Expert Lectures

The introduction of the euro (exactly twenty years ago as Greece’s currency) was presented as a big promise of economic convergence and well-being, in the spirit of the even bigger promise of permanent peace in the European continent. However, as is all too evident by now, the euro was instrumental in dividing rather than uniting Europe, and it put in action centrifugal forces that undermined unification – a prerequisite for a common European foreign policy and defense policy. Today, in the context of the biggest military conflict on European soil since decades, a critical re-evaluation of the twenty-year-long history of the common currency is more urgent than ever.

In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered that our Universe is expanding. Eighty years later, the Space Telescope that bears his name is being used to study an even more surprising phenomenon: the expansion is speeding up. The origin of this effect is not known but is broadly attributed to a type of “dark energy” first posited to exist by Albert Einstein and now dominating the mass-energy budget of the Universe. Professor Riess will describe how his team discovered the acceleration of the Universe and why understanding the nature of dark energy presents one of the greatest remaining challenges in astrophysics and cosmology. He will also discuss recent evidence that the Universe continues to defy our best efforts to predict its behavior.

Everyone agrees that good judges are essential for the maintenance of the Rule of Law in a democratic society. But what makes a judge a good judge and how should we recruit them? The talk will consider how the role of the judiciary has been regarded over the years, how the skills and qualities needed have changed and how they have stayed the same as well as looking at different approaches to judicial appointment in different jurisdictions.

How different does the invisible Universe look from the home we thought we knew? What does the cosmos have in store for us beyond the phenomena we can see, from black holes to supernovas?

Since the dawn of our species, people all over the world have gazed in awe at the night sky. But we can only see a tiny fraction of the Universe.

Join Matthew Bothwell as he asks what the cosmos has in store for us beyond the phenomena we can see, from black holes to supernovas? And how different does the invisible Universe look from the home we thought we knew?

Matthew Bothwell is an astronomer and science communicator based at the Institute of Astronomy and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.Matthew recieved his PhD from the University of Cambridge, working with Prof. Rob Kennicutt and Dr. Scott Chapman. Before taking up science communication, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, and the Astrophysics group at the University of Cambridge.

This talk was recorded on 15 November 2021

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/t8VUHQneRtc

Original Summary:

Using the latest experimental data from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and labs and observatories around the world, including a neutrino detector buried a kilometre under an Italian mountain to a gravitational wave detector nestled in the humid pine forest of Louisiana, particle physicist Harry Cliff will reveal what the newest findings tell us about the the fundamental ingredients of matter and their origins.

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge working on the LHCb experiment, a huge particle detector buried 100 metres underground at CERN near Geneva. He is a member of an international team of around 1400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists who are using LHCb to study the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics.

Summary from source:

In 1977 or thereabouts a collection of scientists huddled around a secret radio receiver in the US desert. This was the start of GPS, Glonass, Gallileo and the whole navigation industry. A GPS chipset now costs, in bulk, a few dollars so your watch, your phone, your computer all have GPS receivers and everyone knows where they are all the time. But how does this technology work? And are there situations when it does not work?

A lecture by Richard Harvey

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website

Original summary:

UBC Asian Studies presents "Foreign Femininity and Masculinity in Japanese Translation," held on October 1st, 2021 with professor and author Momoko Nakamura. This public lecture occurred as a component of JAPN465: Japanese Media and Translation. The talk was presented in English.

This paper investigates how Japanese translators use Japanese gendered features in translating the speech of non-Japanese women and men (Inoue 2003; Shibamoto Smith 2004). The data consists of the translated speech in English and Russian literary works, TV dramas, films and newspaper interview articles. Based on the methodology of discourse analysis, Dr. Momoko Nakamura examines the occurrences of feminine and masculine features in the wide range of media discourse (Nakamura 2013). The analysis shows: 1) Japanese translators overwhelmingly use feminine features in translating non-Japanese women’s speech, and 2) while they also employ masculine features in translating non-Japanese men’s speech, with respect to the casual, laid-back speech of non-Japanese men, they have created a specific Japanese style used only in the translation of the speech. The findings suggest: 1) the predominant use of feminine features for the speech of non-Japanese women works to naturalize Japanese femininity beyond linguistic and ethnic boundaries, and 2) the invention of the style for non-Japanese men serves to enregister the Japanese stereotype of non-Japanese casual masculinity, depending on which Japanese masculinity maintains its idealized status. In sum, this paper contributes to elucidating the inter-lingual intersections of gender construction.

Guest Speaker: Momoko Nakamura, Ph.D. is Professor of English at Kanto Gakuin University, Japan. Her research interest includes linguistic construction of gendered, sexualized identity and discursive formation of gendered styles. She is the author of Jibunrashisa to nihongo [Identity and Japanese] (2021, Chikuma shobo), Shinkeigo ‘majiyabaissu’: shakaigengogaku no shiten kara [New Honorifics “Majiyabaissu”: A Sociolinguistic Approach] (2020, Hakutakusha), Gender, Language and Ideology: A Genealogy of Japanese Women’s Language (2014, John Benjamins), and Honyaku ga tsukuru Nihongo: Hiroin wa onna kotoba o hanashi tsuzukeru [Translation and Japanese: Heroines Speak Women’s Language] (2013, Hakutakusha).

