Stand-ups and experts look at the funnier side of Bacteria

In case you missed this sellout show in the Autumn as part of the Museum of Natural History’s Bacteria exhibition our comedians and experts will be bringing you their deepest and funniest thoughts on microbes, disease, and of course bacteria (again). Hosted by Alex Farrow “An engaging and entertaining pairing of learning and good humour!” ★★★★ The Latest. “Jaw achingly funny” ★★★★ Oxford Mail “A roaring success at creating vibrant comedy shows across Oxfordshire” ★★★★ The Oxford Times

This is a one-off repeat of the show at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in Autumn, although the line up may be subject to slight

‘Making decisions and choices about health and social care need access to high-quality evidence from research. Systematic reviews provide this by both highlighting the quality of existing studies and by themselves providing a high-quality summary’.- Mike Clarke and Iain Chalmers [1]

Iain Chalmers, Carl Heneghan and Kamal Mahtani will talk about the history and development of systematic reviews, their current delivery and the shortcomings in current review production and the future directions of systematic reviews, including the launch of CEBM’s Evidence Synthesis Toolkit.

Sir Iain Chalmers: James Lind Library and Fellow of CEBM
Kamal Mahtani: Associate Professor and Director of the MSc in Systematic Reviews
Carl Heneghan: Professor of EBM and Director CEBM

This talk is being held as part of the Practice of Evidence-Based Health Care course which is part of the Evidence-Based Health Care Programme. This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend.

[1] Clarke M, Chalmers I Reflections on the history of systematic reviews. BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine 2018;23:121-122.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a very special event with Tom Kibasi on Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy. The Final Report of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice.

The UK economy is broken. It no longer provides rising living standards for the majority. Young people face an increasingly insecure future. The gap between rich and poor areas is widening. Meanwhile the rise of giant digital companies, the advance of automation, and catastrophic environmental degradation challenge the very foundations of our economic model.

This important book analyses these profound challenges and sets out a bold vision for change. The report of a group of leading figures from across British society, it explains how the deep weaknesses of the UK economy reflect profound imbalances of economic power. Its radical policy agenda for the 2020s includes new missions to drive productivity and innovation, an overhaul of our financial system, and reforms to improve wages, job quality and the redistribution of wealth.

Ten years after the financial crisis, as the UK confronts the challenge of Brexit, this is an urgent and compelling account of the reforms needed to build a new economy of prosperity, justice and environmental sustainability. It will set the terms of political and economic debate for years to come

Tom Kibasi is Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Chair of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice and a principal author and editor of the Commission’s final report, ‘Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy’. Under Tom’s leadership, IPPR has had significant impact in areas ranging from the real choices on Brexit, recasting the relationship between tech and society, and the funding and reform of the health and care system. Prior to joining IPPR, Tom spent more than a decade at McKinsey and Company, where he was a partner and held leadership roles in the healthcare practice in both London and New York. Tom helped government institutions with healthcare reform across a dozen countries in five continents and served international institutions, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and international foundations including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Tickets cost £5. The doors will open at 6:45pm where there will be a bar with a selection of drinks to purchase until 7pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Come and hear Rachel Sanderson, Land Officer from the Oxford Preservation Trust talk about how the flood alleviation scheme might help cycling. In theory this could be the cycling route from Botley to Sandford and so very valuable to us. This talk is in advance of the the planning application for the Oxford Flood Alleviation Scheme which is being considered by Oxfordshire County Council. The planning application closes on 22nd so this talk will help inform our submission.

As part of our ‘For Learning. For Life’ series we will be hosting three weekly Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction talks, starting on Wednesday 16th January with Paul Luna ‘Typography – A Very Short Introduction’.

Typography, the art of designing printed words, touches our life now more than ever. The widespread use of mobile phones, tablets and social media means that we are regularly asked to make decisions about the fonts, sizes, and layouts we use in our writing. We now see typography as a way to express our personalities rather than just make our writing legible. Paul Luna offers a broad definition of typography as design for reading, whether in print or on screens, where a set of visual choices are taken to make a written message more accessible, more easily transmitted, more significant, or more attractive.

Professor Ian Goldin, Director of Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change, will identify the economic impact of migration and examine how the contribution that migrants make has been overwhelmed by the politics. As Chair of the www.core-econ.org initiative to reform economics, Ian will locate the economics of migration within the broader need to reform economics.

Talk followed by questions and discussion. All welcome.

