Computational Notebooks for Biomedical Research - Michal Krassowski 2 December, 11am - noon, Microsoft Teams (a link to the session will be circulated a few days before the event) To register, please click here: https://oxford.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/computational-notebooks-for-biomedical-research-2-dec Session Aim Demonstrate the capabilities of the computational notebooks in application to biomedical research and best practices for the use of notebooks. Session Content This session will cover the following topics: Jupyter notebooks (Python and R), R (markdown) notebooks, reproducibility and repeatability, extensions in Jupyter ecosystem, notebooks widgets, regulatory musings. Session Objectives At the end of the session, participants will be able to: - decide which format of notebooks suits their needs best, - work with the notebooks in the chosen format, - create simple notebook widgets, - manage notebooks in a git repository and share their work online (Binder)
This session will explore what are the kinds of careers available in the Arts & Heritage sector, and how might these change in the wake of COVID-19?
To participate please contact the convenors: David Hopkin (Hertford): david.hopkin@hertford.ox.ac.uk Sasha Rasmussen (St Hilda’s): sasha.rasmussen@history.ox.ac.uk
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a powerful tool for measurement of brain function. Used both in research and clinical investigation, MEG measures magnetic fields generated by current flow through neuronal assemblies. Mathematical modelling of these fields enables generation of 3D images showing moment to moment changes in brain current. In this way, MEG offers a powerful metric, able to track the formation and dissolution of brain networks as they modulate in support of cognition. However, the current generation of MEG scanners are severely limited. This is because the only sensors able to detect the small magnetic fields generated by the brain are superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) which must be cryogenically cooled to maintain operation. This need for cooling makes MEG systems large and expensive. Moreover, they cannot adapt to head shape or size, they are very sensitive to subject motion, they are largely unsuited to imaging infants and even in adults, the requisite thermally insulating gap between the head and the field sensors limits both sensitivity and spatial resolution. In this talk, I will describe our recent work on the use if a new generation of magnetic field sensor – the optically pumped magnetometer (OPM). OPMs offer similar sensitivity to SQUIDs but without requirement for cryogenic cooling. This has enabled us to develop a new generation of MEG technology (see Figure 1). I will first discuss the basic operation of an OPM including its origins in fundamental quantum physics. I will then go on to describe the development of OPM-MEG, from single sensor recordings to the current 50-channel whole head system which is in operation at the University of Nottingham. I will discuss the technical challenges that have been solved, and which allow for measurement of brain function in freely moving subjects. I will also discuss the latest applications of this technology, including measurements in infants, virtual reality, motor learning and functional connectivity. I will conclude by speculating on the future of MEG technology and the role that can be played by OPM-MEG.
With much talk of a ‘splinternet’ and the emerging of technology ‘blocs’ of influence, the cyber domain is emerging more strongly as a domain of geopolitical competition. This competition features competing visions of the Internet: one, an American led Western model that is open, and another, a more state-controlled, authoritarian Chinese model. The competition between these and other models has had little structure so far and has seen a complex mix of economic, trade, security, technological and other strategic considerations. In this talk, Ciaran Martin will examine some of the issues at stake while exploring some of the possible outcomes in the next decade. Ciaran Martin, Professor of Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government and founding head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre Chaired by Lucas Kello, Associate Professor of International Relations, DPIR This seminar is sponsored by the Centre for International Studies.
Oxford University is setting a target to achieve net zero carbon and biodiversity net gain by 2035 to address the global challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss in our organisation. Harriet Waters (Head of Environmental Sustainability) will present the biodiversity net gain aspects of the University’s Environmental sustainability strategy. Come along, find out more and ask any questions ahead of the consultation closing on 6 December.
The following seminars will take place at 1pm unless otherwise stated. All welcome to join via Zoom, but registration required: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/calendar.
You are invited to join this special Open Forum event, focused on the Race Equality Task Force, which was launched this month to address racial inequality at Oxford. The event is open to all staff and will include an introduction from the Vice-Chancellor to the aims of the Task Force, followed by short presentations from Dr Rebecca Surender, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Advocate for Equality and Diversity and Professor Anne Trefethen and Professor Martin Williams, Pro-Vice-Chancellors and Co-chairs of the Race Equality Task Force. This will be followed by a Q&A session. Questions can be pre-submitted at registration, or posted on the Q&A panel in Teams Live
Modeling cellular state as well as dynamics e.g. during differentiation or in response to perturbations is a central goal of computational biology. Single-cell technologies now give us easy and large-scale access to state observations on the transcriptomic and more recently also epigenomic level. In particular, they allow resolving potential heterogeneities due to asynchronicity of differentiating or responding cells, and profiles across multiple conditions such as time points, space and replicates are being generated. In this talk I will shortly review scVelo, our recent model for dynamic RNA velocity, allowing estimation of gene-specific transcription and splicing rates, and illustrate its use to estimate a shared latent time in pancreatic endocrinogenesis. I will then show CellRank, a probabilistic model based on Markov chains which makes use of both transcriptomic similarities as well as RNA velocity to infer developmental start- and endpoints and assign lineages in a probabilistic manner. It allows users to gain insights into the timing of endocrine lineage commitment and recapitulates gene expression trends towards developmental endpoints. While the above approaches focus on individual gene expression models, recently latent space modeling and manifold learning have become a popular tool to learn overall variation in single cell gene expression. I will wrap by briefly discussing how these tools can be used to integrate single cell RNA-seq data sets across multiple labs in a privacy aware manner.
Given the many new technologies that have emerged recently, we aim to create a forum that balances not only gene editing successes and interesting innovations, but also failures and challenges which are undoubtedly being experienced by many. This will provide an opportunity for discussion around methods of optimisation and helpful tips to facilitate productive collaboration within the University. There will be three sessions covering basic Science and methods (eg. model development, genome-wide screens, donor template design), clinically focused projects (eg. diagnostics, therapies) and emerging CRISPR technologies (eg. prime editing, base editing, RNA editing). We have a fantastic preliminary list of speakers and are calling on anyone, no matter the level and stage of project (students welcome!), to volunteer themselves for a short 10 minute talk with 5 minutes for questions and discussion at the end. Please get in touch with Lewis Fry at lewis.fry@ndcn.ox.ac.uk if you are interested or if you would like to find out more. If you are interested but feel your work doesn't fit within the topics described, please still get in touch as we are open to considering other areas not mentioned too.
Zoom registration: https://medsci.zoom.us/j/99486874853?pwd=eExxMDZWZEtqalBtMnRWWTVWb1Y2Zz09 What is the moral universe of Muslim researchers? Through empirical research conducted in Malaysia and Iran, Dr Suleman will present on key understudied areas in research ethics including: the role of faith in moral deliberations within biomedical research ethics, the moral anxiety and frustration experienced by researchers when having to negotiate multiple moral sources and how the marginalisation of women, the prejudice and abuse faced by groups such as sex workers and those from the LGBT community are encountered and negotiated in Muslim contexts. Biomedical Law and Ethics Library: https://www.routledge.com/Biomedical-Law-and-Ethics-Library/book-series/CAV5
Please email oralhistory@history.ox.ac.uk for an MS Teams invite or follow the link below: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ZmY5ZDA4M2UtZDRmNi00Y2M1LThiNzMtN2UwODg1ODhmNGMy%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22dba96655-073e-4567-8091-56aefb536e7f%22%7d
Tim Wilson (St Andrews) will talk about his new book, Killing Strangers: How Political Violence Became Modern (Oxford University Press, 2020), followed by comments from Stathis Kalyvas (Oxford)
Transport of organelles, vesicles and macromolecules by microtubule-based motors is critical for cellular organisation. Due to their extended processes, neurons are particularly reliant on these trafficking processes occurring efficiently. This fact is underlined by the discovery that mutations in motor proteins and their co-factors cause neurodevelopmental and age-related neurodegenerative disorders. Defective axonal transport has also been observed in neurodegenerative diseases caused by other mutations, although whether this a cause or consequence of the pathology is actively debated. The overarching goal of our group is to understand how microtubule motors traffic their cargoes to distinct sites within cells, and the connections between defective transport processes and neuronal dysfunction during ageing and disease. We address these problems by combining reconstitution of transport complexes in vitro with genetic dissection of cargo trafficking in Drosophila and mammalian cells. In this seminar, I will review our work using Drosophila to elucidate the function and regulation of axonal transport during ageing. I will then present evidence from iPS cell-derived neurons and single-molecule imaging that inhibitory interactions with the transport machinery contribute directly to the most common familial form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The Oxford Internet Institute welcomes Visiting Policy Fellow Tim Hwang, discussing his new book ‘Subprime Attention Crisis’ with Dr Scott A. Hale, a Senior Research Fellow at the OII. Tim is a writer and researcher focusing on public policy and emerging technologies. This session will be a deep-dive conversation exploring how the modern online advertising economy really works, how fragile it may be in reality, and how we might move the internet towards a more sustainable future. This event is co-organised with Meedan. Programmatic advertising – high-speed, algorithmically-facilitated, data-driven advertising – is the cornerstone of the modern internet. It has produced untold wealth for major companies like Facebook and Google, and is the predominant way that online media is made financially sustainable. At its heart, it is based in the idea that the vast trove of data available about people online enables hyper-targeted, hyper-effective persuasion. This promise has driven huge financial gains for businesses, and inspired countless op-eds from technology critics and commentators concerned about the influence of message microtargeting on individuals and society at large. But, much of what we know about online advertising suggests that these visions of an omnipotent persuasion engine are far from reality. In 2014, Google estimated that nearly 60% of ads on the internet are never seen. In 2017, Proctor and Gamble – one of the world’s largest advertisers – cut nearly $200M from its online advertising budget, to little effect. The ostensible strength of online advertising is in reality, likely to be a bubble. The market has been sustainable in part through the economic destruction of traditional media, the perverse incentives of buyers and sellers of advertising, and the surprising opacity of the digital marketplace for attention. Even as attention online is increasingly “subprime”, these dynamics push the market towards new heights.
This term, the seminar meets each Wednesday at 4.30 p.m. online via the Oxford Medieval Studies TEAMS. The Medieval English Research Seminar is a channel of the OMS TEAM. Please join the OMS TEAM by clicking 'TEAMS' > 'Join/create a team' > 'Search teams' > 'Oxford Medieval Studies'. If you have any difficulties, contact vincent.gillespie@ell.ox.ac.uk to be added to the channel for the Medieval English Research Seminar. Week 8, 2nd December: Sarah Wood (Warwick), ‘Langland’s Manuscript Lives’. Chaired by Vincent Gillespie.
In this project, we study the impact of land rights’ formalization on functioning of informal insurance and land re-allocations in Ghana’s rural communities. First, we provide empirical evidence suggesting that increasing formal land rights improve land security, efficiency of informal land allocations, agricultural productivity and informal risk-sharing. Second, we develop a dynamic model of land and risk sharing subject to limited commitment constraints, where the equilibrium degree of co-operation is determined by the degree of land rights chosen. We show that the model can rationalize our empirical findings and can serve as a useful quantitative laboratory allowing for investigating (i) the interaction between the customary tenure and mutual insurance systems; (ii) the causal impact of increasing the formality of land markets on the functioning of these informal institutions; (iii) the degree of land misallocation due to missing land rights or limited commitment constraints; and (iv) effects of allowing land to act as collateral for credit.