Summary from source:

As the world continues the battle against the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians are paying closer attention than ever to the development and implementation of public health policy and research. As McGill University’s 67th Beatty lecturer, Dr. Anthony Fauci will share his insights and remarkable life experience as an infectious diseases expert and public health official on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. In this the university’s bicentennial year, the public lecture will be presented exclusively online on Friday, October 1, 2021, as part of McGill’s virtual Homecoming festivities.

The chief medical advisor to President Biden—and advisor to six presidents before him—Dr. Fauci has served as Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, overseeing an extensive portfolio of basic and applied research to prevent, diagnose, and treat established infectious diseases, including SARS-CoV-2. Notably, he was one of the principal architects of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program that has saved millions of lives throughout the developing world since its launch in 2003. He remains a leader in the global HIV research response. He has also led research efforts to combat tuberculosis, malaria, as well as emerging diseases such as Ebola and Zika. Dr. Fauci is considered a pioneer in the field of human immunoregulation and is the longtime chief of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Laboratory of Immunoregulation.

Born in New York in 1940, as a young man Dr. Fauci delivered prescriptions for the neighborhood pharmacy that his parents owned and operated. He earned a medical degree from Cornell University in 1966, and then began his 53-year career at the NIH in 1968, assuming his NIAID director position in 1984. Today he is one of the world’s most-cited biomedical scientists.

Dr. Fauci is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service, the National Academy of Sciences’ Public Welfare Medal, the George M. Kober Medal of the Association of American Physicians, and the Canada Gairdner Global Health Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, as well as many other professional societies.

Summary: In her Perimeter Public Lecture webcast on October 6, 2021, physicist Naoko Kurahashi Neilson will discuss her experience conducting research in one of the least habitable places on Earth and share some of the insights into our universe that high-energy neutrinos can offer. Kurahashi Neilson is an associate professor at Drexel University and a member of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.

Synopsis: Nell Painter combines the discursive meanings of scholarship with the visual meaning of painting, to answer, literally, why white people are called 'Caucasian,' what that looks like, and how they all relate to our ideas about personal beauty.

Description:

What information and stories work to keep people positive about the future, and how can climate professionals discuss their work in public without the 'doom and gloom'?

With so many headlines warning of impending climate doom, it's tempting to think the situation is hopeless and nothing can be done. But if we are going to avoid the worst effects of the changing climate, we need to acknowledge the scale and seriousness of the problem without falling into despair. The scientists, engineers and campaigners that are working on a better future will need to inspire people, not lecture them, and listen to their concerns, not dismiss them.

This talk is part of our new series on the climate crisis in partnership with the Grantham Institute.

Join a panel of experts as they discuss the psychology of climate change:

• Lorraine Whitmarsh is an environmental psychologist, specialising in perceptions and behaviour in relation to climate change, energy and transport. She is Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST). Her research projects have included studies of energy efficiency behaviours, waste reduction and carrier bag reuse, perceptions of smart technologies and electric vehicles, low-carbon lifestyles, and responses to climate change.
• Amiera Sawas joined Climate Outreach in 2021 as Director of Programmes and Research. She is responsible for overseeing the programmatic and research implementation of the organisation’s strategy.
• Amiera has a PhD in Human Geography, a Masters in Global Politics and a Bachelors in Psychology.
• Renzo Guinto, MD DrPH is Associate Professor of the Practice of Global Public Health and Inaugural Director of the Planetary and Global Health Program of the St. Luke’s Medical Center College of Medicine in the Philippines. He is also Chief Planetary Doctor of PH Lab – a “glo-cal think-and-do tank” for advancing the health of both people and the planet.

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/bDYVmfiQsyo

Summary: Because apes seem most like humans, science fiction has used them as a mirror in which to view ourselves. The philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau saw in orangutans the original, natural man, uncorrupted by society. Meanwhile most of his contemporaries used apes to embody racially charged fantasies of bestial brutality. These conflicting views shaped the numerous versions of King Kong and the Planet of the Apes films, which the lecture will use to look at evolving images of humanity.

Recent and dramatic breakthroughs in our understanding of the body will profoundly change the experience of being human in the coming century.

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/SAzpyLLrEwQ

We may soon be eating bespoke diets for our microbiome, taking drugs to improve our brains and genetically modifying our unborn children to prevent disease. Join immunologist Dan Davis as he explores how radical and disconcerting possibilities have been made real thanks to the ingenious technologies and decades-long collaborations of scientists worldwide.

