoped to inspire a new wave of vaccination driven by peer approval.”

The relationship was reciprocal. For the hundreds of young people brought together by the NFIP from all over the USA for a conference, this was a chance to challenge negative stereotypes about juvenile delinquency, and gain recognition and appreciation through grassroots activism.

Officials and teenagers debated strategies to improve vaccination, as well as how to break down race, ethnicity and gender stereotypes. The underlying ethos was that the vaccination message could penetrate teen culture only if it came from within its ranks. After the conference, the teenagers established county chapters across the country under the motto ‘Teens Against Polio’ (TAP), each chapter recruiting yet more teens to promote vaccination.

Some canvassed door to door or gave talks at schools; others organised car washes and peanut sales, or visited polio wards and rehabilitation centres. “No shots, no dates” was a recurring phrase, and teens were often asked at school dances to prove they were immunised before gaining entry. “By using exclusive dances as a tactic, young volunteers were able to exploit the fear of missing out as a means to increase vaccine uptake among teens,” he says.

“I interviewed some former TAP volunteers, and they said that looking back it was surprising that some of these tactics were so acceptable – it showed the power of teens understanding and connecting with their own demographic.”

The creativity and audacity of teens were acknowledged as cornerstones to the marketing strategy by adults, as one NFIP chapter chairman recalled: “The youngsters did have enterprise and nerve. They went in offices, stores, restaurants, hotels – any place there was a person. They barged in on bank presidents, dentists, janitors, even the jail.”

Although teen health activists could not solve all the challenges facing vaccination, their strategies had a remarkable effect. As teen vaccination increased, fewer cases of polio emerged. By 1960, the annual incidence of polio had decreased by nearly 90% compared with 1950.

Mawdsley believes that lessons might be learnt from the history of the fight against polio by public health communication campaigns today. “Yes, their approaches and language were very much the product of 1950s America, but the lesson here is that a hard-to-influence group can be reached. This could be by tapping into new forms of communication such as social media, or clever approaches to promoting vaccination to people opposed to vaccination.

“TAP reinvigorated a failing public health campaign by addressing the fears, access restrictions and misinformation about polio. The teen polio crusaders were a Trojan horse in the battle for public support and donations for polio.”

This research was funded by Clare Hall, Cambridge, and Cambridge Infectious Diseases.

Inset images: March of Dimes.

A rise in the number of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases has highlighted the growing trend for parents not to have their child vaccinated. Could the activities of a group of teenagers in 1950s America inspire a fresh look at the effectiveness of pro-vaccine public health information campaigns?

Who’d have thought that, after suffering terrible epidemics and fear, Americans would have a very mixed reaction towards polio vaccination? Or that those in the ‘vaccination gap’ would help to fill it.
Stephen Mawdsley
Elvis Presley receives a polio vaccination

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Yes

Unlocking innovation in the supply chain

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In order to stay innovative, many leading companies run internal programmes, covering a wide range of subjects from technology innovation to business model innovation. But these programmes, in many cases, fail to generate significant value.

Some companies consider collaboration with others in the supply chain. One obvious benefit of doing so would be the integration of capabilities and skills. But it’s almost impossible to integrate different strategies at a large scale, since many companies would be unwilling to share all of their data and information.

Apart from limited innovation, the consequences of locking innovation inside companies are obvious. Knowledge and information are not integrated between companies in the supply chain, so the services and solutions delivered to end customers may not be the best ones. Additionally, supply chains are usually output-focused instead of outcome-focused.

Suppliers seldom focus on the value delivered to end customers. On the other hand, if innovation can’t be unlocked in the supply chain, the supply chain is not efficient. Suppliers, contractors and clients have to discuss back and forth several times before final decisions are made.

In some industries in the UK, such as the utility industry, the regulator has triggered the change to unlock innovation in the supply chain, by directing the industry to be outcome focused and customer focused. Companies are incentivised to explore new models to engage suppliers for innovation. One approach is the formation of a strategic alliance, where suppliers/contractors and the client companies can work together within one organisation, and team up to deliver services and solutions to end customers. Suppliers are contracted on outcomes instead of on outputs, so that they consider the end customers as well as the closest step in the supply chain.

The shift from output based model to outcome based model and the formation of a strategic alliance to engage suppliers and clients can bring benefits for key stakeholders. For customers, when suppliers are contracted on outcomes and get rewards when customer experience is improved, they will pay attention to end customers, so that customers are expected to get better services. For client companies, in outcome-based contracts, they can transfer some of the responsibilities and related risks to suppliers, and risks and rewards are shared with suppliers. And for suppliers, since they are contracted on outcomes, they will have certain flexibility to choose among possible solutions. In this situation, they are incentivised to innovate and to come up with more efficient and effective solutions.

However, the challenges and barriers are enormous. Partners in the alliance have different business models, and conflicts can arise when they are brought in under the same outcome-based model. Also, partner companies have very diversified backgrounds. Some of them may be competitors outside the strategic alliance, and some of them may not have had smooth relationships previously. If trust and collaboration in the alliance are limited, failure is likely. When the whole industry is still output focused, extended suppliers may have neither the capabilities nor the confidence to be contracted on outcomes. And if the atmosphere in the whole industry is not collaborative, it is challenging to form collaborative and trusting relationships.

We observed this new model closely and worked together with people from industry, aiming to find key points that can ensure the success of an outcome-based model with a strategic alliance approach where suppliers and clients partner with each other to deliver services and solutions to end customers.

In the resulting report, co-authored with IBM, we conclude that there are three areas that partners in the strategic alliance should work on. These three areas are commercial solutions, collaboration and operational design. A commercial solution that is accepted by all partners lays the foundations of working together. Collaboration ensures that partners start to integrate their skills and capabilities, and design and deliver solutions collaboratively. Process design aims to ensure the smooth operation of the strategic alliance.

Commercial Solutions

Since partners are measured against outcomes, a commercial solution should address the risk and reward sharing mechanism and the benefit realisation framework. The risk and reward sharing mechanism needs to solve these problems: how benefits and rewards are shared among partners based on contributions, how risks are shared among partners based on accountability, and to what extent the alliance should be measured against end customers’ outcomes. The benefit realisation framework needs to solve the following problems: how to decide on the final solutions among many possible capital solutions and operational solutions; how to solve conflicts between return on investments and customer outcomes; and how to solve conflicts among partners regarding their preferences on solutions, etc.