Refugee resettlement has long been seen as a purely humanitarian act. When refugees are “integrated” into the labour market, it is seen as a tool to promote values such as self-sufficiency and dignity. But refugee labour is often needed by host countries, and refugees are often inserted into industries where they are tasked with jobs host country nationals refuse to do. Using the example of the American meatpacking industry, which relies heavily on refugees resettled by the US Department of State, I discuss why refugees were simultaneously deemed “essential” and “prohibited” during the COVID-19 epidemic. This paradox, in which refugees are both indispensable and stigmatized, is used to racialize and devalue their labour, creating ethnic enclaves in the labour market that simultaneously permit them to work and trap them in dangerous, underpaid jobs.
Following on from Oxford’s Citizens Assembly, Lord Mayor of Oxford, Councillor Craig Simmons, asks: What does Oxford need to do to go Net Zero Carbon and what does this even mean? What national and local changes are needed? What is Local Government doing correctly and what does it need to change? About Craig Simmons Councillor Simmons has represented the area on the County and then City Council for more than 20 years. He works as an environmental consultant at Anthesis, a locally headquartered, international sustainability consultancy. Craig is a keen cyclist and community campaigner having established the East Oxford Farmer’s Market and Low Carbon East Oxford as well as co-founding the Cowley Road Carnival and local car club. A link to join the event will be emailed to you on the morning of the event. Deadline to register: 8am, Wednesday 2 December Please note: this event will be recorded
Professor Jerrilynn Dodds is Harlequin Adair Dammann Chair in Islamic Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in the USA. She has a BA from Barnard College and an MA and PhD from Harvard University. Her work has centred on issues of artistic interchange—in particular, among Christians, Jews, and Muslims—and how groups form identities through art and architecture. Dodds has a special interest in the arts of Spain and the history of architecture. She is the author of Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain and NY Masjid: The Mosques of New York and co-author of Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture, among other books and publications. In 2021, Jerri Dodds will take up the Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at the University of Oxford.
Scott Sowerby (Northwestern) ‘Managing Intolerance: The Incorporation of Huguenots and Swiss Protestants in the French Army after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685–1715’ Aaron Graham (Oxford) Huguenots and Protestants in the British army after 1685 John Condren (Oxford) Swiss in French service/impact on Swiss cantons
Seminars are at 5.15 on Wednesdays and will take place online, via Zoom. You will find the link to the Zoom meeting in the email from the English Faculty. If you have any questions, please email Dr George Potts (george.potts@ell.ox.ac.uk) Dr Hugh Stevens (University College London), ‘James Baldwin, Race and Wrongful Conviction’ Dr Leah Rosenberg (University of Florida), ‘The modernism of Eric Walrond and the Postmodernism of Michelle Cliff’ Dr Mandisa Haarhoff (University of Cape Town), ‘Intimacy, Proximity, and Blackness in Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut Convenors: Professor Santanu Das, Professor Laura Marcus and Dr George Potts
Papers and speakers for this seminar will be: 'Ethnic Endogamy and Jewish Income Attainment: A Longitudinal Analysis of Jewish Last Names in Chile' by Naim Bro (Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, Santiago) with Liran Morav (University of Cambridge); 'When Did the American Dream Move North? Intergenerational Mobility in Canada, 1871–1901' by Chris Minns (London School of Economics) with Kris Inwood (University of Guelph) and Fraser Summerfield (St Francis Xavier University); 'The Permanence of Concentrated Property Ownership Amidst Economic Transformation: Social Mobility in Dudelange, Luxembourg (1766–1872)' by Sonia Schifano (University of Luxembourg)
The ethnographic museum is full. Clothes, objects and tools fill the walls and floors. But where is the love? The three speakers take the exhibition Losing Venus as their starting point to discuss how emotion, intimacy, care and love can be brought back into the ethnographic museum and radiate out from its collections. This event will run on Zoom, and will be available to view after the event. A link to the event will be emailed to you via Eventbrite within 48 hours of the event starting.
The Nuffield Department of Women's & Reproductive Health invites you to MitOX 2020 on Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th December 2020. It's our annual meeting packed with short talks on cancer metabolism, neuroscience, diabetes, mitochondrial disorders and general mitochondrial biology. This two day virtual conference is ideal for researchers with an interest in mitochondria from academia and pharma. It will include a range of short talks and posters on cancer metabolism, neuroscience, diabetes, mitochondrial disorders and general mitochondrial biology. View speakers here: https://www.wrh.ox.ac.uk/mitox2020
Students, senior researchers and faculty from all disciplines – physical sciences, social sciences, humanities – are invited to participate in the Climate Change and India reading group, and provide insights into multiple aspects of climate change debates specific to the Indian context. For more details, please see: www.some.ox.ac.uk/research/oxford-india-centre/current-research/climate-change-and-india-reading-group To participate in the reading group, please write to us at oicsd@some.ox.ac.uk
'When faced with huge social or environmental challenges, we must adjust our approach to investment in order to tackle them. Lives would improve, governments would save money and investors would make a reasonable profit. It was a win-win-win situation.' IMPACT, Sir Ronald Cohen Sir Ronald Cohen, pioneering philanthropist, venture capitalist, private equity investor, and a social innovator, who is driving forward the global Impact Revolution. He graduated from Oxford University and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. of The Sunday Times Top 10 Best Business Book, IMPACT: Reshaping capitalism to drive real change. Find out how to play your part in changing the world. Free event and open access. No need to book. Watch live or visit the recording here: https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/oxford-answers
This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human well-being, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being—solidarity (S) and agency (A)—to be considered alongside the standard indexes of material gain (G) and environmental sustainability (E). The four indexes—SAGE—form a balanced dashboard for evaluating well-being. The solidarity index covers the needs of humans as social creatures, living in societies that generate a sense of social belonging. The agency index involves people’s need to influence their fate through their own efforts. While “economic prosperity” (material gain) is conventionally measured through GDP per capita, “social prosperity” can be measured through our solidarity and agency indexes, alongside environmental sustainability that is measured through the Environmental Performance Index. The SAGE dashboard is meant to provide a “sage” approach to assessing well-being, since it aims to denote sagacity in the pursuit and satisfaction of fundamental human needs and purposes. Many of the prominent challenges of the 21st century, including the dissatisfaction of population groups who feel left behind by globalization and technological advance, may be viewed in terms of a “decoupling” of economic prosperity from social prosperity. We present a theoretical model that provides a new perspective on the welfare effects of globalization and automation. The dashboard is meant to provide an empirical basis for mobilizing action in government, business, and civil society to promote a recoupling of economic and social prosperity.
Please send a blank email to cgis-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk to join the mailing list and receive the joining links
For researchers working on this timely topic from across the University, an informal meeting, which has the main purpose of introducing researchers to each other to explore potential interdisciplinary collaborations
Speakers for this insaka are: Nana Oforiatta Ayim : Creating New Narratives for Africa and its Diasporas For many years post independence of African nations, their dominant global narratives were still propagated by the West. Through the advent of social media and the increasing equalizing of voices heard and recognised in the global landscape, this is now changing. Nana will speak about how she has been trying to uncover and reimagine narratives of Ghana, Africa and its Diasporas through a Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, new models of museums and cultural institutions, writing, lecturing and filmmaking. Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Writer, Filmmaker, Art Historian and Cultural Activist who lives and works in Accra, Ghana. She is the Founder of the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge. She published her first novel The God Child with Bloomsbury in 2019, and contributes regularly to books such as African Metropolitan Architecture. She has made films for museums such as Tate Modern, LACMA and The New Museum. She lectures a course on Decolonial History and Theory at the Architectural Association in London. She is the recipient of various awards and honours, having been named one of the Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; a Quartz Africa Innovator in 2017; one of 12 African women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women of 2020 by Okayafrica. Yacob Mulugetta: What direction for Africa’s Energy Future? Energy is a critical enabler of economic transformation and social wellbeing. Nowhere is the critical nature of energy for development more pressing than in Africa. Part of the urgency is because Africa is a continent undergoing change with major aspirations to transform their economies that will create high quality jobs and enhance wellbeing. This will require heavy investments in energy systems, and given that Africa’s energy system is yet to be built, there is a window of opportunity for technology and policy innovation and experimentation. This discussion explores different energy visions that African countries can consider as they make decisions that will have repercussions for many years to come. Yacob Mulugetta is Professor of Energy and Development Policy, and Director of the MPA programme at the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering & Public Policy (STEaPP) at University College London. Previously, he was an academic staff at the Centre for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey, UK. Between 2010 and 2013, Yacob was based at the UN Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where he helped set up the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC). Yacob was also Coordinating Lead Author of the chapter on Energy Systems of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group III on Mitigation) and a member of the Core Writing Team of the IPCC Synthesis Report.
This seminar will demonstrate that without access to safe water there can be no food security and nutrition. It will explore alternative and more locally appropriate ways to address complex water management and governance challenges from the local to global levels against a backdrop of growing climate and other related uncertainties. It will argue for the need to improve policy coherence across water, land and food and for strengthening the human rights to water and food to ensure healthy and productive lives and a climate resilient future for all. The seminar focuses on key findings of the book “Water for Food Security, Nutrition and Social Justice”. Authored by Lyla Mehta, Theib Oweis, Claudia Ringler, Barbara Schreiner and Shiney Varghese, it is the first comprehensive effort to bring together Water, Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) in a way that goes beyond the traditional focus on irrigated agriculture. About the Speaker Lyla Mehta is a Professor at the Institute of Development Studies and a Visiting Professor at Noragric, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She uses the case of water and sanitation to focus on the politics of scarcity, gender, human rights and access to resources, resource grabbing, and power and policy processes in rural, peri urban and urban contexts. Her work also focusses on climate change and uncertainty and forced displacement. She has extensive research and field experience in India and southern Africa and is currently leading a Belmont/ Norface/ EU/ ISC project on ‘Transformations as praxis’ in South Asia. Her most recent book is Water, Food Security, Nutrition and Social Justice (Routledge, 2020). She trained as a sociologist (University of Vienna) and has a Ph.D. in Development Studies (University of Sussex).
Since late 2015, the ESRC/OFSRE Centre for Global Higher education has been conducting research and open scholarly discussion on global, national and local higher education, linking researchers in nine countries. CGHE, which began as a publicly funded initiative of the Economic and Social Research Council in UK in another era, before the 2016 Brexit referendum and the Covid-19 pandemic, has grown its research, publishing and commentary for the changing needs of the time. It now conducts global webinars on higher education topics that regularly draw participants from 30-40 countries and more. In November this year, CGHE began its second stage of ESRC funded support (2020-2023) which will focus on connecting its research outcomes to policy and practice, and also involves two new projects, one focusing on the place of research in higher education, and the other mapping the global higher education space, with emphasis on Africa, Central Asia and the Caucuses, and Europe. The webinar will review the past work of CGHE and its forward plans for the next three years and invite webinar participants to help us identify the burning questions about higher education that need evidence-based answers. This webinar is about the role and nature of research on higher education, and what a research centre with distributed worldwide capacity can do; but it is also about the core functions of higher education and critical research, which at their best are humanity at its best and a chief hope of the world.