This is the first of a series of weekly talks. The full list is:

Brexit: archaic techniques of ecstasy
Thursday 17 January: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Shamanism: taking back control
Thursday 24 January: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Tithe, timber, and the persistence of the ancien régime
Thursday 31 January: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Oxford Town Hall (St Aldates)

Hegelian dialectics and the prime numbers (part 2)
Thursday 7 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) and ‘the sources of poetry’
Thursday 14 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Television: remote control
Thursday 21 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

Fascism and populism: can you spot the difference?
Thursday 28 February: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

The epos of everyday life
Thursday 7 March: 7:30pm–9:00pm
Wesley Memorial Church (New Inn Hall St)

As part of the Surgical Grand Rounds lecture series, hosted by the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, Professor Amir Ghaferi from the University Michigan in the USA, will discuss ‘Communication in Healthcare: A Failure in Need of Rescue?’

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting Roger Riddell for the launch of his latest book and debut novel Tapestries of Difference.

Tapestries of Difference is a gripping love story starting and ending in contemporary London but which journeys to Africa, where it captures the alluring beauty and harshness of today’s Zimbabwe and uncovers deceptions about the past which in all other circumstances ought to be forgotten. It is also a tale of both personal identity and what it means to be British today as the country confronts issues of faith and religion, race and ethnicity as it strives to weave a tapestry of core values to bind people together.

Roger Riddell lived in Zimbabwe for many years, chairing the first Presidential Economic Commission after Independence in 1980. After returning to England, Roger worked at the Overseas Development Institute before becoming a Director of Oxford Policy Management to which he is still affiliated. From 1999 to 2003 he was the International Director of Christian Aid. He has published widely on Zimbabwean and wider development issues. His most recent academic book, Does Foreign Aid Really Work? (Oxford University Press, 2008), has sold in excess of 15,000 copies.

All attendees are entitled to a complimentary glass of wine after which there will be a bar available to purchase drinks.

This event is free to attend, but spaces are limited, so please do register your interest. Doors will open at 6.45pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Animal studies, biblical ecology, ecofeminism, animism and more… Our Religious Ecologies and New Materialisms reading group will be continuing this term on Mondays of even weeks (12-1.30pm), starting next Monday with Ken Stone’s recent book ‘Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies’. Texts provided and feel free to bring your lunch.

The advent of super-resolution microscopy has created unprecedented opportunities to study the mammalian central nervous system, which is dominated by anatomical structures whose nanoscale dimensions critically influence their biophysical properties. I will present our recent methodological advances 1) to analyze dendritic spines in the hippocampus in vivo and 2) to visualize the extracellular space (ECS) of the brain. Using a two-photon–STED microscope equipped with a long working distance objective and ‘hippocampal window’ to reach this deeply embedded structure, we measured the density and turnover of spines on CA1 pyramidal neurons. Spine density was two times higher than reported by conventional two-photon microscopy; around 40% of all spines turned over within 4 days. A combination of 3D-STED microscopy and fluorescent labeling of the extracellular fluid allows super-resolution shadow imaging (SUSHI) of the ECS in living brain slices. SUSHI enables quantitative analyses of ECS structure and produces sharp negative images of all cellular structures, providing an unbiased view of unlabeled brain cells in live tissue.

If you’re planning to make some changes in the New Year, then we have the perfect talk for you. Blackwell’s are delighted to be welcoming Marianne Power to the shop to give a talk on her new book, Help Me!

Marianne Power was stuck in a rut. Then one day she wondered: could self-help books help her find the elusive perfect life?

She decided to test one book a month for a year, following their advice to the letter. What would happen if she followed the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? Really felt The Power of Now? Could she unearth The Secret to making her dreams come true?

What begins as a clever experiment becomes an achingly poignant story. Because self-help can change your life – but not necessarily for the better…

Help Me! is an irresistibly funny and incredibly moving book about a wild and ultimately redemptive journey that will resonate with anyone who’s ever dreamed of finding happiness.

Abstract:
This presentation explores two workforces at the bottom of the coercive apparatus of the colonial state in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are police constables, and village watchmen, also called chaukidars. The two workforces presented a stark contrast. The colonial constabulary was always a thin presence in Indian society, while a much larger workforce of chaukidars existed throughout the countryside. However, chaukidars were never absorbed as direct employees of the government in the way the constables were. While constables were paid salaries out of the budget of the provincial government, chaukidars were paid salaries out of a locally raised chaukidari tax. Constables had a substantial number of upper caste workers in their ranks. All chaukidars were lower caste workers. In this presentation, I will explore how this segmentation of security work emerged in the apparatus of colonial policing and what it reveals about the nature of the colonial police.

About the Speaker:
Partha Pratim Shil is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is interested in labour history and state formation in South Asia.

Learn something new for the New Year with our ‘For Learning, For Life’ series. As part of this we will be hosting three weekly Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction talks, continuing with Laura Marcus, ‘Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction’.