Collaboration

Collaboration should be built from four aspects: strategic objectives, organisational culture, trust and communications. With shared strategic objectives, partners can work towards the same direction. A collaborative and innovative organisational culture needs to be formed within the strategic alliance, collecting the best parts of partners’ organisational cultures. Trust can ensure that partners are willing to share data, knowledge and information, and trust other partners’ decisions. Consistent and efficient communication rules need to be followed, and educational communications will be helpful to deliver the concepts of outcomes and collaboration to every employee.

Operational Design

Operational design includes continuing education, information platforms, process design and metrics and measurements. Continuing education is important to ensure that employees understand the strategic objectives of the alliance and that everyone talks on the same tune. Information platforms help to integrate knowledge and capabilities from partners, and that data and information can flow efficiently. Also, data security needs to be addressed. Process design such as decision-making process, risk management process, culture change process, etc. can facilitate the smooth operations of the alliance. Metrics and measurements that measure the contributions of partners, behaviours of individuals, financial status and the achievements of outcomes also needs paying attention to in everyday operations.

Firms that would like to engage suppliers for innovation can consider forming a strategic alliance, combining suppliers and client companies, while focusing on delivering outcomes to end customers. However, they should be fully aware of the challenges and barriers in this model, and make decisions carefully to ensure success.

Jinchen Hou from the Institute for Manufacturing comments on how members of complex supply chains can form alliances, in order to unlock the innovation that’s often hiding within individual companies. 

Ford Rouge Factory Tour

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Inside information: Students and prisoners study together in course that reveals the power of collaborative education

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The wealth of untapped academic talent inside the criminal justice system has been illuminated by a ground-breaking project in which people in prison studied in equal partnership with Cambridge students.

To date, 22 prisoners have participated in the Learning Together initiative at HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire, which completed its second term last week. Many students have described it as a life-changing experience, and one student who is currently in prison has already had a paper accepted by an academic journal.

The project was funded by the British Academy and consists of carefully-structured, eight-week courses involving both graduates studying for the MPhil in Criminology at the University of Cambridge and students from the prison itself. All of the participants co-operate on equal terms, sharing exactly the same study materials, and working together in small group sessions.

In a report due to be published in the next edition of The Prison Service Journal, the organisers, Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow, argue that the course has dismantled stereotypes and prejudice in both directions. While it overturns the assumptions of many prisoners that a university education is something that they will never be able to achieve, it does so by highlighting their ability to handle complex subject matter on an equal footing with their Cambridge peers.

The forthcoming report argues that more should be done to develop models of prison education which, rather than teaching prisoners in isolation, are built around active collaborations with organisations beyond their walls. In particular, it presents powerful evidence – drawn from interviews with the students who took part – that the experience of studying with others profoundly affected the ways in which all students viewed themselves and thought about the future.

One participant, Gareth, has already written a review of an academic book that he will publish alongside Ludlow and Armstrong in a peer reviewed journal next month. In his graduation speech, Gareth said: “For a large part of my sentence, who I am has been entirely synonymous with the reasons I ended up in prison. Reflecting on the initiative, it seems that the overwhelming product was that I was reminded of being someone other than the person who committed these offences.

“I am someone who has valid and useful opinions, I have an interest in how society works, and the connectedness we feel with the other people who we share this world with. I am developing a sense that not only do I want to help people – I am starting to believe I can.”

The course organisers suggest that such experiences point to the capacity of projects like theirs to improve current prison-based learning and transform the learning cultures of both prisons and universities, in ways that help all students to realise and develop their skills and talents to support social progress.

They point out that a pathway out of crime relies on something called “Diachronic Self-Control” – the idea that a person can have ideas about what they want to achieve in life, but that these will remain unfulfilled unless they can also access the places and connections which make them achievable. “People have to be able to perceive a different future to be able to move towards that future,” the study observes.

The Learning Together course involves weekly sessions, each lasting two and a half hours, and covers a series of topics such as the legitimacy of power, and the rebuilding of non-offending lives.

Each week’s reading list typically involves an academic paper and a more accessible piece of content. For example, for the session on Trust and Democratic Voice, students were also asked to read an article about how marginalised groups in Tunisia used hip-hop as a means of self-expression with which to confront state power during the Arab Spring.

Armstrong, who is a Research Associate in Criminology at St John’s College, Cambridge, said that much of the course drew on ideas from more general research into education. In particular, it applies the principles that students learn better when they absorb new information through dialogue and shape it in light of their experiences, rather than through instruction alone. When students realise they have potential, they adopt a “growth mindset” and are more able to capitalise on it.

“When we move some of those ideas from the learning environment into criminal justice, what we show people in prison is that they are not fixed and defined by their offending, but that there are avenues for them to progress,” she said. “That’s a very powerful message.”

Ludlow, a lecturer in Law and Criminology at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, added: “That message is just as powerful for the Cambridge students. Many of them talked to us about how, before Learning Together, their world views were small. Studying together, in dialogue, helped everyone to see how individual ideas and experiences interact with bigger institutions, histories and social forces.”

Their views are echoed by extensive feedback from the students themselves, much of which is reported in the forthcoming journal article. In one particularly moving graduation speech, a student called Zaheer reflected: “It gave me self-esteem and confidence in my own abilities… Being able to put our past behind us and do something positive like this has helped our confidence, transforming our lives.”

The project has received praise from the Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove. “We must be more demanding of our prisons, and more demanding of offenders, which means giving prisoners new opportunities but expecting them to engage seriously and purposefully in education and work,” he said. “I have seen for myself that the Learning Together Initiative at HMP Grendon provides the chance for prisoners to work towards their full potential and gain qualifications as a result. It does great work and it is a testament to the scheme and the hard work of those involved that so many are able to attend the graduation ceremony.”

The Governor of HMP Grendon, Jamie Bennett, said: “The therapeutic work of Grendon helps to explore and manage some of the profound traumas and problems experienced by the men in our care. Whilst doing this, it is also important to offer opportunities in which they can discover and develop their talents. This course is an example of that.”

Rod Clark, Chief Executive of the Prisoners’ Education Trust, highlighted the value of Learning Together as an initiative with benefits both for the students within the prison and those at Cambridge.