The last US presidential elections have been the most contested in decades, and they aroused the attention in the entire world. Will Joe Biden’s presidency imply the return to democratic normality? Conversely, is the “old normality” over? Will Trumpism persist after Donald Trump? What are the main challenges that the USA face in the 21st century? To discuss these questions, the MFO invites you to a seminar on Thursday, 3 December, 2.30 pm (UTC). Guest speakers are Archon Fung (Harvard), Desmond King (Nuffield College), and Sylvie Laurent (Science Po Paris). Organised in cooperation with Nuffield College.
Future of Technology and Society Discussion Group https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/future-of-technology-and-society-discussion-group
One of the most fascinating developments over the past years has been the recognition that the cerebellum is not just involved in motor control and motor learning but that it is engaged in almost all neurological functions including cognitive, emotional and social-psychological functions. This range of functions is reflected by the many diseases that are linked to dysfunction of these cerebellar domains. Mounting evidence suggests a role for the cerebellum in autism. However, the molecular mechanisms linking cerebellar function to autism remain incompletely understood. I will present work from our group that investigates the role of autism genes in the development and function of the cerebellum by integrating experimental developmental neurobiology and computational analyses. Please register in advance for each seminar. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. If you could share with anyone who might be interested in your research groups / departments that would be great. Contact catherine.manning@psy.ox.ac.uk for any questions or suggestions for future speakers.
The nature of public management is changing as public services around the world contend with increasingly complex problems, rapid technological advancements, and rising expectations from the public. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights an urgent need for public services to be more innovative, agile and sophisticated in the way that they operate and in their response to societal challenges. Despite its immense toll on human lives and socio-economic conditions, COVID-19 presents an opportunity to reinvent the public service to become more effective, perform better and be more connected to the population that it serves. In this event, Victor Lapuente, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, and Lea Gimenez, Chief of the Innovation in Citizen Services Division at the Inter-American Development Bank and Paraguay's former Minister of Finance reimagine the role of the public service and discuss how to translate a disruption such as the COVID-19 pandemic into organisational learning. Calum Miller, Chief Operating Officer and Associate Dean at the Blavatnik School of Government, moderates the discussion. Please note: This event will be held online via Zoom. Register via the webpage to receive an email with joining instructions closer to the event date.
As soon as the scale of the coronavirus shock to the economy became clear, the Government introduced three policies to protect directly household incomes: a Job Retention Scheme, to pay the wages of employees who were temporarily furloughed; a Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, to give grants to established self-employed people whose businesses had been affected; and a package of increases to entitlements to social security benefits, with Universal Credit at the core, that bolstered the UK’s means-tested ‘safety net’. This lecture will discuss the design and beneficiaries of these policies and, given the distributional pattern of the labour market shock, considers the emerging overall impact on living standards, particularly of low-income households. For further information and analysis, attendees may be interested in a recent publication, by Mike and colleagues: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oxrep/graa024/5863392
This paper addresses the morality of consumer boycotts. The boycotts Amy considers are assumed to pursue unquestionably good and just ends. Even so, she will argue that boycotts can be construed as a kind of violent protest: they share with violent protests efforts to coerce changes in conduct through violence or threats of violence. And she will argue that boycotts are presumptively wrong for an additional reason: they violate market norms. Other theorists have argued that political boycotts are presumptively wrong because they seek to effectuate political change in a sphere that is not governed by democratic procedures, and because boycotts stand to undermine substantive policies produced through the democratic process. In other words, by the lights of these theorists, the problem with boycotts is that they seek democratic ends in an undemocratic sphere. Or, more pithily put, boycotts are anti-democratic. Amy argues that there is an additional problem with boycotts – namely, that they are anti-market. In particular, she is going to argue that boycotts disrupt market activity in ways that are presumptively unfair to sellers and other buyers. More pithily put, boycotts are akin to looting because boycotts “rob” retail businesses – not of their merchandise, but of the opportunity to have a fair shot at competing for consumer dollars. The paper ends by contrasting boycotts with conscientious consumerism. Amy argues that the state should permit conscientious consumerism more readily than boycotts, but only when the conscientious consumer is an individual, and not where it is a corporation.
As the race for COVID–19 vaccines enters its next stage, we are faced with broad ethical challenges, along with specific questions of principle and practice. How will the private companies developing these vaccines balance their commercial interests with the public good? Once the vaccines are ready for distribution, how should countries and the global community plan for distribution and allocation? And with so much skepticism about both commercial and political interests, what can and should be done to bolster trust across populations and targeted to specific communities? On Thursday, December 3, from 12:00pm ET to 1:30pm ET, Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, will moderate a discussion on the ethics of the COVID-19 vaccines. Join us for this important discussion on a timely subject.
Humanity's relationship with nature has become increasingly unsustainable. Recent events have demonstrated this, including the COVID pandemic, devastating fires in Australia, Siberia and Brazil, and floods in India and the UK. We need to reset our relationship with nature so we can build a world in which both people and nature can thrive. To do this we need to come together across the world, regardless of our backgrounds and circumstances, as fellow humans who share the same planet. We all need to raise our voices so that people in power hear us and change their policies. We also need to take action as individuals and groups to change the way we live. #Pledgeforourfuture is a place for people to say how they feel, get inspired and register their commitment to change their lifestyles and influence others. If enough of us come together and raise our voices, we can show decision-makers that change must come. Together, we can build an unstoppable momentum towards creating a planet where both nature and people can thrive. Our panellists cover a spectrum of age, conservation experience and approaches, and come from different parts of the world (Argentina, the Netherlands, India and the UK). They have come together because of their shared vision of empowering people to find the answer to the perennial question "But what can I do to help?". In this session we will hear about where they got their love of nature, how they have tried to make a difference in their personal and professional lives and where they may sometimes still struggle, and about their hopes and fears for the future of nature and humanity. We will discuss the importance of seizing this current moment of heightened awareness about the intertwining fates of nature and people. We will also talk about how to answer questions from people who are concerned, but don't know where to start in making a change - or who may feel that their contribution is too small to be relevant. We will introduce the idea of #4steps4theEarth as a way of structuring people's commitments to nature. Finally, we will discuss what gives the panellists #ConservationOptimism. The panel session will be followed by a Question and Answer session. Please send us any questions for the panel in advance to: contact@pledgeforourfuture.earth or tweet them to #pledgeforourfuture
With COVID-19 vaccines on the horizon, attention again returns to the contentious topic of whether vaccination should be made mandatory. Recent polling has resulted in worrying headlines about a lack of willingness to have a COVID-19 vaccine if it were available. Are mandates the answer to ensure vaccine high uptake to end the pandemic? While still a hypothetical scenario, without yet having a safe and effective vaccine approved for use, this could change in the coming months. The question of introducing mandatory vaccination spans considerations of personal liberty, health decision-making, public health and policy, as well as the relationship between the state and its citizens. Join Professor Julian Savulescu and Dr Samantha Vanderslott to debate the ethical and public policy arguments for and against mandatory COVID-19 vaccination.
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Live Event: Thursday 3 December 2020, 5.00pm-6.00pm Making Theatre Live: Across and Beyond Borders Watch Live here: https://youtu.be/uhAtmqLTcN4 Join us for a fascinating conversation with two internationally renowned theatre directors – Thomas Ostermeier from Berlin’s Schaubühne and our current visiting Theatre Fellow Katie Mitchell. Professor Wes Williams, TORCH Director, will host this free-ranging conversation which will explore questions of liveness, of borders – geographical, linguistic, and metaphorical, as well as the range of challenges facing theatre during and beyond the 2020.
Suggested preparatory reading: Johanna Luthman, Love, Madness and Scandal (2017), 45-80
A discussion of pre-circulated selections of Prof. Reckson’s new book, held in collaboration with the University of Manchester. Realist Ecstasy explores the intersection and history of American literary realism and the performance of racial and spiritual embodiment. Find out more here: https://nyupress.org/9781479850365/realist-ecstasy/ Lindsay V. Reckson is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Haverford College. NOTE: There will also be a discussion with Prof. Reckson about conducting postgraduate research on Wednesday, 2 December 2020, 5:00-6:30pm. This event is hosted by the University of Manchester. All seminars will be held on Zoom. For Zoom invitation and pre-circulated readings, please join the ALRS mailing list by sending a blank email to alrs-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Ethical Debates in Orangutan Conservation explores how conservationists decide whether, and how, to undertake rehabilitation and reintroduction (R&R) when rescuing orphaned orangutans. The author demonstrates that exploring ethical dilemmas is crucial for understanding ongoing disagreements about how to help endangered wildlife in an era of anthropogenic extinction. Join us for an online launch of this new book, which will interest conservation and animal welfare practitioners, and scholars in the fields of animal studies, primatology, geography, environmental philosophy, and anthropology. Organised in collaboration with the Keble College MCR, and featuring a post-launch discussion on how to publish from your PhD.
Aspects of identity — from gender, to race, to class background, to national origin, — impact the way that women experience challenges. It follows that empowering women requires different kinds of work and different kinds of change. We speak to three successful entrepreneurs, Christelle Kwizera, Alison Price and Leah Lizarondo, who have not only founded entrepreneurial businesses in male-dominated fields but are also using their work to tackle climate change and sustainability issues. We ask them how they navigated their way through challenges to come out on top. Co-hosting the event with Dr. Bridget Kustin is Amanda Ellis, co-chair of the WE Empower United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Challenge. Christelle, Alison and Leah have been recognised for their achievements by WE Empower who run a global business competition to honour, support and celebrate women entrepreneurs who are advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and inspiring communities to create the world we want by 2030.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
The 2007 IPCC 4th Assessment Report did not account for dynamical ice sheet change within its projections of future sea level due to limited understanding of the processes involved and a lack of consensus on their magnitude. Since then, our understanding of ice sheet dynamics has expanded dramatically thanks to significant advances in our ability to measure and model the drivers of ice sheet change. The majority of research has focused on climatic factors controlling ice sheet change but in this talk I will consider an important non-climatic factor: the role of the ice sheet bed. Basal conditions determine whether an ice sheet slides freely or is frozen to its bed, but for a marine-grounded ice sheet such as Antarctica, the shape of the bed also plays an important role as it determines whether the ice sheet can recover from short-term ice loss or whether it is likely to tip into a state of unstable retreat. Crucially, the current shape of the bed beneath West Antarctica means that it is at risk of runaway ice loss. I will describe various factors that may play a role in destabilizing or stabilizing this ice sheet, including a negative feedback process, related to the isostatic response of the solid Earth to ice sheet change, that has the potential to slow the rate of ice loss. The strength of this feedback depends on the rheology of the upper mantle and I will describe recent efforts to determine the material properties of the solid Earth beneath Antarctica, drawing on both modelling and observational approaches.