Autobiography is one of the most popular of written forms. From Casanova to Benjamin Franklin to the Kardashians, individuals throughout history have recorded their own lives and experiences. These records serve as invaluable resources to historians, psychologists and literary critics. Laura Marcus explores what we mean by ‘autobiography’ and how it overlaps with other literary forms such as letters, essays and even fiction. Learn about the autobiographical consciousness and how autobiography interacts with psycholanalysis.

Talk by Dr Thea Gomelauri

Social housing has it’s roots in the recognition of housing as a human right. However, for almost a Century now, this has been overshadowed by its use as a political football. Successive governments have used social housing to win votes, control publics, demonise groups along lines of class and race and to line their own pockets.

As the cost of renting or owning a home on the open market soars, support for the poorest citizens does not. The freeze in local housing benefit until 2020 means that the private rental market is increasingly out of reach and households are increasingly turning to the Council in need of affordable housing.

In the grip of a homelessness crisis, there is an increasing recognition in Oxford that homelessness is a housing issue. So how about housing as a human right and what is the role of social housing in Oxford today?

Join us at Open House Oxford from 19.30 – 21.00 with speakers John Boughton, Kate Wareing, Eileen Short and Shaista Aziz to explore the history of social housing, the current situation in Oxford and what the future might look like.

Our speakers
John Boughton is author of Municipal dreams, an excavation of housing histories in Britain which draws on ideas from the past to knit together fresh narratives on how building more social housing can offer a way through the current housing crisis.

Municipal Dreams was selected by The Guardian’s architecture critic Rowan Moore as one of the best books of 2018. The book explores many of the great debates on housing in the UK including housing as a human right, the role of the state, the development of estates, the role of the planner and the legacy of Right to Buy.

As Chief Executive of SOHA (South Oxford Housing Association), Kate Wareing is at the forefront of providing affordable housing in and around Oxfordshire. With a career including time spent as Director of the UK Poverty Programme at Oxfam GB, Kate has an expert knowledge of both the struggle that Oxford’s poorest citizens face in trying to make this city their home and the challenges housing providers face in building homes available for social rent.

Eileen Short is part of the Defend Council Housing Campaign which works to keep council housing under local authority control. She is a fierce advocate for the rights of social tenants.

The evening will be chaired by Shaista Aziz, labour councillor for Rose Hill and Iffley, Co-Vice Chair of the Fabien Women’s Network and Co-Founder of Intersectional Feminist Foreign Policy and the Uninvited Women Journal.

Tickets are free but you must register to attend.

You can read our accessibility guidance on our website but please do not hesitate to contact us directly if you have any specific needs or if there is anything we can do to make your visit more comfortable. As with all events at Open House we are happy to pay bus fare for anyone who needs it, please just let one of our volunteers know.

Illustrated talk

This is a joint event with the Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade

The illegal wildlife trade undermines our global commitment to protect threatened biodiversity. Being a key destination in Asia, China needs to play a leading role in reducing demand for illegal wildlife products so as to reverse the unsustainable trend.

During this talk Ming will discuss ongoing projects that his team are working on from Guangzhou, where they are based, which is widely considered as the epicenter of illegal wildlife trade in Mainland China. He will draw on the team’s interdisciplinary approaches to tackle these complex illegal wildlife trade challenges.

Partnering with local and international groups (including Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade and Wildlife Conservation Society), they hope to develop data-informed strategies by understanding the domestic trends and drivers of wildlife trade in China, the dynamics of local medicinal and wildlife markets, and the motivation and behavior of local and overseas Chinese consumers of wildlife products.

Give your New Years Resolutions a kick start at Blackwell’s by joining us to hear Graham Allcott teach us all How to be a Productivity Ninja. This best selling book has been completely updated for 2019.

Do you waste too much time on your phone? Scroll through Twitter or Instagram when you should be getting down to your real tasks? Is your attention easily distracted? We’ve got the solution: The Way of the Productivity Ninja.

In the age of information overload, traditional time management techniques simply don’t cut it anymore. Using techniques including Ruthlessness, Mindfulness, Zen-like Calm and Stealth & Camouflage, this fully revised new edition of How to be a Productivity Ninja offers a fun and accessible guide to working smarter, getting more done and learning to love what you do again.

Graham Allcott is an entrepreneur, author, speaker and podcaster. He is the founder of Think Productive, one of the world’s leading providers of personal productivity training and consultancy. Graham hosts the popular business podcast, Beyond Busy. He is also active within the charity sector both as the co-founder of Intervol, an international student volunteering charity and in previous roles as Chief Executive of Student Volunteering England, Head of Volunteering at the University of Birmingham and an advisor to the UK Government on youth volunteering policy.

This is a free event, but do please register your interest in attending. For more information, please call Customer Services on 01865 333 623 or email events.ox@blackwell.co.uk.

