https://www.facebook.com/events/495653777253176/

The Oxford Guild is very excited to welcome Larry Hirst CBE, former Chairman of IBM EMEA, to speak on Thursday 7th May. This will be an incredibly insightful talk and is not one to be missed, especially for anyone interested in technology, business, or issues of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. The event will include a Q&A session open to the floor, and promises to cover a wide range of topics, as Larry discusses his high-profile and varied career. ALL ARE WELCOME!

DATE: Thursday 7th May 2015 (2nd Week)
TIME: 6:40pm
VENUE: Habakkuk Room, Jesus College
REGISTER YOUR INTEREST HERE: http://tinyurl.com/LarryHirstIBMGuildTalk

Until his retirement from IBM in July 2010, Larry Hirst was chairman of IBM Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). He represented IBM to the European Commission and other authorities such as NATO and the EDA on issues of international public policy and business regulation. During his time as Chairman, IBM EMEA revenues grew to $35bn, with a workforce of 110,000 people. Previous roles in his 33-year career included Chairman of IBM Netherlands (2002-2010), the leadership of IBM’s business in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands and South Africa (2002-2008).
Larry is passionate about the issues of diversity and inclusion and is an Ambassador to the Everywoman company (https://www.everywoman.com/) and Black British Business Awards (http://www.thebbbawards.com/), as well as a supporter of groups including the Asian Business Networks Association, the European Women’s Achievement Award, the Afro Caribbean Group, Stonewall, Whitehall in Industry, Asian Business Women, and Investors in Diversity.
Larry was appointed C.B.E. in 2006, in recognition of Services to the IT industry.

This event will be particularly insightful for anyone considering a career in technology or business, and there will be a Q&A session as part of the event.

We look forward to seeing you there!

In this talk Professor Paul Aveyard, Professor of Behavioural Medicine at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Health Care Sciences will look at how our brains respond to cigarette smoking and the way that those responses drive continued smoking, sometimes against our will. Almost everyone who smokes believes smoking relieves stress, but I will discuss our research which seems to show the opposite is true. Understanding the way these brain processes work can help us understand how we can help people stop smoking

As adults can tell us when they are feeling pain we can often simply ask them whether pain medication is working. As babies cannot talk, we need to rely on other measures to find out whether they are feeling pain. It is not always possible to know whether a baby is in pain by looking at their behaviour. Join us to hear Dr Rebeccah Slater, discuss whether the use of modern brain imaging techniques can tell us whether a baby can feel pain. This is particularly important for babies admitted to intensive care after birth who may need lots of medical interventions to be performed everyday as part of their essential medical care.

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This talk is being held as part of the Practice of Evidence-Based Health Care module which is part of the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care. Members of the public are welcome to attend.
Carl Heneghan is Director of the Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine, a General Practitioner and Senior Tutor of Kellogg College.
Carl has been the author and principal investigator on the Cochrane reviews on Tamiflu in adults and children and for 6 years he has worked alongside an international Cochrane group to obtain the missing unpublished evidence. This work has proved controversial in questioning the £500 million spent by the UK stockpiling the drug and has led to parliamentary appearances and substantial news coverage. The talk will detail the journey to obtain the evidence, the new methods including the use of clinical study reports and the effect of the drug once all the evidence became available.

As part of this year’s community outreach program, Oxford Brookes University’s 150th anniversary, and as a way showing our appreciation to all participants, clinicians, researchers, members of the public and organisations that have supported our work, we will be holding an open day on Saturday, 30th of May 2015. Over the past decade, the Movement Science Group, which now falls within the Centre for Rehabilitation at Oxford Brookes University, has conducted extensive research on a variety of topics related to rehabilitation and physical activity. Topics include measuring and understanding movement in those with movement difficulties, exercising benefits in people with neurological conditions, and developing novel rehabilitation strategies.

Susan Jebb is a nutrition scientist who has spent more than 25 years studying the links between what we eat and the effect on our weight and risk of cardiovascular disease. Her research includes a mix of observational analyses from prospective cohorts, experimental studies and both controlled and more pragmatic dietary intervention studies.

In this talk she will consider how evidence from these diverse sources informs dietary recommendations. Drawing on her experience as a scientific advisor to the Department of Health on obesity and food policy and a raft of public engagement activities, including the recent Horizon series “What’s the right diet for you?” she will also consider how the scientific evidence is translated into policy and practice.

Professor Sir John Bell has been invited to Oxford Brookes to discuss the future of medicine and the role of the Oxford Academic Health Science Centre. His research interests are in the area of autoimmune disease and immunology where he has contributed to the understanding of immune activation in a range of autoimmune diseases. In 1993, he founded the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, one of the world’s leading centres for complex trait common disease genetics.