In Japan almost 80% of all university students attend private institutions. According to some estimates, up to 40% of these institutions are family businesses in the sense that members of a single family have substantive ownership or control over their operation. This paper examines how such universities in Japan have negotiated a period of major demographic decline since the 1990s: their experiments in restructuring and reform, the diverse experiences of those who worked and studied within them and, above all, their unexpected resilience. It argues that this resilience derives from a number of ‘inbuilt’ strengths of family business which are often overlooked in conventional descriptions of higher education.
In collaboration with the Wellbeing Research Centre. This paper explores a new approach to capturing wellbeing and human development in a single, joint multidimensional index that is at once intuitive, rigorous and policy salient. Based on Amartya Sen’s capability approach and the Alkire-Foster method as adapted in Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, we build a new exploratory Multidimensional Wellbeing Index (MWI) for the United Kingdom. The index follows a subset of the domains and indicators from the official national wellbeing dashboard, and is constructed from a single wave of Understanding Society (Wave 9) data. Following a review of recent developments in wellbeing measurement, we present the methodology for the index, and findings at the national level and decomposed by population groups. The study aims to inform the debate on the measurement of wellbeing in the United Kingdom, and of human development more generally, and to illustrate the value-added of an overarching intuitive yet rigorous metric, as a complement to a rich and intricate dashboard. Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Her research interests and publications include multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, welfare economics, Amartya Sen’s capability approach, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, and human development. She holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford. Fanni Kovesdi is a Research Analyst at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. Since joining OPHI in 2018, she has worked on the global MPI and Changes over Time projects, harmonizing MPI data to analyse trends in poverty for 80 countries using the global Multidimensional Poverty Index. Prior to joining OPHI, she has completed a Masters in Sociology at the University of Oxford. Her research interests are in poverty, wellbeing, inequality, social identities and migration. This event will be held on Zoom (registration: https://bit.ly/2GPQbUA).
Central bank communication to the public is important. Not only do central banks need to influence wage and price-setters expectations to fulfill their objectives, the power that central banks wield creates a democratic obligation to communicate to the public. Despite its importance, communication to the general public is far less studied than communication to financial markets. This paper posits that a key channel through which the general public receives central bank communication is through the print media. We examine which features of central bank text are associated with increased reporting in the news. We write down a model of news production and consumption in which news generation is endogenous. We use our model to show that standard econometric techniques will likely (i) provide biased estimates and (ii) fail to deal with the high-dimensionality of the estimation problem. We use computational linguistics to measure the variables in our model for the case of the Bank of England, and double machine learning to estimate the model. We find that not only does the content of the what the Bank of England produce matter for its news coverage, but also the way in which the Bank of England says it.
Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) undergo substantial changes in their structural and electronic properties under applied pressure leading to charge density wave, superconducting, and topologically non-trivial phases. In this talk, I will present our latest results on MoTe2 and SnSe2, two compounds that have emerged as promising candidates for exploring exotic states of matter. In the case of MoTe2, we demonstrated that the superconducting dome observed experimentally originates from the synergistic contribution of the density of states at the Fermi level and the transverse acoustic Te modes in the 1T’ phase. In the case of SnSe2, we showed that the apparent contradiction among high-pressure results can be attributed to differences in experimental conditions. In particular, we provided evidence that while a superconducting state emerges in the parent compound under non-hydrostatic pressure, a structural transition to a commensurate superstructure develops under hydrostatic pressure.
Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes, foreign arms sales to Taiwan, and foreign leaders’ meetings with the Dalai Lama, despite adverse implications for its international image. China is also curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion: most cases of Chinese coercion are not military coercion, nor does China coerce all states that pose the same threats to its national security. My book manuscript, Calculating Bully – Explaining Chinese Coercion, examines when, why, and how China coerces states when faced with threats to its national security. It asks two central questions: when and why does China coerce, and – if coercion is chosen – what tools does China use? Contrary to conventional wisdom and in contrast with historical rising powers, my book manuscript demonstrates that China is a cautious bully, does not coerce frequently, and uses military coercion less as it has become stronger, resorting mostly to non-militarized tools such as gray-zone coercion. I identify the centrality of the reputation for resolve and economic cost in driving whether states coerce or not. States coerce one target to deter others – ‘killing the chicken to scare the monkey,’ treating coercion as a signalling tool. At the same time, states are constrained by the imperative of developing the domestic economy and the potential of losing the target state’s markets and supply. Ketian Vivian Zhang is an Assistant Professor of International Security in the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University.
Genotype-phenotype associations can be results of direct effects, genetic nurturing effects and population stratification confounding (The nature of nurture: Effects of parental genotypes, Science, 2018, Deconstructing the sources of genotype-phenotype associations in humans, Science, 2019). Genotypes from parents and siblings of the proband can be used to statistically disentangle these effects. To maximize power, a comprehensive framework for utilizing various combinations of parents’ and siblings’ genotypes is introduced. Central to the approach is mendelian imputation, a method that utilizes identity by descent (IBD) information to non-linearly impute genotypes into untyped relatives using genotypes of typed individuals. Applying the method to UK Biobank probands with at least one parent or sibling genotyped, for an educational attainment (EA) polygenic score that has a R^2 of 5.7% with EA, its predictive power based on direct genetic effect alone is demonstrated to be only about 1.4%. For women, the EA polygenic score has a bigger estimated direct effect on age-at-first-birth than EA itself.
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This paper introduces a simple market model for news: consumers benefit from and want to share true news and producers incur costs to produce true news. News veracity is endogenous, shaped by the social network. When producer revenues derive from consumers’ viewing stories (e.g., advertising revenue), veracity is low in dense networks, since even false news spreads widely. With revenues from consumers’ actions based on stories (e.g, voting), veracity is higher in dense networks, since consumers make better inferences about news truth. Adding third-party misinformation can increase equilibrium true-news production as consumers respond by being more judicious when sharing stories. Please sign up for meetings here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G0KdCfEkG4LYBuDSCLxyGRSEULv3_smLEEQMofG4X5U/edit#gid=0
Growing up in science is a conversation series featuring personal narratives of becoming and being a scientist, with a focus on the unspoken challenges of a life in science. Growing up in Science was started in 2014 at New York University and is now worldwide. At a typical Growing up in Science event, one faculty member shares their life story, with a focus on struggles, failures, doubts, detours, and weaknesses. Common topics include dealing with expectations, impostor syndrome, procrastination, luck, rejection, conflicts with advisors, and work-life balance, life outside academia but these topics are always embedded in the speaker’s broader narrative.
Online seminar followed by Q&A - all welcome. Please note all times given in UK time (GMT) Despite the well appreciated importance of forests in the global carbon cycle, we still do not know how much carbon is stored in Earth’s forests as aboveground biomass, nor how it is spatially distributed. These estimates are crucial for constraining climate models, increasing our understanding of the global carbon cycle, and improving forest management to better mitigate climate change. New satellite missions have been designed specifically to fill this critical carbon knowledge gap, and the first of this next generation is NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), which is currently collecting lidar data from the International Space Station (ISS). GEDI’s full waveform observations map the Earth surface in 3D, and produce estimates of forest height and canopy cover, as well as empirical estimates of aboveground biomass. More than a year of GEDI observations are currently publicly available, with >5 billion measurements. This talk presents the GEDI mission’s framework for estimating biomass from these lidar waveforms, and highlights current challenges, including remaining uncertainties in dense tropical forests. The application of GEDI data toward forest conservation efforts will also be discussed. Laura Duncanson is an Assistant Professor of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her B.Sc Hons. from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, MSc at the University of Victoria, and PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2015. Her research focuses on using lidar remote sensing for biomass mapping, ecological studies, and policy relevant applications including forest conservation. She has worked with spaceborne lidar for over a decade starting with ICESat’s GLAS, and has worked for the past five years on algorithm development for GEDI’s biomass products. She was a NASA Postdoctoral fellow at NASA Goddard from 2015-2017, and many of her projects involve collaborations between the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard. She sits on the science teams of NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, GEDI, ICESat-2 and Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, is project scientist for the bilateral ESA-NASA Multi-Mission Algorithm and Analysis Platform being developed for collaborative algorithm development and lidar/SAR biomass mapping, and is co-lead of the Committee for Earth Observing Satellites (CEOS) Working Group on Calibration and Validation (WGCV) Land Product Validation (LPV) Biomass protocol.
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In addition to the requirement of a tax benefit or advantage, the application of most modern general anti-avoidance rules turns on two elements: a so-called "subjective element" which considers the purpose for which the transaction or arrangement resulting in the tax benefit or advantage was undertaken or arranged; and an "objective element" which considers the object or purpose of the relevant provisions to determine if the tax benefit resulting from the transaction or arrangement is or is not consistent with this object or purpose. Although these two elements are present in most modern GAARs, the function of each element within these rules and the relationship between them is often poorly understood. Other unresolved issues concern the roles of artificiality and economic substance in the application of these rules, and the relationship, if any, between these concepts and the "subjective" and "objectives" elements of the rules. A final set of issues involves the uncertainty that GAARs may engender, the ability of judges to apply these rules and principles in a coherent and consistent manner, and the compatibility of these rules and principles with the rule of law. This essay addresses these issues by reflecting on Tim Edgar’s article “Building a Better GAAR”. Part 1I considers the rationale for a general anti-avoidance rule or principle, arguing that it not only represents a useful policy response to the harmful consequences of tax avoidance (the consequentialist argument that Professor Edgar espoused), but that it may also be justified on the non-consequentialist grounds that it protects the integrity of the provisions at issue and thereby upholds the rule of law. Part III builds on this analysis to consider the design of a general anti-avoidance rule or principle, arguing that it should be codified in the form of an explicit rule, should include subjective and objective elements like the purpose and misuse or abuse requirements in the Canadian GAAR, and should be informed by concepts of artificiality and economic substance which apply respectively to the subjective and objective elements of the rule. Part IV concludes.
Dr Justine Loh is an Emergency Medicine and Paediatric Emergency Medicine Consultant at Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, and will be sharing her personal experiences and insight from her time at the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A certain political and moral insanity seems to be taking over the world. Both the political and the moral consensuses are under the consistent attack of rightwing populist leaders using authoritarian tools. Although in each country this attack is perceived as an independent chaos specific to the local political and social conditions, it in fact has a pattern repeating exactly the same way regardless of the national differences. Democracies are destroyed through seven political steps to pave the way to the new form of fascism. Unless the peoples of the world agree on the fact that the matter is global, the planet will lose its political triangulation points. Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best-known novelists and political commentators, and her journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Der Spiegel etc. She won PEN Translate Award with Women Who Blow On Knots (2013) and with her political long essay Turkey: The Insane And Melancholy (2016) she received New Ambassador Of Europe Prize from Poland. Her latest book How To Lose A Country: The Seven Steps From Democracy to Dictatorship (2019) was internationally acknowledged. Her new book Together is coming out in May 2021. REGISTER: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/3016019761352/WN_NPX5ZdKOSEOWaL8ahzgUtQ
Mansfield honorary fellows Errollyn Wallen, the world-famous composer whose Jerusalem featured in the 2020 Last Night of the Proms, and award-winning poet and novelist Ben Okri lead an evening of music and words with contributions from the Mansfield creative community.
