Some face-to-face events are returning. Check carefully for any requirements.

Nov
6
Wed
Designing the Future: Who is doing it? @ Jacqueline du Pre Music Building
Nov 6 @ 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Designing the Future: Who is doing it? @ Jacqueline du Pre Music Building

Sarah Weir OBE, Chief Executive, Design Council, will lecture on ‘Designing the Future: Who is doing it?’ She will consider the question of what design is – a mindset and skillset; critical thinking and creativity combined; much more than aesthetics.

The Lady English Lecture Series marks the College’s continuing commitment to the education and advancement of women and promotes the contributions made by women to the University and to public life more generally.

Feb
4
Tue
Unbody: get haunted in Augmented reality @ Oxford Brookes University, Student Union Gallery
Feb 4 @ 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Unbody: get haunted in Augmented reality @ Oxford Brookes University, Student Union Gallery

What’s it like to be haunted? Writer Jay Bernard’s augmented reality installation explores this question – unpicking how we can be haunted by our histories and our everyday lives.

Listen to a reading while exploring alternative realities in an AR experience that looks at how the past and present are closely linked.

The installation is based on their debut collection, ‘Surge’, which considered the aftermath of the 1981 New Cross Fire. Jay Bernard is the winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work Poetry and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Part of The Think Human Festival
Everyone welcome

Feb
19
Wed
“Better doctors, better patients, better decisions: Risk literacy in health” with Prof Gerd Gigerenzer @ Oxford Martin School
Feb 19 @ 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm

In modern high-tech health care, patients appear to be the stumbling block.

Uninformed, anxious, noncompliant individuals with unhealthy lifestyles who demand treatments advertised by celebrities and insist on unnecessary but expensive diagnostics may eventually turn into plaintiffs. But what about their physicians? About ten years ago, Muir Gray and Gerd Gigerenzer published a book with the subtitle “Envisioning health care 2020”. They listed “seven sins” of health care systems then, one of which was health professionals’ stunning lack of risk literacy. Many were not exactly sure what a false-positive rate was, or what overdiagnosis and survival rates mean, and they were unable to evaluate articles in their own field. As a consequence, the ideals of informed consent and shared decision-making remain a pipedream – both doctors and patients are habitually misled by biased information in health brochures and advertisements. At the same time, the risk literacy problem is one of the few in health care that actually have a known solution. A quick cure is to teach efficient risk communication that fosters transparency as opposed to confusion, both in medical school and in CME. It can be done with 4th graders, so it should work with doctors, too.

Now, in 2020, can every doctor understand health statistics? In this talk, Gerd Gigerenzer will describe the efforts towards this goal, a few successes, but also the steadfast forces that undermine doctors’ ability to understand and act on evidence. Moreover, the last decade has seen two new forces that distract from solving the problem. The first is the promise of digital technology, from diagnostic AI systems to big data analytics, which consumes much of the attention. Digital technology is of little help if doctors do not understand it. Second, our efforts to make patients competent and to encourage them to articulate their values are now in conflict with the new paternalistic view that patients just need to be nudged into better behaviour.

This talk will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

Joint event with: The Oxford–Berlin Research Partnership