The last decade has seen a surge of interest in economic inequality and widely read books about its social and political consequences by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, and Larry Bartels. Yet most scholarship focuses on incomes, neglecting the massive inequalities that exist and are widening in the ownership of assets: from residential to financial wealth.

In this talk, Professor Ben Ansell, building off his ERC project WEALTHPOL, will examine the potential impact of wealth inequality on contemporary politics, from standard economic debates such as taxation to the rise of populist parties.

Daniel Whiting (University of Oxford), Dr Lucy Bowes (University of Oxford), and Dr Peter Hacker (University of Oxford) will address the topic of criminality and the brain from the point of views of psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy, respectively. Val McDermid, the crime writer, will be a guest speaker.

Ada, Countess of Lovelace, is sometimes called the world’s first computer programmer. Professor Ursula Martin (University of Oxford) discusses how a young woman in the 1800s acquired the expertise to become a pioneer of computer science.
Due to popular demand this is a repeat of Professor Martin’s talk in September 2018.

As part of the Surgical Grand Rounds Lecture Series, Dr Regent Lee (Clinical Lecturer in Vascular Surgery and a Co-Principal Investigator of the OxAAA Study at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford) will discuss ‘Novel methods for predicting growth of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) in humans – an update from the OxAAA Study’.

Dr Imafidon, is co-founder of STEMettes, the social enterprise inspiring the next generation of females of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. One of the BBC’s 100 inspirational and innovative women for 2017.

This lecture series was established in honour of our alumna, Sue Lloyd-Roberts, an award-winning broadcast journalist whose uncompromising and courageous documentaries highlighted humanitarian issues across the world.

We are delighted that our speaker this year will be world-renowned, award-winning Lyse Doucet, Chief International Correspondent and Senior Presenter for BBC World News television and BBC World Service Radio. Lyse was a BBC foreign correspondent with postings in Jerusalem, Amman, Tehran, Islamabad, Kabul and Abidjan for 15 years, before becoming a presenter in 1999. She was paramount in the coverage of the “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa and, for the past 20 years, has continued to cover all major stories in this area.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. Both are free, but please register to attend. Booking deadline: 21 January.

An interview with John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics (emeritus) at Oxford University, by Rob Gifford, Senior Editor for The Economist.

In today’s world, isn’t it science, rather than Christianity, that holds the key to answering life’s deepest questions? Haven’t new discoveries rendered religious ideas obsolete? In a pluralistic and interconnected age, what should we put our trust in and is there any hope for humanity?

Join us as John and Rob explore these and many other questions relating to God, science and the meaning of life. This interactive event includes opportunities to submit questions, as well as a book signing for Prof. Lennox’s latest work, Can Science Explain Everything?

Abstract:
This talk on the economics of religion in India is based on research conducted in India for over a decade. The talk asks why we need an economics of religion for India and discusses contemporary attitudes towards religion in the country. It will discuss how religion relates to growing inequality in India, changes in demography, socio-economic status and religious competition. The talk will present original research findings from a survey of 600 Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jain and Sikh religious organisations across 7 Indian states with respect to their religious and non-religious service provision such as health and education. The talk will also touch briefly on religious education, and the issues around introducing subjects such as mathematics, science and computers into a traditional religious curriculum. Ultimately, the talk presents an economic analysis of religion that hopes to inform social policy in countries such as India that have religiously-pluralistic populations.

About the Speaker:
Sriya Iyer is a Janeway Fellow in Economics and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge; and a Bibby Fellow and College Lecturer at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. She researches in the economics of religion, demography, education and development economics. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture, on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Religion and Demography, is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA), and was awarded a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize in 2014. She has published two books on Demography and Religion in India (Oxford University Press, 2002) and The Economics of Religion in India (Harvard University Press, 2018). She has also published articles in economics journals including the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Literature, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Development Economics.

‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. So said the philosopher George Santayana and in that spirit we are launching a new series of free history talks to reflect on and remember our Past Times. We are honoured to announce that the inaugural talk in this series will be from Jeremy Dronfield, the author of The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz.

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in.

When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz, a certain death sentence, Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering they endured, there was one constant that kept them alive: the love between father and son.

Based on Gustav’s secret diary and meticulous archive research, this book tells his and Fritz’s story for the first time – a story of courage and survival unparalleled in the history of the Holocaust.

Lord Nicholas Stern, IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, LSE and Director of the LSE India Observatory, will discuss his new book, with Himanshu of JNU, Delhi and Peter Lanjouw of the Free University of Amsterdam, How Lives Change: Palanpur, India, and Development Economics. Using a unique data set consisting of seven full (100%) surveys of one Indian village, one for every decade since Independence, Nick will reflect on the past, present and future, both of India and of development economics, seen through the experience of Palanpur in the years since Independence.

This talk will be followed by a drinks reception, book sale and signing, all welcome.

Please register at: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/2651