A door creaks. The circle of torchlight swings around the exhibition hall, picking out ribs, a spine, rows of teeth in its beam… Hang on – what’s this – an empty showcase...? Join wildlife presenter and explorer Steve Backshall on a hunt for a missing exhibit in this unique live-streamed, interactive puzzle challenge! Devised by Steve Backshall and escape room creators Agent November, Mystery at the Museum will take you on a virtual behind-the-scenes adventure through the spectacular building of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Help Steve solve a series of puzzles to save a missing museum specimen, learning about the natural world along the way. Mystery at the Museum is an interactive online event for people of all ages with a passion for the natural world. The event is free to attend, with donations going towards the Museum's HOPE for the Future project. Read more here: https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/mystery-at-the-museum
9.45-10.00 Registration and coffee 10.00 Welcome 10.00-10.35 Dr Harriett Webster, UWTSD The Monastic Context in Britain 10.35-10.55 Refreshments 10.55-11.20 Prof W. Gibson, Oxford Brookes University , Samuel Wesley’s Religious Society 11.20-11.55 Dr Colin Haydon, University of Winchester , ‘"I want you to be all a Christian -such a Christian as the Marquis De Renty or Gregory Lopez was." John Wesley and Two Roman Catholic Exemplars' 11.55-12.30 Revd Dr Kenneth Carveley L’Entente Spirituelle: John Wesley and some French monastic sources 12.30-12.40 Revd Richard Teal Reflections on monasticism 12.40-1.30 Lunch 1.30-2.05 Prof Isabel Rivers, QMUL John Wesley and Thomas a Kempis: Early Methodism as a community of readers 2.05-2.35 Dr Linda Ryan, Independent Scholar The Kingswood School rule and monastic schooling 2.35-3.10 Nick Mayhew-Smith Into the Celtic West: a dialogue between early monastic nature spirituality and the Methodist embrace of outdoor worship 3.10-3.30 Refreshments 3.30-4.00 Jenny Carpenter , The Stockwell Wesley Community 4.00-4.30 Round table conversation chaired by Revd Dr Jonathan Hustler, General Secretary of the Methodist Church, including Revd Dr Roger Walton & the speakers
Modern researchers need to have an up-to-date understanding of working with research data. This relates equally to the material they create themselves and that obtained from other sources. Academic institutions, funding bodies and even publishers are now expecting competence in these issues. This workshop will provide a grounding in the different ways quantitative and qualitative data is being made available to benefit researchers. By the end of the session you will also have some insight into how your own future work could add to the process and become part of the research discourse. The course aims to provide an overview of macro and micro data sources available at the University of Oxford, including national data archives, subscription services, business data, and offers some pointers for further searching. Intended Audience: DPhil students and research staff (particularly in Social Sciences). This workshop will be most beneficial to those researchers planning to use secondary data sources (quantitative, qualitative and mixed) as part of their research or who wish to learn more about the potential of open data platforms and data archives.
Photography can be an incredibly powerful tool to document international development, social justice or environmental issues. However, it can also reinforce problematic narratives as well as entrenched power dynamics. In this conversation with humanitarian photographer Martha Tadesse, we will reflect on photography ethics, decolonising the gaze, as well as issues of representation, power dynamics and consent, and how we can all improve our practices. Host: Alice Chautard, School of Geography and the Environment Photography can be an incredibly powerful tool to document international development, social justice or environmental issues. However, it can also reinforce problematic narratives as well as entrenched power dynamics. In this conversation with humanitarian photographer Martha Tadesse, we will reflect on photography ethics, decolonising the gaze, as well as issues of representation, power dynamics and consent, and how we can all improve our practices. Host: Alice Chautard, School of Geography and the Environment Register (free): https://bit.ly/3fyE9fA We are hosting this event on Zoom; please register to receive the log in details.
Inflammation is a key physiological and pathological response to disease and injury. Endophenotypes, broadly defined as intermediate traits (ideally heritable and manifesting prior to disease onset), can help us understand disease mechanisms as well as identify molecular therapeutic targets and prognostic indicators. Importantly, they can shed light on the causes of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. I will cover research we have conducted involving population functional genomics approaches to understand the role and genetic basis of classic and non-classic markers of inflammation such as vitamin D and neutrophil counts. I will also discuss the application of best practice principles in research software engineering and applied statistical learning deriving from this research.
Convenors: Alex Beeton, Ellen Paterson Monday 7 December 13:50 Welcome and Introduction 14:00-15:00 Keynote Address 'The Many Lives of Gaspar Gomes de Faria: Community and Empire in Seventeenth-Century Portuguese India' Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter College) 15:00-15:30 Refreshment Break 15:30-16:30 Community and Religion '“Illustrious among refugees”: Huguenot Memoir and Social Standing in Exile' Nora Baker (Jesus College) '“Against all the Catholics”: The Spanish Ambassadors’ Support of English Recusants in Elizabethan England' Heather McTaggart (Lincoln College) 16:30-17:00 Refreshment Break 17:00-18:00 Community and Violence 'Early Modern Militias and the Boundaries of Community' Louis Morris (Pembroke College) '“She was not only your mother but your captain”: English Nuns, Religious Violence, and Communal Identity in the Dutch Revolt' Laura Roberts (Magdalen College) Tuesday 8 December 14:00-13:30 Community and Rhetoric 'Petitioning Communities? Companies and Anti-Monopoly Petitions in Jacobean England' Ellen Paterson (Lincoln College) '"Brought out of the English language into German": Confessional Communities in Print, 1547-1603' Kate Shore (Lincoln College) 'Was There an Erasmian Community in England, 1499-1536?' Tim Wade (New College) 15:30-16:00 Refreshment Break 16:00-17:00 Community in a Global World 'Church of England Clerics and the Religious Diversity of the Ottoman World: The Case of Dr John Covel, 1670-77' Charles Beirouti (New College) 'Fear, Rumour, and Epidemic Disease: Building Communities in Seventeenth-Century North America' Angeliki Myrillas-Brazeau (Lincoln College)
In early March 2020, I gave a presentation to a group of ethicists and physicians on a novel coronavirus emerging in China. It was concerning, as there were 127, 863 confirmed cases and it seemed likely the virus would cause a global pandemic. Weeks later, one of the first known COVID cases in Los Angeles was seen in my hospital. By late April, we were in disaster-response mode, including a 24/7 incident command center and drastic changes in clinical operations to minimize infection and preserve PPE. The rest, as they say is history. In this talk, I will describe my experiences as a clinical ethicist responding to the first wave of COVID-19 surges in my community and the second, current, phase of navigating prolonged disruption in the healthcare environment. Along the way, I will focus on topics dear to medical ethics where I have personal experience: the ethics of care during surge; the messy business of developing and operationalizing ethically sufficient triage protocols; the effects of family clustering on surrogate decision making; compassionate approaches to hospital visitation during lockdown and subsequent phases of restricted liberties; and, anticipating the ethicists role in the future, with more rationing and less certainty on the horizon
The centenary of Hans Blumenberg’s (1920-1996) birth provide an occasion to revisit some aspects of his life and thought.
The next Oxford Intelligence Group event this year will be a conversation with Professor John Ferris, who has recently completed his book Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency’. John Ferris is Professor of History at the University of Calgary and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has written or edited eight books and over 100 articles or chapters on diplomatic, intelligence, imperial, international, military and strategic history and strategic studies. John completed part of his research for this book whilst an associate member of Nuffield College, which makes the OIG especially pleased that he has honoured us with an early opportunity to discuss his work, both in its own right and in the context of what is now a rich seam of authorised histories covering the main intelligence agencies. The format of the webinar will be a discussion with John, chaired by OIG member Stephen Gale, in which we hope our audience will be actively involved.
Session Aim Research data management (RDM) is an umbrella term, covering a range of data-related activities during the whole research project life-cycle, from before it starts to after the project concludes. The session aims to give an overview of the research process, and how researchers in Oxford can improve each stage of this process. Session Content This session will cover the following topics: Research integrity: motivations and barriers Components of good research data management (RDM) Resources available to help with RDM (in Oxford and more widely) Choosing tools for research. Open science, reproducibility, and future directions for research. Questions and feedback Session Objectives At the end of the session, participants will be able to: Reflect on their research processes and to consider ways in which they can improve these processes and consequentially the outputs they produce. Much of the focus will be on providing detail of all the resources available to the participants, as well as giving them an opportunity to ask questions.
An online briefing on open access publishing and Oxford's position including guidance on how to comply with the Open Access requirements for the REF and mandates from key funding bodies whilst respecting your publisher's rights and policies. The session will cover: An explanation of Open Access; Green route and how to deposit in ORA; Gold route and how to claim for Article Processing Charges; How to find out about research council or funder requirements; How to find out what your publisher will allow; Where to get more information & help; Act on Acceptance and OA policy for REF 2021; University policy for the Open Access block grants including RCUK/UKRI and Wellcome Trust. Intended Audience: Current Oxford researchers and academics, research support staff and librarians
Convenors: Alex Beeton, Ellen Paterson Monday 7 December 13:50 Welcome and Introduction 14:00-15:00 Keynote Address 'The Many Lives of Gaspar Gomes de Faria: Community and Empire in Seventeenth-Century Portuguese India' Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter College) 15:00-15:30 Refreshment Break 15:30-16:30 Community and Religion '“Illustrious among refugees”: Huguenot Memoir and Social Standing in Exile' Nora Baker (Jesus College) '“Against all the Catholics”: The Spanish Ambassadors’ Support of English Recusants in Elizabethan England' Heather McTaggart (Lincoln College) 16:30-17:00 Refreshment Break 17:00-18:00 Community and Violence 'Early Modern Militias and the Boundaries of Community' Louis Morris (Pembroke College) '“She was not only your mother but your captain”: English Nuns, Religious Violence, and Communal Identity in the Dutch Revolt' Laura Roberts (Magdalen College) Tuesday 8 December 14:00-13:30 Community and Rhetoric 'Petitioning Communities? Companies and Anti-Monopoly Petitions in Jacobean England' Ellen Paterson (Lincoln College) '"Brought out of the English language into German": Confessional Communities in Print, 1547-1603' Kate Shore (Lincoln College) 'Was There an Erasmian Community in England, 1499-1536?' Tim Wade (New College) 15:30-16:00 Refreshment Break 16:00-17:00 Community in a Global World 'Church of England Clerics and the Religious Diversity of the Ottoman World: The Case of Dr John Covel, 1670-77' Charles Beirouti (New College) 'Fear, Rumour, and Epidemic Disease: Building Communities in Seventeenth-Century North America' Angeliki Myrillas-Brazeau (Lincoln College)
“Research collaboration” and “women in science” have been widely studied for half a century. However, the gender context of academic science has changed substantially, with more female scientists entering the higher education sector every decade and increasingly occupying high academic positions. Our story is about man-woman collaboration in research in this changing context. We examined male-female collaboration practices of all internationally visible (25,000) Polish university professors based on their 160,000 Scopus-indexed publications. We merged a national registry of 100,000 scientists (with full administrative and biographical data) with the Scopus publication database. We examined the propensity to conduct same-sex collaboration across male-dominated, female-dominated, and gender-balanced disciplines. We found out that across all age-groups and all academic positions, the majority of male scientists collaborate solely with males. The majority of female scientists, in contrast, do not collaborate with females at all. So we found out that the gender homophily principle (i.e. publishing predominantly with scientists of the same sex) works powerfully for male scientists – but does not seem to work for female scientists. Having an integrated biographical, administrative, publication, and citation database at our disposal (which we termeded “The Observatory of Polish Science”), we were able to examine the propensity to engage in same-sex collaboration across several new dimensions. This research goes beyond traditional bibliometric studies of gender-based homophily in research collaboration by combining the data routinely inaccessible to large-scale studies (such as the biological age of all scientists, and the stages of their academic careers) and the data routinely accessible in bibliometric studies, such as journal prestige, academic disciplines, and institutional type. We draw conclusions from a single-nation context to academic science in general and discuss practical implications of our research for academic careers.