“Problems within prisons – safety concerns, overcrowding, limited access to classes – can make creating a healthy learning environment incredibly difficult,” he added. “Projects like Learning Together help to achieve just that, offering tremendous benefits for people on both sides of the prison wall. They allow prisoners to recognise their ambitions and motivations, while giving the student population an understanding of prison life.”

Armstrong and Ludlow are supporting the creation of similar partnerships between other universities and prisons and other departments within the University of Cambridge. They are also involved with further collaborative initiatives focused on different skills, such as cooking and making music.

Their report calls for the development of an approach to prison education that is “more porous” in terms of its creative engagement with the outside world, and its approach to prisoners as potential assets to society rather than people who merely require correction.

Further information about the Learning Together Programme can be found here

Additional images reproduced by permission of the Ministry of Justice/Learning Together project.

A highly innovative project in which Cambridge students and prisoners studied together at a Category B prison in Buckinghamshire has broken down prejudices and created new possibilities for all of those who took part. The researchers behind it suggest that more such collaborative learning initiatives could help dismantle stereotypes and offer prisoners a meaningful vision for the future after release.

I am someone who has valid and useful opinions, I have an interest in how society works, and the connectedness we feel with the other people who we share this world with. I am developing a sense that not only do I want to help people - I am starting to believe I can.
Gareth, a student on the Learning Together course at HMP Grendon
Prisoner and guard.

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Yes

Does nature make you happy? Crowdsourcing app looks at relationship between the outdoors and wellbeing

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NatureBuzz, which is available to download free on iOS and Android platforms, asks participants three times per day to answer questions about how they feel, whether they are outside or indoors, who they are with, and what they are doing. At the same time, it records their location using GPS data.

NatureBuzz also provides information about UK nature reserves and ‘protected areas’ and will provide users with feedback on how their happiness has fluctuated, where it was highest, with whom and during which activities.

“Apps provide a great way of collecting data from thousands – possibly tens of thousands – of users, a scale that is just not possible in lab experiments,” explains research associate Laurie Parma from the Department of Psychology, who coordinates the study. “We’ll use this data to answer some fascinating and potentially very important questions about our relationship with nature.”

Studies have suggested that people are happier and reinvigorated when living in more natural settings. For example, a 2011 study from the United States found that people who live in inner cities were the least happy, while those who live in rural areas are the happiest. However, it is not clear whether all green spaces promote happiness equally.

Diversity – the number and abundance of different species in particular systems – is thought to be important in increasing the resilience of some so-called ecosystem services  - such as climate regulation and pest control – that underpin human wellbeing. However, the more immediate role that biodiversity may play in affecting happiness is unclear.

“We know that people quickly become familiar with – and immune to – happiness-inducing stimuli and one potential way to combat this phenomenon is to provide new and varied stimuli,” adds Professor Andrew Balmford from the Department of Zoology. “Natural environments with greater biodiversity – different flowers, different birds, for example – present a rich variety of stimuli, so it’s possible they will keep the ‘happiness factor’ fresh for visitors.”

The researchers hope that by crowdsourcing data, they will be able to answer questions such as whether the type of green space – gardens, city parks, countryside or nature reserves, for example – have the same impact on an individual’s wellbeing, and whether someone needs to be interested in nature to benefit more from the natural environment. They believe their findings may have important consequences for how policymakers promote biodiversity and how reserve managers enable people to make the most of the happiness-improving potential of access to nature.

The app is part of a broader study of happiness and nature developed by the Departments of Psychology and Zoology, University of Cambridge, RSPB, UNEP-WCMC and Cardiff University. It is funded by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and is part of a research programme on human happiness.

NatureBuzz is available to download from the iPhone App Store and from Google Play.

A new app will crowdsource data to help scientists understand the relationship between biodiversity and wellbeing. The app, developed at the University of Cambridge, maps happiness onto a detailed map that includes all the UK’s nature reserves and green spaces. 

Apps provide a great way of collecting data from thousands – possibly tens of thousands – of users, a scale that is just not possible in lab experiments
Laurie Parma
La felicità nella luce della sera

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Yes

Diaries of Captain Scott's widow secured by Cambridge University Library

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Kathleen Scott, the sculptor and widow of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, married journalist and politician Hilton Young, 1st Baron Kennet, in 1922. Her papers include diaries covering a period of over 35 years, records of her sculpture and exhibitions as well as other writings. These include a major series of significant letters from some of the most distinguished and powerful politicans, writers, artists and explorers of her generation.

Of particular importance are the papers and letters relating to her first husband Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Together with her diaries covering the period of Scott's last Antarctic expedition, the material is of the utmost interest for our understanding of the legendary explorer.

The papers also reflect the fascinating careers, interests and connections of Lord and Lady Kennet and are of importance for the study of British military and political history, as well as of literary and cultural attitudes and concerns during the first half of the 20th century.

Edward Hilton Young was a British politician and writer. He embarked on a career in financial journalism, working for various papers including The Economist and the Morning Post prior to serving for the Royal Navy in World War One, where he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Service Cross.

He entered Parliament in 1915 as a Liberal MP, becoming Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1921. After the 1922 election, he became Chief Whip for Lloyd George's Liberal Party and in 1926 joined the Conservatives, serving as Minister for Export Credits and then as Minister of Health. In 1935, Hilton Young accepted a peerage as Lord Kennet of the Dene. The archive at Cambridge University Library includes his wartime diaries and logbooks and his political papers and correspondence.

Cambridge University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “It’s a particular pleasure, as we celebrate our 600th Anniversary, to welcome this exceptional archive to the University Library. Lord and Lady Kennet led fascinating lives and these papers will be of great interest to researchers.”

Also accepted were the papers of Wayland Hilton Young, 2nd Baron Kennet (1923-2009) which have been allocated to The Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College.

Wayland Young’s  papers detail his political career in both the Labour and Social Democratic parties.  The files include working drafts, fragments of memoirs, notes for speeches and articles, and substantial correspondence and papers for Europe Plus Thirty, the EEC project he chaired in 1974-1975 forecasting how Europe would look in 30 years. 

Allen Packwood, Director of The Churchill Archives Centre, said: “The Churchill Archives Centre holds the personal papers of figures from across the political spectrum, and is pleased to offer a home to Wayland Young, who was an independent thinker and a lifelong campaigner.”

