St Catherine’s College is hosting award-winning musical theatre composer Claude-Michel Schönberg as he delivers his Cameron Mackintosh Inaugural Lecture on Thursday, 3 November 2016. Claude-Michel, best known for scoring the music for Les Misérables, Miss Saigon and more, will speak on the subject of ‘Creation and Immigration’.
Entry is by free ballot. . To find out more information and to register visit https://www.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/cmsinaugural by Friday 21 October.
Delivering reliable drinking water to millions of rural people in Africa and Asia is an elusive and enduring global goal. A systematic information deficit on the performance of and demand for infrastructure investments limits policy design and development outcomes.
Since 2010, the ‘Smart Handpump’ project has been exploring new technologies, methods and models to understand and respond to this challenge. A mobile-enabled data transmitter provides foundational data on hourly water usage and failure events which has enabled the establishment of performance-based maintenance companies in Kenya that are improving handpump reliability by an order of magnitude.
The research is a collaboration between the School of Geography and the Environment and the Department of Engineering Science with a range of partners including government, international bodies such as UNICEF and the private sector. New research involves modelling the accelerometry data from the handpumps to predict aquifer depth. We invite you to test the Smart Handpump in the car park and debate how the ‘accidental infrastructure’ of rural handpumps can spark bolder initiatives to deliver water security for millions of poor people in Africa and Asia.
Get your game face on – it’s poker night at Science Oxford.
Brush off your pack of cards and outplay Lady Luck with an evening of poker probability and psychology. Learn more about the head games that define what happens at the poker table with mathematician and author of The Perfect Bet Adam Kucharski and psychologist Danielle Shore, who’ll show how your poker face can affect your opponents’ decision-making. Their talks will be followed by a friendly poker tournament – the perfect opportunity to put into practice the science of poker.
Chips included as part of ticket price.
This year’s lecture will be given by David Altshuler MD PhD, Executive Vice President for Global Research and Chief Scientific Officer, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and will be titled ‘Human Genetics and the Discovery of New Medicines’.
The lecture will take place on Wednesday 9 November 2016 at 17.15 in Lecture Theatre 1, Mathematical Institute, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG. Refreshments will follow.
Please email [email protected] with any queries.
Xtrac / Oxford e-Research Centre
October 20, 2016 – 19:00
Oxford e-Research Centre
7 Keble Road, Oxford
Seminar Open to all
This exciting talk from Xtrac – global leaders in racing gearbox design will discuss the challenges of designing a gearbox for a unique hypercar – the Pagani Huayra. Voted in 2015 by IMechE as one of the leading engineering companies, this talk will discuss what sets Xtrac apart from its competitors as well as the challenges that arise when you are involved in a hypercar design project.
Speakers:
Jon Marsh – Chief Designer
Dominic Smith – Head of Advanced Engineering
Paul Pomfret – Assistant Chief Designer
Refreshments will begin at 6.30pm, with the talk starting at 7pm. Booking is not compulsory but is helpful for the organisors.
When duties arising from two different rights are incompatible with one another, the rights in question can be said to be in conflict. Public discourse at the moment is flooded with claims about the incompatibility between privacy and security. According to popular belief, the more privacy individuals enjoy, the less the state is able to provide security, and vice versa. In other words, the state seems to have incompatible duties: on the one hand, to respect its citizens’ right to privacy by refraining from spying on them, and on the other hand, to guarantee the safety of its citizens, their right to security, which, so the argument goes, cannot be done without spying on the general population. This paper focuses on the supposed trade-off between privacy and security in the context of terrorist threats and mass surveillance. I will follow Waldron’s (1989) framework for assessing rights in conflict by first weighing security against privacy—assessing the importance of the interests at stake, the trade-offs involved and the possible successive waves of duties generated by the failure to comply with a primary duty, and the need for proportionality—and finally focusing on possible internal connections between privacy and security that may suggest these rights are less in conflict than is usually thought. The paper ends with some reflections on the implications for encryption.
Talk by Professor Robert Evans
Druce was the re-founder of the ANHSO in 1901 and an officer of the Society for half a century. He was not only a pioneering botanist, but also a pharmacist, politician, preservationist and philanthropist. This talk will present his career.
Prof. Evans is Regius Professor of History emeritus at Oxford University.
Climate change is a much-discussed topic, but what does the science say? In this talk, the evidence of how climate change is already affecting bird distributions, populations and communities will be reviewed and summarised. The magnitude of future climate change is projected to be much greater than already experienced. The potential impact of these future changes in bird species around the world will be assessed, and used to assess how conservation practice may need to adapt in response.
Dr Pearce-Higgins is the British Trust for Ornithology Director of Science
Iceland is one of the most volcanically active regions in the world. This is due to the interaction between the plate spreading and the Icelandic hotspot. This small island contains 35 active volcanoes, each capable of exhibiting a very wide spectrum of volcanic activity. This presentation will provide an overview of the most active volcanoes in Iceland and the techniques used to monitor them.
Michelle is a volcanologist specialising in Icelandic volcanoes. For the last three years, she has been working for the Nordic Volcanological Center, University of Iceland. She holds a BSc double major in Geology and Physics from the Queensland University of Technology, an MSc in Geophysical Hazards from the University College of London and a DPhil in Earth Sciences from the University of Oxford.