So many of us are desperately busy doing what’s immediately in front of us rather than the things that make a real difference.

Ben will tell the story of the GB men’s rowing 8+ in the build up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where they won the gold medal, and how they challenged everything to make the boat go faster. For Ben it was the culmination of nine years in the national team.

Ben’s story is a call to action, challenging you to examine how you spend your time in a way that ensures you are travelling in the direction that you want to go.

About the Speaker
Ben Hunt-David MBE
BEN HUNT-DAVIS MBE

Former Brookes student, Ben Hunt- Davis is a performance coach, speaker and author. Ben has been involved in five Olympic Games – three as a competitor and two as a member of the headquarters team. He was also Chairman of the Organising Committee for both the 2011 World Rowing Junior Championships and the 2013 Rowing World Cup. He now runs a performance consulting company helping companies to make their ‘boats go faster’. His first book is entitled Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?

The charity Oxford Student Minds and the Mind Your Head Campaign are excited to bring you the biggest event on the mental health awareness calendar – a night of celebration as the culmination of Testimonials week. The SpeakEasy is an event unlike any other in Oxford, combining support for mental health with food, drink and music.

We will begin the night with the opportunity to learn more about mental health conditions including depression, anxiety and eating disorders from our invited specialist guests. Interspersed throughout this portion of the night will be student testimonials of prose and poetry regarding their experiences tackling both Oxford and a mental illness. We encourage open discussion following these testimonials to establish how as a community we can come together to improve wellbeing in Oxford. By doing this, soon we will all be able to ‘SpeakEasy’ about matters of mental health.

Following this, to celebrate both the end of the year and the work of Student Minds and Mind Your Head, Oxford volunteers we will be providing food, drink and music. Along with other special guests, we are thrilled to announce that DJs Tom Stafford, Nick Byrne and OUSU’s own Louis Trup will be on the decks to bring you the best night possible. Food will be provided in the form of alcoholic ‘ice cream’ by Annie Zimmerman’s ‘Scooperfood’ and the Student Minds’ Pick N Mix table. Please bring spare cash to enjoy the delights of our Food Courtyard.

Tickets cost £5 on the door and all proceeds will be going directly to the charity Student Minds to help train Eating Disorder support group facilitators, costing £150 per person. It’s our ambition to provide enough money to train a team of 10 new facilitators to better improve support for student sufferers in Oxford. However, to encourage people to provide Testimonials, we will be providing free entry to those who enter to Meredith Leston at meredith.leston@st-annes.ox.ac.uk and a friend.

So come along to ‘SpeakEasy’. Dance, drink and eat for a good cause and help us tackle stigma surround mental health at the same time! The Testimonial part of our event will run from 8 until 9pm with the celebrations kicking off straight after until late.

The Patient Safety Academy at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences are pleased to invite you to a seminar on current safety issues for senior management, led by Dr Ken Catchpole from Cedars Sinai Healthcare, Los Angeles. Dr Catchpole has won international recognition for his work on applying Human Factors to healthcare problems. He will deliver an initial assessment of key problems and potential solutions facing senior managers in Trusts in the NHS in England followed by a question and answer session.

Drinks and canapés will be provided. Places are limited, so please respond to this invitation if you would like to attend by 12 June 2015.

Brian Hurwitz is D’Oyly Carte Professor of Medicine and the Arts in the Department of English. He is a medical practitioner affiliated to the Division of Health and Social Care Research, King’s College London, directs the Centre for the Humanities and Health and is a member of the Steering Advisory Board of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s.

Collectively clinical case reports constitute a huge repository of medical experience. This talk will scrutinise their shape, salient features, and the nature of the hindsight from which they are composed, filtered for coherence, and turned into second order accountsof encounters, observations and reasoning about a patient or series of patients. It asks what case reports are good for and what kinds of knowledge they embody.

Two hour cycle ride with Max as he reveals some surprising facts about the science of cycling. Ride and demonstration.
Please show up 10 minutes before departure at The Story Museum. The ride will finish back at The Story Museum.

Author and cyclist Max Gaskin explores the science of cycling from hydrogen to helmets!
6.30pm – 7.30pm £8/£5 concessions

International table tennis player, broadcaster and writer, Matthew Syed will reflect on the psychology of performance.

“Understanding Trauma & PTSD within the context of the Treatment Room”

This is a CPD event for practitioners run by Morit Heitzler.