 

The acceptance of the collected material settled £402,500 of tax.  The Acceptance in Lieu scheme is administered by the Arts Council. The Acceptance in Lieu Panel, chaired by Edward Harley, advises Ministers on whether property offered in lieu is of suitable importance, offered at a value which is fair to both nation and taxpayer and whether an allocation wish or condition is appropriate.  AIL enables taxpayers to pay inheritance tax by transferring important works of art and other important heritage objects into public ownership. The taxpayer is given the full open market value of the item, which then becomes the property of a public museum, archive or library. In the last decade the scheme has bought over £250m of cultural property into public collections.

The diaries of Captain Scott’s widow – and the papers of her second husband, Lord Kennet – will be made accessible to researchers at Cambridge University Library following their acceptance in lieu of inheritance tax.

Lord and Lady Kennet led fascinating lives and these papers will be of great interest to researchers.
Anne Jarvis
Kathleen Scott pictured with her husband Captain Robert Falcon Scott, 1910

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From the pit to the pinnacle: Dante reappraised “vertically”

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Dante's Divine Comedy shown in a fresco by Michelino

Dante’s 14th century epic journey through the Christian afterlife, the Divine Comedy, has long been regarded as a literary and theological masterpiece. Over the past four years, the University of Cambridge has brought together experts on Dante from across the UK and abroad to re-examine Dante’s work in a bold new way, looking at the “vertical” connections between the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso as Dante travels from Hell, through Purgatory and finally to Heaven.

The project, which took the form of a series of workshops and public lectures hosted by Trinity College, marks the first time that a “vertical” reading has been systematically applied to Dante’s entire 14,233-line work as a whole. Scholars from around the world came to Cambridge to explore how the same-numbered cantos from all three canticles relate to each other, and what new light these connections can shed on Dante’s artistic and conceptual modes throughout the poem.

The final lecture of the series was presented by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Professor Lord Rowan Williams, and examined the final cantos of each section and their themes of “Fire, Ice and Holy Water”.

Professor Williams’ lecture, along with all others in the series, is available to view online via the University Streaming Media Service.

The cycle of 33 major public lectures by literary scholars, philosophers, theologians and thinkers began in 2012. Over four years, it has offered a radical new approach to Dante’s great work and to the venerable Lectura Dantis tradition by generating innovative readings of the Comedy as well as broadly influential debate on Dante’s position in our culture today. The series, called Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, was organised by Dr George Corbett and Dr Heather Webb as an initiative of the Department of Italian at Cambridge University, in collaboration with the Leeds University Centre for Dante Studies and the University of Notre Dame.

Dr Heather Webb, lecturer in Italian at the University of Cambridge, said: “Looking at Dante through a vertical reading is a way of starting over and exploring the poem afresh. If we read, for example, Inferno III, Purgatorio III, and Paradiso III, throwing out all our usual ideas and just looking at those three cantos, something new always comes up. This series has examined how we read Dante, what we bring to each reading, and also how Dante himself might have wanted us to read his poem”.

Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is also available in book form, published via Open Book Publishers, an Open Access publisher that makes books freely available to read online, as well as in inexpensive e-book and paper editions. Vertical Readings will be a three-volume collection. Volume one is currently available, with volumes two and three coming soon.

The collection offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the entire Divine Comedy, which not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks new ways to enter into the core themes of the poem. It is hoped that the three volumes together will provide an indispensable resource for students of Dante.

Dr Webb said: “Open Book Publishers have made it so that anyone can go online and read the whole collection, which is really exciting for everyone involved in the project. We want students and enthusiasts at every level to be able to access this new approach to looking at Dante and for us to share the results that everyone who has worked on these readings have brought together over the past four years.”

Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is available to read free online and purchase via Open Book Publishers

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has rounded off a four-year project at Cambridge University which explored the “vertical” connections across Dante’s Comedy.

This series has examined how we read Dante, what we bring to each reading, and also how Dante himself might have wanted us to read his poem
Heather Webb, Department of Italian
Dante's Divine Comedy shown in a fresco by Michelino

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Threat of novel swine flu viruses in pigs and humans

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While swine flu viruses have long been considered a risk for human pandemics, and were the source of the 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus, attention has recently turned to the transmission of flu viruses from humans to pigs.

"Once in pigs, flu viruses from humans continue to evolve their surface proteins, generically referred to as antigens, resulting in a tremendous diversity of novel flu viruses that can be transmitted to other pigs and also to humans," explains first author Nicola Lewis from the University of Cambridge.

"These flu viruses pose a serious threat to public health because they are no longer similar enough to the current human flu strains for our immune systems to recognise them and mount an effective defence. Understanding the dynamics and consequences of this two-way transmission is important for designing effective strategies to detect and respond to new strains of flu."

Humans and pigs both experience regular outbreaks of influenza A viruses, most commonly from H1 and H3 subtypes. Their genetic diversity is well characterised. However, the diversity of their antigens, which shapes their pandemic potential, is poorly understood, mainly due to lack of data.

To help improve this understanding, Lewis and her team created the largest and most geographically comprehensive dataset of antigenic variation. They amassed and characterised antigens from nearly 600 flu viruses dating back from 1930 through to 2013 and collected from multiple continents, including Europe, the US, and Asia. They included nearly 200 viruses that had never been studied before.

Analysis of their data reveals that the amount of antigenic diversity in swine flu viruses resembles the diversity of H1 and H3 viruses seen in humans over the last 40 years, driven by the frequent introduction of human viruses to pigs. In contrast, flu from birds has rarely contributed substantially to the diversity in pigs. However, little is currently known about the antigenic relationship between flu in birds and pigs.

"Since most of the current swine flu viruses are the result of human seasonal flu virus introductions into pigs, we anticipate at least some cross-protective immunity in the human population, which could potentially interfere with a re-introduction of these viruses. For example, the H1N1pdm09 viruses circulating in both humans and pigs are antigenically similar and therefore likely induce some immunity in both hosts," says Lewis.

"However, for the H1 1C, H3 3A, and H3 3B human seasonal lineages in pigs, the risk of re-introduction into the human population increases with the number of people born after the circulation of the human precursor virus, and is increased by the antigenic evolution of these viruses in pigs. Earlier introduced lineages of human H1 and H3 viruses therefore pose the greatest current risk to humans, due to the low or negligible predicted levels of cross-immunity in individuals born since the 1970s."