Oxford is built on people, and the way they engage with pressing global issues within and across disciplines. People matter more than ever. This new series will convene the great minds of Oxford and beyond to discuss the issues that matter to our graduate students. Oxford Minds aims to provide all our graduates with an educational experience that transcends disciplinary boundaries.
The Integrate Hub Gatherings bring together researchers and practitioners in renewable energy and associated topics such as energy efficiency, demand, batteries, EVs, community energy etc. We meet in person and via video link to hear about new developments, discuss relevant items and discover areas in which to collaborate. Please forward this invitation to anyone who you think would be interested! The meeting is held fortnightly on Wednesdays, from 10:45 to 12:30. People can participate via video conference or in person (social distancing permitting). From 11:30 we will have a presentation from an invited speaker. Dr Jens Madrian will speak on “Building a stable, cost effective and 100% renewable based grid – the NEOM journey?” The Saudi government and its Public Investment Fund are rolling out projects to implement its Vision 2030 – the kingdom’s long-term blueprint for economic diversification, social development and job creation. One of the flagship gigaprojects, is the construction of a $500bn futuristic city called NEOM in north-west Saudi Arabia. Dr Jens Madrian joined NEOM as Executive Director NEOM Energy in 2019. he will be talking about his responsibility for designing and building the NEOM energy market/system of 50+GW from scratch that will be based on 100% renewable generation. Please get in touch with Helen Gavin if you are interested in joining the meeting!
The following new DANSOX (Dance Scholarship Oxford) event will soon be added to the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building's YouTube channel. International choreographer, Kim Brandtrup, will give the lecture, Hearing Footsteps - the ear and the audible in dance and choreographic practice, with practical demonstration from dancers, Estela Merlos and Thomasin Gulgec. Watch this and more on the DANSOX playlist of the JdP Music Building's YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN1N94pPcJrqpg_JhUAXt4Od7Len6ywpC
The Philosophy, Disability and Social Change online conference comprises presentations by disabled philosophers whose cutting-edge research challenges members of the philosophical community to: - think more critically about the metaphysical and epistemological status of disability; - closely examine how philosophy of disability is related to the tradition and discipline of philosophy; - acknowledge the continuing exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession of philosophy; - seriously consider how philosophy and philosophers contribute to the pervasive inequality and subordination that disabled people confront throughout society; - develop mechanisms designed to transform the current professional and institutional position of disabled philosophers in particular and the economic, political and social position of disabled people more generally. The presentations will highlight the diversity and range of approaches to critical philosophical work on disability and showcase the heterogeneity with respect to race, gender, nationality, sexuality, gender identity, culture, age and class of the community of disabled philosophers. This conference is organised as part of the Alfred Landecker Programme at the Blavatnik School of Government. Please note: This conference will be held online via Zoom. There will be live captioning for all of the sessions. Please register to attend via the event webpage and you will receive an email containing joining instructions nearer to the conference date.
Registration link: https://medsci.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMucemtpjsqG9zzmn3Tx9mHda5Mh_UotLDz Paying for organs for transplantation is illegal in most countries, yet some patients still choose to travel overseas and obtain transplants through such illegal channels. They do so safe in the knowledge that once they get back to the UK, they will be treated like any other patient and receive a lifetime of follow-up care for their transplant. Even though doctors may be suspicious of the origins of their patient’s transplant, most feel bound by a duty of confidentiality and unable to take further action. In this talk, I will draw upon the concept of ‘organ laundering’ whereby, over time, illegally obtained organs are ‘laundered’ and take on the guise of entirely licit transplants. I will start by outlining organ laundering and explaining why it is problematic. I will argue that potential participation in organ laundering provides additional reasons for doctors to report cases of suspected illegal transplants. Finally, I will consider ways in which this may be compatible with existing justifications for breaching confidentiality and disclosing patient information in other scenarios.
Please email oralhistory@history.ox.ac.uk for an MS Teams invite or follow the link below: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_M2ZiOWZkMTAtZGFmYi00ZWM2LWFhMTEtMTBjNzM3ZWFiODRh%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22dba96655-073e-4567-8091-56aefb536e7f%22%7d
This paper examines the effects of a government-sponsored apprenticeship training program designed to address high levels of youth unemployment in Ghana. We exploit the randomized access to the program to examine the short-run effects of apprenticeship training on labor market outcomes. Our results show that apprenticeships shift youth out of wage work and into self-employment. However, the loss of wage income is not offset by increases in self-employment profits in the short run. In addition, the paper uses the randomized match between apprentices and training providers to examine the causal effect of characteristics of trainers on outcomes for apprentices. Participants who trained with the most experienced trainers or the most profitable ones had higher earnings. This suggests that training programs can be made more effective through better recruitment of trainers. Written with Morgan Hardy, Jamie McCasland and Isabelle Salcher
A Film Journey and Conversation with Experts hosted by Dr Arezou Azad Live Event: Wednesday 9th December 2020, 5.00pm-6.30pm This is a live streamed event. Please register via Eventbrite. Humanitarian action in today’s world has been marred bythreats to multilateralism, inclusivity, and most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. How can we meet the major humanitarian challenges that people in conflict zones today face? Lessons need to be learned; new paths forged. In this Live YouTube event, Arezou Azad takes us on a journey to (re-)discover one man who manoevred competing interests in conflict zones in the interest of humanitarianism with a skill that has been unparalleled: Sergio Vieira de Mello, who paid the ultimate sacrifice when he and 21 humanitarian colleagues were killed in an al-Qa’ida attack on a UN building in Iraq 17 years ago. Dr Azad will be joined by four expert guests, who have drawn inspiration from the film “En Route to Baghdad” (2005). They will show, and comment on, snippets of the film that can help us navigate these uncertain times. Topics addressed by individual experts in the Live event include: Dealing with non-state actors during jihad (Dr Elisabeth Kendall) Attacks on humanitarian actors - Trends, what the law says, and what else is required (Abby Stoddard and Emanuela-Chiara Gillard) Behind the scenes: The making of “En Route to Baghdad” (Simone Duarte)
Good research data management is a vital component of academic practice. Part of this is the principle that the data used to develop the arguments and outcomes of your research should be effectively stored and managed during a project, preserved for the future and - where possible - shared with other academics. This session introduces the University's research data policy and outlines the practical impact this will have on your work. The services available at Oxford to assist you will be outlined. This session is not only essential during your current studies but will be invaluable if you plan to continue in research as a career. The session will cover the common dangers and pitfalls of digital data; key principles of RDM; drafting a data management plan; institutional, funder and publisher requirements; issues around preserving data and cybersecurity; ORA-Data, Github and other preservation services; the potential of data management in your own field; and accessing Oxford-based tools for research data management. For all DPhil students and research staff.
Few people link the public good with higher education issues in Japan. One reason seems to be that private universities, which charge expensive tuition fees, outnumber the public sectors in Japan, making it difficult to perceive higher education as a public good which has the attributes of being non-rivalrous and non-excludable. But is it true that the vast majority of private universities has hindered the discussion of public good in higher education in post-war Japan? Based on a discourse analysis of official documents from the government, economic organisations and associations of universities, the paper will argue that for a long time national universities were reluctant to acknowledge their social contribution. However, in the last 15 years the three key actors (government, industry and universities) have synchronised their approach to three key public functions of the higher education sector in Japan, in relation to knowledge creation, human resource development, and the social contribution. The paper is part of CGHE’s larger study of the public good role of higher education in ten countries.
Dr Richard Youle received his PhD degree from the University of South Carolina and moved to NIH for postdoctoral work then transitioned to a Senior Investigator in the Surgical Neurology Branch of NINDS. His work now focuses on mitochondria, innate immunity and neurodegeneration. He won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences for his work on mitochondrial quality control related to Parkinson’s Disease.
Wellcome funded and need to know how to comply from 1 January 2021? In this focussed online briefing we will: step you through the changes and new requirements; give you an update on which publishers are compliant; provide links to further Wellcome information and guidance; let you know where to find help at Oxford; and answer as many questions as we can. Intended Audience: Current Oxford researchers and academics, research support staff and librarians.
This paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy and link this data to unique historical data with detailed information about war casualties and Nazi raids across space (Municipality) and time. We find that prenatal stress exposure leads to lower wage earnings when workers start their career, and that this effect persists until retirement. The earnings penalty is in large part due to the type of job that people hold and interruptions in their working career due to unemployment. We further show that workers exposed to in-utero stress face larger earnings reductions after job loss due to mass layoffs. This earnings loss deepens their relative disadvantage over time.