This talk will explore:

– The psycho-physiology of trauma (autonomic nervous system)

– Different types of trauma

– Disturbances to self-regulation in trauma

– Understanding dissociation as a body-mind process

– Brain function during and after trauma

– How re-traumatisation occurs and what we can do about it

– Trauma in the therapy room: basic principles of a body based approach

– The ‘safe place’ – establishing a container and working alliance

Recognising and dealing with secondary (vicarious) trauma

The talk will run from 6-8pm at Eau de Vie on Tuesday 30th June.

Places are £35.

B o o k i n g s

t: 01865 200678
e: info@eau-de-vie.co.uk

Professor Trish Greenhalgh will talk about how careful analysis of stories can help us rise above the ontological desert of ‘behaviour change’ research.

Qualified nutritionist and Oxford Fat Loss Specialist looks at the most recent scientific research, scrutinizing the truth about sugar and sweeteners. Are they really that bad for us, are any dangerous, and what should we avoid?

How can we use chocolate to understand the neurobiology of depression? Join us to hear Dr Ciara McCabe discuss how we investigate reward function in the human brain and how this is related to depression. Find out how this information can help explain why current medications might not be working and how, with neuroscience, we aim to develop better, targeted personalised treatments for depression.

The Oxford Architecture Society lecture series

Lisa Finlay is coming to speak to us from Heatherwick Studio.
Established by Thomas Heatherwick in 1994, Heatherwick Studio is recognised for its work in architecture, urban infrastructure, sculpture, design and strategic thinking. At the heart of the studio’s work is a profound commitment to finding innovative design solutions, with a dedication to artistic thinking and the latent potential of materials and craftsmanship. In the twenty years of its existence, Heatherwick Studio has worked in many countries, with a wide range of commissioners and in a variety of regulatory environments.

The first OxArch workshop of the series ‘Behind Architecture: The Essentials’ is set to bring us back to the analogue process of representation. ‘Architecture in Watercolours’ presents an opportunity to begin the year with a little experimentation.

Anisha Meggi (currently studying her PhD) works with watercolour to capture the essence of a project with the physical and theoretical layering of watercolour paint and model making.

Come join us on the 4th floor of Abercrombie on Thursday at 4pm, if you’re interested in learning a new skill or pushing further what you already know about watercolour.

We will be providing some watercolour trays, watercolour paper and brushes. However, if you have you’re own watercolour sets, please feel free to bring them in.

Prices:
£7 for members
£9 for non members

Part 3 of a three-part mini-series on notation: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

Part 1 was Reading Slough and London Paddington: the persistent lure of spelling reform (July 16th). Part 2 was Writing little messages in Italian: the social origins of music notation (August 20th).

Free entry, no need to book. You’re welcome to come along just to listen, or to take part actively in the discussion. The meeting room will be indicated on the display screen just inside the Town Hall entrance lobby.

Conceptions of Enlightenment is a one-day conference concluding in a public lecture at 5pm. The lecture will be delivered by Dennis Rasmussen (Tufts University, Boston), author of The Pragmatic Enlightenment (CUP, 2014).

Over the last century, historians and philosophers have used the term ‘Enlightenment’ in diverse ways. Was it primarily a philosophical movement, or did it involve a much wider change of outlook and sensibility in the course of the eighteenth century? Did its origins and centre lie in England, the Netherlands, France, or Scotland? Did it establish the human rights and freedoms we now value, or did it in practice subject humanity to rigidly rational systems of control? Did it give a voice to women and colonial subjects, or did it reinforce male domination and European hegemony over the rest of the world? Did it prepare the way for the French Revolution and the Reign of terror, or is its heritage to be found in the American Declaration of Independence?

To discuss such questions, a number of leading scholars of the Enlightenment will introduce the work of some of the historians and philosophers who have been most influential in shaping this much-debated concept.

Contemplative Neuroscience: Application to Emerging Healthcare Technologies

Dr Christopher Brown
University of Cambridge

Wednesday 30 September 2015 at 1:30pm
Wellcome Building seminar rooms, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford

About Dr Christopher Brown
Dr Brown is a research associate in the CamPAIN research group at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He has conducted research in the neuroimaging of acute and chronic pain as part of his PhD (University of Manchester) and postdoctoral work in clinical neuroscience. He continues to work in multidisciplinary teams of clinicians in pain medicine and rheumatology, and academics in neuroimaging, computational neuroscience and genetics. Dr Brown’s current research focusses on patient phenotyping and real-time monitoring pain and pain-predictive mechanisms in order to translate neuroscience into improved clinical care for patients with chronic pain.