Swine flu causes symptoms such as coughing, fever, body aches, chills, and fatigue in humans. Pigs can also experience fever and coughing (barking), along with discharge from the nose or eyes, breathing difficulties, eye redness or inflammation, and going off feed - although some display no clinical signs at all.

Vaccination to control flu in pigs is used extensively in the US and occasionally in other regions. Control strategies vary by region, with some countries not using any vaccinations, while others produce herd-specific vaccines for individual producers. There is no formal system for matching vaccine strains with circulating strains, however, and no validated protocols for standardisation and effective vaccine use.

"The significant antigenic diversity that we see in our data means it is highly unlikely that one vaccine strain per subtype would be effective on a global scale, or even in a given region," says co-author Colin Russell, also from the University of Cambridge.

"Our findings therefore have important implications for developing flu vaccines for pigs. They also emphasise the need for more focused surveillance in areas with a high pig population density, such as China, and situations where humans and pigs have close contact, in order to better assess the incidence of transmission between the animals and risk of spreading to humans."

Reference:

The paper 'The global antigenic diversity of swine influenza A viruses' can be freely accessed online at http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.12217.

Originally published as a press release by eLife.

The wide diversity of flu in pigs across multiple continents, mostly introduced from humans, highlights the significant potential of new swine flu strains emerging, according to a new study.

These flu viruses pose a serious threat to public health because they are no longer similar enough to the current human flu strains for our immune systems to recognise them
Nicola Lewis

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Opinion: There are also drawbacks to being bilingual

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The ability to speak more than one language certainly has its perks. It enables you to work in another country, for example, interact with people while travelling, or consume foreign media.

Bilingualism is very common – current estimates are that more than half of the world’s population is bilingual and that this prevalence is rising.

Cognitive psychologists have been interested in how bilingualism shapes the mind for almost a century. There are those who suggest that in order to speak in one language, bilinguals have to suppress the influence of the other. Research from the past three decades has argued that this unique form of language processing “trains the brain” in the use of non-verbal abilities known as “executive functions” such as ignoring irrelevant information or shifting attention.

Bilinguals of different ages and cultural backgrounds have been shown to be faster and more accurate than their monolingual peers when performing cognitive tasks demanding these abilities. Furthermore, it has been argued that bilingualism may lead to a delayed onset of symptoms associated with dementia.

But the scientific community recently has become increasingly sceptical of the bilingual advantage hypothesis. One of the main points of criticism is that differences between monolinguals and bilinguals when it comes to executive function are not always apparent. This has generated a heated debate, especially in the Bilingualism Forum of the scientific journal Cortex, about whether bilingualism is associated with cognitive advantages or not.

Fresh challenge

It appears that research on bilingualism is at a turning point. We need to pursue a new approach to understand, beyond those individual examples of executive functions, how the bilingual mind works. We have attempted to address this challenge by testing whether bilinguals and monolinguals differ in terms of how accurately they can assess their own performance.

This ability is called metacognition and is associated with, but separate from, other areas where bilinguals have been shown to have an advantage. Surprisingly, however, we found that bilinguals had less insight into their performance than their monolingual peers.

Joining the dots

In an effort to find out whether bilinguals also display advantages in other cognitive abilities (beyond executive function), we evaluated metacognitive processing in young adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Metacognition is the ability to evaluate one’s own cognitive performance or simply to have “thoughts about thoughts”.

This ability is a crucial function of everyday life, when we have to make decisions where the outcomes are not immediate. For example, when an entrepreneur reviews their company’s performance, they need to take into account a variety of factors – including, for example, revenues and expenses – in order to evaluate whether the company is doing well. Confidence in their ideas and performance can be the determining factor in whether they decide to keep investing time in their company or give up and apply for another job (the so-called “exploitation exploration trade-off”).

In our research, we presented participants with a situation in which they had to observe two circles on a screen and guess which one contained more dots. Sometimes the difference was obvious, making the decision easy, while at other times the decision was very difficult (for example, one circle contained 50 dots and the other 49). Participants were then asked to determine how confident they were in their decision on a scale from less to more confident than normal.

Illustration of the metacognition paradigm employed by Folke et al., 2016.Folkes et al, 2016, Author provided

Over the course of two experiments, we found that bilinguals and monolinguals were equally likely to choose the circle containing the highest number of dots. However, monolinguals were better able than bilinguals to discriminate between when they were right and when they were wrong. In other words, bilinguals had less insight into their performance than monolinguals. This went against our initial predictions, as we expected to find a bilingual advantage in metacognitive processing. These results indicate that bilingualism may be associated with cognitive disadvantages as well as benefits.

What’s next?

The Multilanguage & Cognition lab (MULTAC) at Anglia Ruskin University is currently undertaking a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust to enhance our understanding of the bilingual mind.

The lab has already published evidence of cognitive advantages associated with bilingualism, suggesting that bilinguals are better at filtering out verbal interference as well as visual attention, specifically spotting the difference in a visuo-spatial working memory task.

This new research indicates that bilingual people may experience a disadvantage in metacognition. We hope that this new direction in bilingualism research will encourage further attention and enable us to resolve theoretical debate through the adoption of open-minded, empirically driven exploration of cognitive effects (both positive and negative) that may be associated with learning more than one language.

Julia Ouzia, PhD candidate in cognitive psychology, Anglia Ruskin University and Tomas Folke, 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.

Tomas Folke (Department of Psychology) and Julia Ouzia (Anglia Ruskin University) discuss the cognitive disadvantages that may be associated with learning more than one language.

Bilingual street name sign in Bangor, North Wales

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Opinion: Fact Check: are 60% of UK laws really imposed by the EU?

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Today it is a tragedy that the European Union – that body long ago established with the high and noble motive of making another war impossible – is itself beginning to stifle democracy, in this country and around Europe. If you include both primary and secondary legislation, the EU now generates 60% of all the laws that pass through Westminster.

Boris Johnson, writing in The Sun, April 21

Among the headline-grabbing claims repeatedly made by campaigners for the UK to leave the EU is that a substantial majority of British law is now imposed by Brussels – providing crucial “evidence” to back up their core arguments about a loss of sovereignty and an assault on democracy.