Carbon offsetting is a widespread tool in efforts to achieve net zero emissions. But current approaches to offsetting are unlikely to deliver the types of offsets needed to achieve global climate goals. Net zero pledges from many companies, such as those recently from BP and Google, and the recent 2060 “carbon neutrality” pledge from China are likely to use offsets. But what types of offsets are acceptable and under what conditions should they be used? The Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting (or 'The Oxford Offsetting Principles') provide guidelines to help ensure offsetting actually helps to achieve a net zero society. Join our launch event to hear from the authors and leading stakeholders. The event consists of two parts: PART 1: Presentations from several authors, including: Myles Allen on the importance of long-lived CO2 storage Ben Caldecott on creating demand for credible offsets and the role of sustainable finance in scaling supply Tom Hale on issues of policy, politics, and governance Yadvinder Malhi CBE FRS on the critical role of nature-based solutions and permanence in delivering net zero PART 2: A panel of leading companies and stakeholders with credible approaches to offsetting. Participants to be announced.
https://www.turing.ac.uk/events/data-debates-talking-about-my-generation Chaired by writer and broadcaster Timandra Harkness. Timandra presents BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and has presented the documentaries, Data, Data Everywhere, Personality Politics & The Singularity. From housing and employment prospects to differing values and political views – our age is often portrayed as defined by a growing generational divide. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted further intergenerational differences, with the elderly considered more at risk healthwise and millennials, financially. Even before the pandemic, the media has often reinforced age-related stereotypes – on one side, baby boomers who got the best of the post-war economic boom, in the process getting richer and more conservative politically, and millennials, technology savvy and individualistic, political ‘snowflakes’, experiencing an adulthood of precarious employment and housing. What does data tell us about these apparent generational inequalities and what are the implications for society? Have we really never had it so good? Could things be about to change as the world reluctantly concedes to the “new normal”? The event will address current debates about how COVID-19 has exacerbated generational divides and exposed inequalities in mental health and wellbeing, housing, employment, access to green space and other areas
In this talk, Daniel will discuss the public engagement branch of the Literary History of Medicine Project which focussed on developing board and card games on the subject of Medieval Islamic Science and Medicine and was run in collaboration with the History of Science Museum's Education Officers, Chris Parkin and Sukie Trowles. Daniel will provide an overview of the project, present the games that were made and played with the public, and look at the wider process of creating games, and how they can be used as a vehicle to engage the general public with the outputs of academic research. Daniel Burt, ICT Officer at The Khalili Research Centre (the University’s centre for the study of Islamic Art & Material Culture) has spent the last 15 years of his career working in the field of Digital Humanities developing software for museum collections, image archives, and databases to aid with academic research. Outside of work, he has been developing board games for almost 30 years, often in collaboration with established board game designer, Maurice Suckling (Freeman’s Farm, Hidden Strike: American Revolution), who was also involved in the Board Games & Medieval Medicine Project, their most recent collaboration being as a team for the inaugural ConSim Game Jam which tasked them with developing a game from scratch in 72 hours.
THE QUESTION OF SLAVES IS DIFFICULT IN EVERY WAY. PLATO 11-12 February 2021 This on-line EUROPAEUM Classics Colloquium – the 18th in our series – will explore various aspects of ancient slavery. During the colloquium, we will be looking at core aspects of slavery - matters that are still at the very heart of human interest. The objective of the Colloquium is to examine ancient slavery in all its manifestations from different perspectives and with a wide range of research methods. The colloquium will bring together leading international researchers and scholars including Professor Nino Luraghi (Oxford University), Professor Edith Hall (King's College, London) and Dr Myles Lavan (University of St Andrews). New methodologies and previously untapped sources will be explored, discussing and examining variation within the ancient word. We will look at how often were slaves freed and why, and study how important is manumission to our understanding of slavery. To have a full understanding of the political, social and economic dimensions of ancient slavery, the colloquium would be also looking in depth at slavery as a form of trade. We welcome applications from master’s and doctoral students from within the EUROPAEUM network. Applicants are invited to give a paper and contributions are equally welcome from historians of slavery and from scholars with an interest in slave/unfree agency and participation. Presentations will be grouped into three thematical panel and they should be between 15 and 20 minutes. Participants will be invited to comment on others’ work. We also welcome applications from students who wish to participate without giving a paper. Applications should include the EUROPAEUM application form, a brief CV, and a short abstract of the proposed paper (up to 500 words, if applicable). More information about how to apply: https://europaeum.org/opportunities/apply-for-a-europaeum-event/ Deadline for submission of applications and abstracts: 11 December 2020 Deadline for final papers: 22 January 2021. All submission should be sent to euroinfo@europaeum.ox.ac.uk
Join the meeting on; https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_Y2Q1N2M2OTEtYzVlZS00ZjU4LWFiZTItZGJkODY4YThiYTIx%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22f6227846-379e-4bb4-ab2c-e0cc994df5e5%22%7d
OCTF online seminar followed by Q&A - all welcome. NB - all times given in UK time Large mammal herbivores are important drivers of plant and ecosystem geography. Yet, most megaherbivore mammals that once inhabited the Earth went extinct, and little is known on whether and how this history helps to understand current patterns of vegetation structure and function in the planet (anachronism). In this talk, Prof Dantas presents evidence that the geography of plant antiherbivory defense traits largely parallel the past distribution of the Neotropical extinct megafauna, and that the overall trait patterns are similar to schemes of vegetation classification traditionally used for African ecosystems. He also provides evidence that biomes have substantially changed since megafauna extinction, a process that cannot be attributed to environmental changes alone. These results highlight the key role of megafauna history to understand broad scale vegetation patterns, especially in regions that are or used to be inhabited by megaherbivores. Vinícius L Dantas is a Brazilian ecologist and biogeographer interested in disturbance effects on the distribution, dynamics and functional diversity of biomes. He is currently an assistant professor at the Federal University of Uberlandia, Brazil.
Featuring twenty-four participants across six panel discussions, the conference herds together a multidisciplinary set of scholars who are researching how worlds are composed with elephants. Whether historical or ongoing entanglements, in domestic or wild settings, or through affective relations of care or fear, these diverse worlds take shape through the interacting perspectives and presence of human and elephant in a culturally and ecologically specific context.
The initial observations describing chemokine receptors as a simple system, with a ligand that binds a unique receptor and activates a Gi protein to trigger calcium flux and cell migration, has evolved to a highly complex signaling machinery that facilitates cell adaptation to the environment. The use of new technical approaches that allow precise analysis of protein-protein interactions in living cells is revealing an unanticipated level of complexity among chemokines and chemokine receptors at the cell surface, and supports previous data on allosteric interactions. This complexity reflects a highly regulated system that allows the precise cell allocation to trigger the optimal response. Knowledge of the dynamic interactions of the ligands and receptors, as well as their interplay with other proteins co-expressed by the cell, with lipids that form the cell membrane, with the cellular cytoskeleton, and with downstream signaling machinery will be crucial to define the context-specific signaling triggered by chemokines and to determine how these inflammatory mediators modulate cell responses. Using a natural mutant of CXCR4, responsible of the Warts, Hypogammaglobulinemia, Infections and Myelokathexis (WHIM) syndrome, a rare, autosomal dominant, primary immunodeficiency disorder we will see how the complexity can affect receptor function and explain the phenotype of this rare immunodeficiency.
This year we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cyril Foster Lecture. For the past six decades, scholars and practitioners have delivered the Cyril Foster Lecture on the "elimination of war and the better understanding of the nations of the world”. For this special anniversary we will be hosting a digital roundtable to reflect upon the past 60 years and how our understanding of international relations has advanced during this time. Moreover, we will tackle what are the core challenges to order and cooperation in the international system in the years to come.
Depending on one's place in the world, it may seem like there has been very little ethics in the local, national, and global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Or, for others, it appears that ethicists are fully engaged and working overtime, from conducting covid-19 related research, holding public seminars and teaching ethics to healthcare workers, to advising politicians and policy makers. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic, consequent BLM protests, and decolonizing global health movements have moved at least some senior American bioethicists to state that there needs to be a new bioethics that is more attuned to 'structural injustice' and global in scope. So where does that leave the fields of public health ethics and global health ethics? Are there any meaningful distinctions to be made in aims, scope of methodologies among the three? I will discuss some good and bad reasons for doing so, using examples Registration link: https://medsci.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMldOqorjwrGdXDyZpS1M9jr7kcoM5KwAfx
Papers and speakers for this seminar will be: 'Family Trees and Falling Apples: Intergenerational Mobility Estimates from U.S. Genealogy Data' by Kasey Buckles (University of Notre Dame) with Joseph Price; 'Who Benefits from Meritocracy?' by Santiago Pérez (UC Davis) with Diana Moreira (UC Davis); 'Offspring as Rents? Intergenerational Immobility in a Multi-ethnic Ruling Coalition of Medieval China' by Erik Wang (Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse) with Joy Chen (Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business) & Xiaoming Zhang (HKU)
Come along to this informative seminar to find out how to apply for an Oxford-Bristol Myers Squibb (formerly Celgene) Fellowship. We will talk you through the background to the fellowships scheme, give you details about BMS areas of interest and go through how to apply. Q&A will follow the presentation.
Come along to this informative seminar to find out how to apply for an Oxford-Bristol Myers Squibb (formerly Celgene) Fellowship. We will talk you through the background to the fellowships scheme, give you details about BMS areas of interest and go through how to apply. Q&A will follow the presentation.
Join this free one-hour practical, interactive workshop from the UK EQUATOR Centre. In our Lightning Workshops series, our methodology, writing, and communication experts cover all of the essential aspects of writing and publishing your academic research. These sessions are designed for early-career biomedical and clinical researchers. This workshop will give you a structure for approaching peer reviewer comments and responding to them clearly and gracefully. Practice dealing with the kind, the fair, and the seriously challenging, including a case study of real peer review comments. Paula Dhiman is a medical statistician working on meta-research at the UK EQUATOR Centre in the Centre for Statistics in Medicine. She focuses on the methodological conduct and reporting of non-randomised research, aiming to help improve the quality and integrity of future research. She is passionate about statistical methodology and observational research and is particularly interested in prognostic/risk modelling. She is also the Associate Editor for the Journal of Intellectual Disability Development. This free workshop is open to University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes staff and students, but we do ask you to book a spot. To hear about other EQUATOR courses in Oxford, please join our mailing list by sending a blank email to equator-oxford-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Come along to this informative seminar to find out how to apply for an Oxford-Bristol Myers Squibb (formerly Celgene) Fellowship. We will talk you through the background to the fellowships scheme, give you details about BMS areas of interest and go through how to apply. Q&A will follow the presentation.
The international student population is seen as an important economic contributor for Malaysia. The State is committed to the cause, through the launch of policies and sector-specific strategies that address internationalisation as an important agenda for the country. Higher education institutions are also strengthening internationalisation initiatives, not only to increase revenue generated from the incoming flow of students, but also to attain favourable placings in global university rankings. Based on available data on international student mobility, Malaysia is doing considerably well in attracting students from specific regions of the world. There is also distinctive differentiation between the type of international students recruited into public and private higher education institutions. However, little is known on how domestic students perceive internationalisation. It also remains unclear whether domestic students experience a heightened sense of global citizenship as a result of their international exposure on campus. This webinar discusses current developments in Malaysia with regard to internationalisation of higher education, and presents a study on the perception of domestic students on internationalisation in a Malaysian public research university. Through focus group discussions, respondents discussed on the presence of international students, the university’s rise in international rankings, their interactions with international students and staff, and the lessons learnt from their experience. Findings of the study provide insights on the ways in which higher education institutions should be more inclusive of domestic students in strategies for institutional internationalisation.
What can we call a science? And what makes it science? Dr Taha Yasin Arslan (Medeniyet University, Istanbul) challenges us to rethink the history of science, proposing new definitions for the term “science”. Join us -- and share your ideas. Dr Taha Yasin Arslan is an assistant professor at the Department of the History of Science of Istanbul Medeniyet University in Istanbul, Turkey. His research deals with the extant astronomical instruments and related manuscripts in the Islamic world. As part of his academic studies, he makes digital and physical reproductions of the instruments that were described in the historical texts. His recent focus is on the transition and transmission of practical astronomical knowledge in the Islamic world between the 13th and 16th centuries.