EBM has been transformational for healthcare, however, currently it is poorly understood how this has occurred over time. Using Heart Attack as an example, Prof Carl Heneghan will demonstrate and discuss how EBM has saved lives, and invite the audience to consider the consequence of a health system without evidence.

Demographic changes across the world pose one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Longer lifespans and shifting fertility rates bring with them an array of global health issues. In this lecture, Professor Sarah Harper, Co-Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, will talk about the causes and effects of population change and the global age structural shift, and Professor Robyn Norton, Co-Director of The George Institute for Global Health, will address the implications of these changes on global health.

3D character animation online with Mixamo/Adobe
On June 1st of this year Adobe announced its purchase of the company Mixamo.
This evening John Twycross – Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Production, Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment, Oxford Brookes University – will demonstrate some of the features of the current Mixamo website, look at how this currently integrates into game engines and discuss the implications of this for designers.

The Mixamo online service provides a motion capture library, character generation and automated rigging. It is exciting because it makes character animation accessible to all. It also clearly signals Adobe’s commitment to gain a foothold in the 3D character animation field and expanding Photoshop’s 3D features.

The Oxford Forum for Medical Humanities presents a talk on effective altruism and the true impact of a doctor, by (medical doctor) Dr Gregory Lewis.

Doctors have a pretty solid reputation as do-gooders, and many students go into medicine for altruistic reasons. But how much good do doctors do? If you are deciding whether to become a doctor in the UK, how many lives can you expect to save over the course of your career?

Dr Gregory Lewis, a full-time doctor and ex-Cambridge medical student, will present some of his research into these very questions. This talk should be of interest to medics and non-medics alike who are serious about the impact of their career.

Date: Saturday 24 October (Week 2)
Time: 4:30pm-5:30pm
Venue: Blue Boar Lecture Theatre, Christ Church

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WHY DOCTORS DON’T DO MUCH GOOD

If you want to save lives, should you study medicine? Probably not.

The conclusion of our research is that most people skilled enough to make it in a field as challenging as medicine could have a bigger social impact through an alternative career.

The best research suggests that doctors do much less to improve the health of their patients than you might naturally expect. Health is more determined by lifestyle factors, and most of the treatments that work particularly well could be delivered with a smaller number of doctors than already work in the UK or USA.

However, medicine is high earning and highly fulfilling, and we expect there are more promising opportunities to help others through biomedical research, public health, health policy and (e.g. hospital) management.

Overall, we think going to medical school would be the best way to have a social impact only if someone felt they were a significantly better fit for medicine than the other options we recommend.

Source: 80,000 Hours https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save/

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BIOGRAPHY

Dr Gregory Lewis, a full-time public health doctor training in the east of England. He studied Medicine at Cambridge, where he volunteered for Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, and he did his FY1 at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

He will present some of his research into these very questions. This talk should be of interest to medics and non-medics alike who are serious about the impact of their career

“This is a good day for businesses…” says Dan Kelly, President, CEO and Chair, Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Maybe so, but CETA, like other trade-deals, is bad news for equality, democracy and the environment.
In early 2016, CETA, the Canada-EU trade deal is due to be debated and voted on in the European parliament. Like TTIP, CETA allows corporations to sue governments in secret courts over decisions they don’t like.
As part of the growing movement against corporate trade deals and to try to stop final agreement of CETA, we’re planning a speaker tour.
The speakers will be:
• Maude Barlow, chair of citizens’ group the Council of Canadians
• Yash Tandon, Ugandan trade expert and author of Trade is War
• Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now

Sir Iain practised as a clinician for seven years in the UK and the Gaza Strip, before becoming a full time health services researcher. He was founding director of both the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit and the UK Cochrane Centre. Since 2003, he has coordinated the James Lind Initiative to promote public and professional acknowledgement of the need to address uncertainties about the effects of treatments. He is coordinating editor of The James Lind Library and Testing Treatments Interactive. He was knighted in 2000 for services to health care.

All of us are exposed regularly to claims about the effects of interventions alleged to protect and promote health. Why is it important to ask whether these claims are reliable? And how can all of us be helped to assess which of the claims are likely to be trustworthy?

From a very early age, children ask very reasonable ‘Why?’ questions. What can be done to encourage children’s ‘innate’ curiosity about how the world works? How can critical thinking about the answers offered to them be promoted? In particular, how might children and young people be introduced to concepts that would prompt them to ask probing questions about the reliability of claims about the effects of interventions? Finally, how should the effects of efforts to help children and young people to become effective BS detectives be assessed?