Bluster, bluster.Surrey County Council News, CC BY-SA

 

This particular claim varies as regards both the alleged figure and its supposed source. UKIP has again and again asserted that Brussels makes 75% of UK law – a figure that appears based on nothing more than some unsubstantiated press remarks from EU Commissioner Viviane Reding. Appearing before the House of Commons Treasury Committee in March, Boris Johnson cited what he called new evidence that put the true number at 60%. This turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of House of Commons Library research dating from 2014, though as can be seen from the quote at the beginning, he is still repeating it.

Perhaps the most important and influential backing for the Leave campaign’s claims comes from a Business for Britain report of March 2015. Touting itself as “definitive”, it decreed that between 1993 and 2014, 64.7% of UK law was EU-influenced, and EU regulations accounted for 59.3% of all UK law.

But closer analysis reveals that this report is utterly flawed and misleading. BfB included in its calculations all EU regulations without distinguishing between legislative regulations and non-legislative ones.

EU legislative regulations are comparable to primary legislation in the UK, but they are relatively few in number. Certain EU non-legislative regulations are comparable to statutory instruments in the UK – such as many of the “delegated regulations” adopted under Article 290 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union – so they too could in principle be included in any attempt to quantify the domestic impact of EU law.

But the great bulk of non-legislative regulations are adopted by member states to implement technical, administrative decisions at the EU level. This includes things such as updating the scientific registers of chemicals and food additives; adjusting specific anti-dumping duties on cheap imports from third countries; confirming the regular continuance of UN sanctions on named individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism; and entering specific foodstuffs in the register of protected designations of origin.

Pears are from Mars …Yulia Koshchiy

 

It is simply not credible to include such measures in any purported calculation of the volume of UK law which derives from the EU. Or at least: if BfB counted those EU regulations in its sums, it should also include their proper domestic comparators – the vast numbers of UK decisions taken by public officials in a wide range of public bodies across the entire country. This would surely render the EU component of any statistics on the volume of “UK law” virtually negligible. As it stands, this is comparing apples with pears.

To be fair, any competent legal scholar would confirm that attempts to quantify the amount of “UK law”, or the amount of “EU law”, let alone the statistical relationship between the two, could never be anything more than an inaccurate guess guided by contestable research methods.

But there is a broader and more fundamental point here. This is far from the only example of the Leave campaign relying on and then reiterating claims which have proven upon closer inspection to be partially or even wholly false.

Think of Michael Gove’s rosy but entirely spurious vision for the UK’s post-withdrawal trade relationship with the EU. Or watch the fantastical claims of Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings falling apart under the slightest scrutiny by the Treasury Committee. Those following the referendum debate from a perspective of informed expertise may rightly feel frustrated and dismayed by such blatant skulduggery.

Verdict

The only way to produce a figure anywhere approaching 60% for the amount of British law that comes from the EU is to follow a seriously flawed methodology. If this sort of work were submitted for academic peer review, it would be rejected at the first hurdle as manifestly unscientific. The real worry is that substituting the dissemination of misleading propaganda for honest evidence-based argument, on an issue of fundamental importance for the future of this country, risks further undermining public trust in our political institutions as well as inflicting serious damage upon the quality of our national democracy.

Review

Kenneth Armstrong, Professor of European Law, University of Cambridge

Fans of The Big Bang Theory will be familiar with Sheldon Cooper’s webcast Fun with Flags. The EU referendum campaign has brought us Fun with Fractions with Boris Johnson suggesting that the percentage of UK law that emanates from the EU is “60%”.

The 60% figure derives from a methodology reported by the House of Commons Research Library, and as the report’s author admits “it is impossible to achieve an accurate measure”. The methodology includes EU “regulations” which can have immediate effect in UK law without being implemented by Westminster, the idea being that a methodology which only focused on directives and decisions that require formal adoption into national rules would underestimate EU influence. But as our commentator notes, this also risks including a large number of technical regulations and amendments.

As Sheldon would claim, methodology matters. The mere fact that methodologies are contestable does not mean that any given one is wrong, unless it is wrong in terms of the question asked. Is it a narrow question of how much EU law is implemented or are we evaluating broader EU influence? Does volume equate with significance? And how do we factor in change over time? Does anyone really care? Distractions with fractions.

Michael Dougan, Professor of European Law and Jean Monnet Chair in EU Law, University of Liverpool

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.

Kenneth Armstrong (Centre for European Legal Studies) and Michael Dougan (University of Liverpool) discuss the volume of UK law which derives from the EU.

European Union Quarter in Brussels

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Speakers of two dialects may share cognitive advantage with speakers of two languages

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The new findings on bi-dialectalism are published in the journal Cognition, following a study undertaken by researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Cyprus, and the Cyprus University of Technology.

Although a topic of continuing academic and public scrutiny, a lot of research to date reports a positive cognitive net effect for multilingual children compared to children who speak only one language.

The effect is usually manifest in attention, cognitive flexibility and the ability to inhibit irrelevant information, with some researchers arguing that the advantages of bilingualism are evident throughout the human lifespan. Until now, however, there has been very little research on children speaking two dialects which may only be separated by subtle linguistic differences.

Bi-dialectalism, the systematic use of two different dialects of the same language, is widespread in many parts of the world. In the USA millions of children grow up speaking African American English at home as well as Mainstream American English at school.

Similar situations arise in many parts of Europe, such as the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, where school-children may only feel comfortable to talk about school subjects in High German, but switch to Swiss-German for everyday conversation.

British English, Gaelic and Welsh have well-established dialects as well as newly emerging ones such as Multicultural London English, which has a rising number of speakers, especially among young, urban people.

To date, bi-dialectalism can be found in Lowland Scotland (in speakers of Scots and Standard Scottish English), in parts of Northern Ireland and elsewhere. However, the criteria for classifying two varieties as dialects rather than independent languages are not strictly objective and it could be debated whether these are cases of bilingualism instead.

Dr Kyriakos Antoniou and Dr Napoleon Katsos from the University of Cambridge studied the cognitive performance of children who grew up speaking both Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek – two varieties of Greek which are closely related but differ from each other on all levels of language analysis (vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar).

The study showed that multilingual and bi-dialectal children exhibited an advantage over monolingual children that was evident in composite cognitive processes including memory, attention and cognitive flexibility; suggesting that advantages previously reported for multilingual children could be shared by children speaking any two or more dialects.