Come along to this informative seminar to find out how to apply for an Oxford-Bristol Myers Squibb (formerly Celgene) Fellowship. We will talk you through the background to the fellowships scheme, give you details about BMS areas of interest and go through how to apply. Q&A will follow the presentation
13-15 January 2021 Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity: History and Archaeology between the 6th and the 8th centuries Cyprus in Late Antiquity was a thriving and densely populated province. During the sixth and seventh centuries, the growing affluence of the island is conspicuous in comparison to other regions of the Eastern Roman Empire. In the traditional historical view, the late antique period on Cyprus ended abruptly as a result of the Arab raids of the mid-seventh century. The original focus of urban archaeology on monumental structures and Christian basilicas tended to stress the impact of these raids further; layers of destruction were often uncritically associated with the Arabs, overshadowing archaeological evidence that hinted at continuities beyond the mid-seventh century. In recent decades, archaeological research on late antique Cyprus has shifted its focus away from urban centres and single monuments in favour of a more contextual perspective. Building on well-established traditions of field prospection, diachronic survey projects and small-scale excavations are revealing a complex web of settlement patterns. They have shown that economic, political and cultural contacts between the island and the wider eastern Mediterranean were continued. Moreover, they also suggest that the end or transformation of occupation on individual sites cannot always be explained by catastrophic events, but should be interpreted in terms of local adaptation to changing needs and contacts. This symposium brings together archaeologists and historians engaged in the study of Cyprus between the sixth and eighth centuries. They will collate the results of recent and past research to arrive at a comprehensive, interdisciplinary reconstruction of life on the island in the Long Late Antiquity. You can access the conference programme here: https://torch.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/torch/documents/media/cyprus_in_the_long_late_antiquity_programme.pdf For further information and to register please email: Panayiotis.Panayides@classics.ox.ac.uk Ine.Jacobs@classics.ox.ac.uk
https://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/study/skillstraining/calendar/research-techniques-day-online
Zoom
In recent decades, universities in Hong Kong have been getting noticed worldwide, acclaimed as dynamic poles of global and regional scholarly dynamics. This is due to several reasons. Their location in a territory of crossroads where European, North American, and Australian economic, social, and cultural dimensions interact with East Asian, particularly Chinese, counterparts. They are strongly internationalized in their activities, academic staff and students, and common use of English language. The territory is a regional center of knowledge networks. The universities are institutionally diverse, sharing some commonalities, but with different strategies and focuses. Their academics are extremely adaptable, working in the ultimate capitalist neoliberal society, in stress-driven performativity workplaces, where evaluation frameworks prevail. Since mid-2019, Hong Kong society was shaken by a social movement that divided the society of Hong Kong into two sides. The social movement results from a mix of political, economic, cultural, and social tensions that have been gradually building across the years. As intense clashes between protesters and police occurred on university campuses, people have an impression that university students played an active role in the protests. In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the territory, later the world, affecting universities as well. How did these changes influence the stability, characteristics, enrollment, and development of universities in Hong Kong? These issues will be discussed in the webinar from the perspectives of two higher education researchers (one local and one non-local) working in two different universities in Hong Kong.
The multidisciplinary Integrate Hub Gatherings bring together researchers and practitioners in clean and renewable energy to hear about new developments, discuss relevant items and discover areas in which to collaborate. The meeting is held fortnightly on Wednesdays, from 10:45 to 12:30. It’s all online at the moment, using Zoom. Please get in touch with Helen Gavin if you are interested in joining the meeting. —— Agenda 10:45 – Soft start and general chat 11:00 – The meeting begins with introductions, then open time in which anyone can raise an issue or discuss new developments, issues, news etc 11:30 – The main feature with an invited speaker! This week we will hear from Rebecca Ford and Jeffrey Hardy on their recent work "Are we seeing clearly? The need for aligned vision and supporting strategies to deliver net-zero electricity systems". 12:30 – End of meeting.
TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Live Event: Thursday 21st January 2021, 5.00pm-6.00pm Watch Event Here: https://youtu.be/Uoc7IabkHtM Till it has loved - American Art Song in Recital Live Online Event with Nadine Benjamin and Nicole Panizza Programme: Luigi Zaninelli Seven Epigrams of Emily Dickinson (2003) - 12.15 mins 1. Had I pleasure you had not 2. Who knows where our hearts go 3. I trust this sweet May Morning 4. We wouldn't mind the sun dear 5. I am studying music now 6. Till it has loved 7. You might not know I remembered you Lori Laitman Early Snow: Three Poems of Mary Oliver (2003) - 10 mins 1. Last Night the Rain Spoke to me 2. Blue Iris 3. Early Snow Samuel Barber - Op.13 - 6 mins 3. Sure on this Shining Night (James Agee) (1938) 4. Nocturne (Frederic Prokosch) (1941) 3 Songs by Black American composers - c. 9 mins 1. Love Let The Wind Cry (Undine S. Moore/Sappho - 1977) - 3.9 mins 2. Night (Florence B. Price/ Louise C. Wallace - 1946) - 2.05 mins 3. For You There Is no Song (H. Leslie Adams/ Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1977) - 3 mins Sylvia Glickman Black Cake A Recipe by Emily Dickinson (1976) - 6 mins
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
Dr Wilma van de Berg is senior neuroscientist, associate professor and lecturer in clinical neuroanatomy, neuropathology and clinical neurosciences at the dept. Anatomy and Neurosciences, Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc. She is the head of the section Clinical Neuroanatomy and Biobanking which focuses on studying human brain morphology and cellular disease mechanisms in aging and disease. She is founder and director of the Normal Aging Brain Bank, which collects advanced post mortem MRI and high-quality brain tissue of non-demented elderly for stimulating translational research in neurosciences.
Our Mental Wellness is a lecture series that focuses on mental health topics of broad interest to staff, students and Mental Health Talk. This fourth talk in the series, on the topic of Overcoming Mistrust and Paranoia, will be presented by Daniel Freeman, Professor of Clinical Psychology. A Q&A panel discussion will follow, chaired by Catharine Creswell (Professor of Developmental Clinical Psychology), and include Daniel Freeman, Elizabeth Tunbridge and Kam Bhui. Abstract: The world can certainly feel a dangerous place. We don’t talk about it nearly enough, but every day each of us must decide whether or not to trust other people. There’s no way around these decisions: they’re an inevitable part of life. Paranoia is excessive mistrust of other people. Many people have a few paranoid thoughts, a few have many paranoid thoughts. This talk will cover a number of key questions: What is paranoia? How common is it? What is the latest scientific understanding of the causes? And what can we do to tackle it?
Though official policy in the United Kingdom and the United States is to widen post-secondary participation, most policymakers have lost faith in the benefits of generic bachelor’s degrees. Comparing the Conservative Party’s support for further education to the Biden Administration’s focus on community colleges, Christopher Newfield will argue in this webinar that both governments are preparing students for mid-skill, middle-income jobs that have been largely offshored or made precarious. The remedy is not to increase focus on individual, monetary effects but to reduce it: governments should develop proper industrial strategies while funding universities to generate public, common, collective goods alongside private goods. Christopher will use racial equality as his example of a collective good. Contemporary societies will better respond to a higher education sector that fully redefines its social effects for the wider public.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
Zoom
The multidisciplinary Integrate Hub Gatherings bring together researchers and practitioners in clean and renewable energy to hear about new developments, discuss relevant items and discover areas in which to collaborate. The meeting is held fortnightly on Wednesdays, from 10:45 to 12:30. It’s all online at the moment, using Zoom. Please get in touch with Helen Gavin if you are interested in joining the meeting. Agenda 10:45 – Soft start and general chat 11:00 – The meeting begins with introductions, then open time in which anyone can raise an issue or discuss new developments, issues, news etc. 11:30 – The main feature with an invited speaker! This week we will hear from Neil McCulloch, The Policy Practice on “Achieving 24/7 power in complex governance contexts – a case study of Zahle in Lebanon”. 12:30 – End of meeting.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
Raka Ray is an American sociologist and academic. She is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies, and recently appointed the Dean of Social Sciences at UC-Berkeley. She researches and has published on gender, postcolonial sociology, emerging middle classes, South Asia, inequality, qualitative research methods and social movements.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
In this talk, you’ll find out what eating disorders are and common myths about them. We'll also discuss evidence-based treatments and provide guidance on what you can do if you, or someone you know, is struggling with eating problems. The main presentation will be given by Rebecca Murphy (Senior Research Clinician Department of Psychiatry). A Q&A panel discussion will follow with Robin Murphy (Associate Professor of Experimental Psychology) and one other (TBC), and chaired by Catharine Creswell (Professor of Developmental Clinical Psychology).
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
Please email Louise King (louise.king@nds.ox.ac.uk) if you would like to attend.
This sixth talk in the series, on the topic of Coping with Trauma, will be presented by Anke Ehlers, Professor of Experimental Psychopathology and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. A Q&A panel discussion will follow, chaired by Catharine Creswell (Professor of Developmental Clinical Psychology).
Followed by a drinks reception at 6pm
Larry E. Tise, late Wilbur & Orville Wright Distinguished Professor of History, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA Scholars of science and technology frequently lament that Thomas Harriot did not publish a great book during this lifetime. This judgment sadly overlooks the fact that Harriot wrote and published the most important illustrated exploration narrative of European expansion into the Americas. His Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, issued in pamphlet form in 1588, was published in 1590 with 24 elegant copperplate engravings. The vivid illustrations were carefully captioned by Harriot himself and these images indelibly fixed our mental image of native Americans from the sixteenth century to the present. This book not only established the model for exploration books, it also became the first popularly hand-colored exploration narrative of the Renaissance era. These are among Dr Tise’s findings as he researched hand-colored copies of Harriot’s book around the world and worked with the great art house Taschen to publish in 2019 Theodore de Bry—America: The Complete Plates, 1590-1602 (published simultaneously in English, French, and German). Read more here: https://www.oriel.ox.ac.uk/about-college/news-events/events/thomas-harriot-lecture-thomas-harriot-and-creation-americas-first
Our Mental Wellness is a lecture series of evidence-based, practical mental health topics of broad interest to staff and students. This seventh talk in the series, on the topic of Bullying and Anxiety, will be presented by Eleanor Leigh, Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow and Principal Clinical Psychologist. A Q&A panel discussion will follow with Lucy Bowes (Associate Professor of Experimental Psychology) plus one other panel member (TBC), chaired by Catharine Creswell (Professor of Developmental Clinical Psychology).
Our accredited five-day course covers major topics in global surgery, anaesthesia and obstetric care, such as burden of disease, manpower issues, training, partnership, supplies, service management, research needs, advocacy and ethics, and resource allocation. The course is suitable for those in all disciplines interested in global surgery, anaesthesia and obstetrics: - medical personnel with an interest in global surgery - qualified surgeons, anaesthetists and obstetricians/gynaecologists - those in training, including senior medical students - allied health care professions linked to global surgery The course is run by our multi-disciplinary faculty from Oxford University Global Surgery Group, with invited UK and international guest speakers. Course information and applications: https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/global-surgery Bursaries application deadline: TBC