Dr Kyriakos Antoniou, from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “What is exciting and encouraging about our findings is that we were able to replicate the advantages of bilingualism in children who speak two varieties of the same language. They need not be as diverse as English and Mandarin Chinese.

“The distance between languages and dialects does not make much of a difference according to our tests and findings. Systematically switching between any two forms of language, even quite similar ones, seems to provide the mind with the extra stimulation that leads to higher cognitive performance.

“Our findings could be significant for parents and children in the UK and countries across Europe and beyond where children speak a variety of different dialects. Germany, Italy and Spain all have significant numbers of dialectal speakers, as do parts of the US and China. With the rise and increased recognition of dialects in the UK, bi-dialectalism might become even more relevant in the UK in the near future.

“What our research suggests, contrary to some widely held beliefs, is that we don’t have to treat multilingual or bi-dialectal children as problematic. When it comes to language, plurality is an advantage.”

The study consisted of 64 bi-dialectal children, 47 multilingual children and 25 monolingual children. Comparisons between the three groups were performed in two stages and the socio-economic status, language proficiency, and general intelligence of all children taking part was factored into the research methodology.

Dr Napoleon Katsos, one of the study authors, said: “Previous research has documented positive associations between childhood bilingualism and cognitive abilities.

“The novel and most important contribution of this study is that it showed similar positive effects extend to children speaking two closely related dialects of the same language. In qualitative terms, the effects of bi-dialectalism and multilingualism were, in general, quite similar. However, more research is needed on this topic.

“Dialects are very much under-recognised and undervalued. This kind of research can make people appreciate there is an advantage to bi-dialectalism and this may be important when we think about our identity, about how we educate children and the importance of language learning.”

Dr Antoniou and Dr Katsos are now retesting and extending their hypotheses on a larger scale in Belgium, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Brussels.  Belgium offers an ideal testing ground, with dialects of Dutch such as West-Flemish, being spoken alongside more standard versions of Dutch and French. The new study includes larger samples and new measures, to better understand the effects of bi-dialectalism on cognitive and linguistic development and their relation to bilingualism. 

Reference:

K.Antoniou et. al. ‘The effect of childhood bilectalism and multilingualism on executive control’ Cognition 149 (2016)

DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.12.002

The ability of children to speak any two dialects – two closely related varieties of the same language – may confer the same cognitive advantages as those reported for multilingual children who speak two or more substantially different languages (such as English and French).

Dialects are very much under-recognised and undervalued.
Napoleon Katsos
Conversations by Steve McClanahan via Flickr

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Winds a quarter the speed of light spotted leaving mysterious binary systems

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Two black holes in nearby galaxies have been observed devouring their companion stars at a rate exceeding classically understood limits, and in the process, kicking out matter into surrounding space at astonishing speeds of around a quarter the speed of light.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) XMM-Newton space observatory to reveal for the first time strong winds gusting at very high speeds from two mysterious sources of x-ray radiation. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, confirms that these sources conceal a compact object pulling in matter at extraordinarily high rates.

When observing the Universe at x-ray wavelengths, the celestial sky is dominated by two types of astronomical objects: supermassive black holes, sitting at the centres of large galaxies and ferociously devouring the material around them, and binary systems, consisting of a stellar remnant – a white dwarf, neutron star or black hole – feeding on gas from a companion star.

In both cases, the gas forms a swirling disc around the compact and very dense central object. Friction in the disc causes the gas to heat up and emit light at different wavelengths, with a peak in x-rays.

But an intermediate class of objects was discovered in the 1980s and is still not well understood. Ten to a hundred times brighter than ordinary x-ray binaries, these sources are nevertheless too faint to be linked to supermassive black holes, and in any case, are usually found far from the centre of their host galaxy.

“We think these so-called ‘ultra-luminous x-ray sources’ are special binary systems, sucking up gas at a much higher rate than an ordinary x-ray binary,” said Dr Ciro Pinto from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, the paper’s lead author. “Some of these sources host highly magnetised neutron stars, while others might conceal the long-sought-after intermediate-mass black holes, which have masses around one thousand times the mass of the Sun. But in the majority of cases, the reason for their extreme behaviour is still unclear.”

Pinto and his colleagues collected several days’ worth of observations of three ultra-luminous x-ray sources, all located in nearby galaxies located less than 22 million light-years from the Milky Way. The data was obtained over several years with the Reflection Grating Spectrometer on XMM-Newton, which allowed the researchers to identify subtle features in the spectrum of the x-rays from the sources.

In all three sources, the scientists were able to identify x-ray emission from gas in the outer portions of the disc surrounding the central compact object, slowly flowing towards it.

But two of the three sources – known as NGC 1313 X-1 and NGC 5408 X-1 – also show clear signs of x-rays being absorbed by gas that is streaming away from the central source at 70,000 kilometres per second – almost a quarter of the speed of light.

“This is the first time we’ve seen winds streaming away from ultra-luminous x-ray sources,” said Pinto. “And the very high speed of these outflows is telling us something about the nature of the compact objects in these sources, which are frantically devouring matter.”

While the hot gas is pulled inwards by the central object's gravity, it also shines brightly, and the pressure exerted by the radiation pushes it outwards. This is a balancing act: the greater the mass, the faster it draws the surrounding gas; but this also causes the gas to heat up faster, emitting more light and increasing the pressure that blows the gas away.

There is a theoretical limit to how much matter can be pulled in by an object of a given mass, known as the Eddington limit. The limit was first calculated for stars by astronomer Arthur Eddington, but it can also be applied to compact objects like black holes and neutron stars.

Eddington’s calculation refers to an ideal case in which both the matter being accreted onto the central object and the radiation being emitted by it do so equally in all directions.

But the sources studied by Pinto and his collaborators are potentially being fed through a disc which has been puffed up due to internal pressures arising from the incredible rates of material passing through it. These thick discs can naturally exceed the Eddington limit and can even trap the radiation in a cone, making these sources appear brighter when we look straight at them. As the thick disc moves material further from the black hole's gravitational grasp it also gives rise to very high-speed winds like the ones observed by the Cambridge researchers.  

“By observing x-ray sources that are radiating beyond the Eddington limit, it is possible to study their accretion process in great detail, investigating by how much the limit can be exceeded and what exactly triggers the outflow of such powerful winds,” said Norbert Schartel, ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist.

The nature of the compact objects hosted at the core of the two sources observed in this study is, however, still uncertain.

Based on the x-ray brightness, the scientists suspect that these mighty winds are driven from accretion flows onto either neutron stars or black holes, the latter with masses of several to a few dozen times that of the Sun.

To investigate further, the team is still scrutinising the data archive of XMM-Newton, searching for more sources of this type, and are also planning future observations, in x-rays as well as at optical and radio wavelengths.

“With a broader sample of sources and multi-wavelength observations, we hope to finally uncover the physical nature of these powerful, peculiar objects,” said Pinto.

Reference:
C. Pinto et al. ‘Resolved atomic lines reveal outflows in two ultraluminous X-ray sources’ Nature (2016). DOI: 10.1038/nature17417.

Adapted from an ESA press release. 

Astronomers have observed two black holes in nearby galaxies devouring their companion stars at an extremely high rate, and spitting out matter at a quarter the speed of light.

This is the first time we’ve seen winds streaming away from ultra-luminous x-ray sources.
Ciro Pinto
Artist’s impression depicting a compact object – either a black hole or a neutron star – feeding on gas from a companion star in a binary system.

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The Academy of Medical Sciences announces new Fellows for 2016

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Forty-seven world-leading UK researchers, including four from the University of Cambridge, have been elected to the prestigious Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

The Fellows have been elected for their contribution to medical research and healthcare, the generation of new knowledge in medical sciences and its translation into benefits to society.

This year's elected Fellows have expertise that includes paediatrics, genetics, neuroscience and oncology.

The Fellows elected from the University of Cambridge are:

  • Professor Sylvia Richardson – Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit
  • Professor David Owen – Cambridge Institute for Medical Research
  • Professor Angela Roberts – Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience
  • Professor Colin Taylor – Department of Pharmacology
  • Professor Robin Franklin – Wellcome Trust-MRC Stem Cell Institute
  • Professor Jason Chin – Department of Chemistry/MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Professor Sir Robert Lechler PMedSci, President of the Academy of Medical Sciences said:

"These new Fellows represent the amazing diversity of talent and expertise among the UK medical research community. Through their election to the  Fellowship, we recognise the outstanding contributions these individuals have made to the progress of medical science and the development of better healthcare.

"Thanks to the experience and expertise of its Fellows, the Academy can play a crucial role in addressing the great medical challenges of our time, such as maintaining health in an ageing population, the spread of non communicable diseases and multiple morbidities.

"We work with our Fellowship to create the essential connections between academia, industry and the NHS and beyond, to strengthen biomedical research and facilitate its translation into benefits for society. 

"We are delighted to welcome this year’s new Fellows to the Academy and I look forward to working with them all in the future."

The independent Academy of Medical Sciences promotes advances in medical science and campaigns to ensure these are translated into benefits for patients. The Academy’s Fellows are the United Kingdom’s leading medical scientists from hospitals, academia, industry and the public service.

The Academy of Medical Sciences has announced the election of its new Fellows, including four Cambridge University academics.

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Prospective students share their view of Cambridge

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St John's College from the Kitchen Bridge. Photographer: Silas Hope.
Every year, CUSU’s Shadowing Scheme offers an inspiring taste of life as a Cambridge student. Over three days, prospective applicants (‘shadows’) attend lectures and supervisions as well as getting involved with the University’s vibrant social life. 
 
CUSU received dozens of entries for this year’s competition and after much deliberation its judges have selected the best. 
 
Winning the diary competition, Shabnam Tariq from Thomas Rotherham College in Rotherham, described going on a tour around Cambridge with her student mentor:
 
“The community was vibrant with people from all sorts of social and cultural backgrounds which I was not expecting.”
 
Shabnam particularly enjoyed dining in Trinity College:
 
“The architecture was beautiful and the ceiling was just as stunning. Being an A-level historian, I even spotted a portrait of Henry VIII, which helped me to understand Tudor propaganda even more. Who wouldn't want to stare at a portrait of Henry while enjoying a three-course meal?”

 
Shabnam also described in lively detail the academic components of her Shadowing Scheme weekend, writing: 
 
“I visited the beautiful Fitzwilliam Museum and then went to a ‘Life as a medical student’ introduction at Addenbrookes Hospital. Everything was very practical. I got the chance to test people's blood pressure and do a cardiac examination which was very fun. We then received a talk from a consultant on medical school admissions. This was very useful because it made me realise that you need more than knowledge to become a doctor…”
 
Shabnam concluded: “I had an amazing time on the Shadowing Scheme and it has made me want to study medicine at Cambridge even more. I learnt that nobody is arrogant, obnoxious and has 20 A-levels. Well, most people are not! It has also made me realise that you do not need to come from a wealthy family or a private school to study there; if you are dedicated and hardworking, then it can be the place for you. It is now my aspiration and goal to study medicine at Cambridge!”
 
Runner-up, Dominic Crombie from St Aidan’s Catholic Academy in Sunderland, wrote:
 
“There are certain things a person can’t do in good conscience anymore after having gone to Cambridge. They can’t be a cynic, seeing all the students will quickly dispel that. They can’t question the value of a university; it’s in every conversation on everything from [Nicki] Minaj to Marlowe. They can’t waste time; there are far too many plays to write and music-related debates to be had for that. And they can’t be satisfied with not knowing things, with not being curious …”
 
In the Photography category, Silas Hope from Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School in Chatham (Kent) took first prize with an atmospheric and brilliantly executed shot of St John’s College taken from the Kitchen Bridge.
 
The Runners-up were:
 
Mohammad Fazal from Loxford School of Science and Technology in Ilford (Essex) whose decision to snap the view through the window of his room at Queens' College resulted in a highly original photograph which captured the sense of becoming a Cambridge student for the weekend; 
 
William Keeley from Cronton Sixth Form in Widnes (Cheshire), who presented two photographs, one of Gonville& Caius College, the other of King’s College, to create a striking collage effect.
 

Around 350 state school Year 12s and mature learners who took part in Cambridge University Students’ Union’s (CUSU) student-led Shadowing Scheme were invited to enter a photography and diary competition to share their experiences. 

If you are dedicated and hardworking, then it can be the place for you. It is now my aspiration and goal to study medicine at Cambridge!
Shabnam Tariq, student at Thomas Rotherham College in Rotherham
St John's College from the Kitchen Bridge.

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