Daniel M. Davis is Professor of Immunology at the University of Manchester and author of two previous books: The Beautiful Cure, shortlisted for the 2018 Royal Society Science Book Prize and a book of the year in The Times, Telegraph and New Scientist, and The Compatibility Gene, longlisted for the 2014 Royal Society Science Book Prize and shortlisted for the Society of Biology Book Prize. His research, using super-resolution microscopy to study the immune system, was listed in Discover magazine as one of the top 100 breakthroughs of the year. He is also the author of over 140 academic papers, collectively cited over 13,000 times, including articles in Nature, Science and Scientific American.

This talk was livestreamed on 6 July 2021.

A lecture by Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad (Department of Arabic and Islamic Civilizations, American University in Cairo) delivered at the Warburg Institute, University of London, School of Advanced Study, on 1 May 2013.

Keynote Lecture for the 2021 Commodities of Empire Workshop ‘The Raw and the Refined: Commodities, Processing, and Power in Global Perspective’, School for Advanced Study, University of London.

After the close of the Second World War, the British Labour government threatened to nationalise sugar refining as part of its overall effort to build a social democratic economy. Industry’s reaction was swift and extensive. The sugar industry quickly moved much refining to the empire, especially the sugar islands of Jamaica and Trinidad, and later to British colonies in Africa. It forged ties with other domestic industries such as trucking, cement, and steel and manufacturing groups such as the Federation of British Industries to lobby government, workers and consumers. Led by Tate and Lyle, a firm that wielded monopolistic power over the sugar industry, sugar also developed one of the most successful PR campaigns in Britain. Tate and Lyle’s campaign employed the phrase “Tate not State,” which it printed on sugar packets, packages, toys and advertising at home. In the Commonwealth, sugar’s PR explained how “private interests” rather than public bureaucrats would create health, happiness, and progress. It especially focused on how growing, refining and consuming sugar would lead to development, modernity and racial and social equality. This story deliberately suppressed significant aspects of the colonial past and fought tooth and nail against state-centred forms of development throughout the Commonwealth and Great Britain. This campaign became also became a model for other industries that sought to fight “socialism” in the colonies undergoing decolonisation and in postcolonial nations thereafter. The sugar industry thus became a major voice of capitalism during decolonisation and the Cold War, a history that has gone unnoticed by business, economic or political historians. The shifting global geographies of sugar refining is thus part of the story of global capitalism but also reveals the connections between metropolitan, colonial and postcolonial political and cultural economies.

All of the calorie counts you see on food today are wrong. Obesity researcher Giles Yeo shows why calories are not created equal.

Giles Yeo explores what your environment has to do with your bodyweight, the science behind why popular diets succeed, at least in the short term, and why they ultimately fail.

Dr Giles Yeo is a geneticist with over 20 years’ experience dedicated to researching the genetics of obesity. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge and assisted the ground-breaking research that uncovered key pathways in how the brain controls food intake.

His current research focuses on understanding how these pathways differ from person to person, and the influence of genetics in our relationship with food and eating habits.

He is based at MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, where he is Principal Research Associate, and is a fellow and graduate tutor at Wolfson College. Giles also moonlights as a science presenter for the BBC. He lives in Cambridge with his family.

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/S5F0x1HZSBs

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/79973

Lovely lecture, but, what creates the QF? Go to NDE on Lemmy to find out!

Summary from the University of Pittsburgh's Global Studies Center: The Muslims in a Global Context series offers the opportunity to examine the factors and trends that are having major impacts on these diverse regions and their relationships with other world regions and countries.

Abstract:

How can we design simple and elegant intelligent materials, that may one day animate and improve themselves?

Today’s researchers are designing materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. From furniture that builds itself and flat shoes that jump into shape, to islands that grow themselves.

In this talk, Skylar discusses how materials can exhibit behaviours that we typically associate with biological organisms, the challenges we face and how they can help us create a sustainable future.

Skylar Tibbits is a designer and computer scientist whose research focuses on developing self-assembly and programmable materials within the built environment. Tibbits is the founder and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, and Associate Professor of Design Research in the Department of Architecture.

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/C1liR2zeS4s

Emory University professor Felix Harcourt teaches a class on how conspiracy theories about UFOs have shaped America culture. He begins in the late 1940s and describes how public opinion about extraterrestrials changed over the course of the 20th century, often paralleling societal anxieties.

Audio-only direct link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADV5745402173.mp3

How high can we build skyscrapers with the help of new materials and technologies?

Roma Agrawal delves into the history of the materials that enabled immense construction, particularly concrete and steel, and the developments that made our structures what they are today. All while noting the accomplishments of key visionary engineers - Henry Bessemer, Fazlur Khan and Elisha Otis.

Roma Agrawal MBE is a structural engineer, and author, who builds big. From footbridges and sculptures, to train stations and skyscrapers – including The Shard – her work has left an indelible mark on London’s landscape.

Roma has been awarded international awards for her technical prowess and success in promoting the profession, including the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering’s Rooke Award.

Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/CeuwNLFd3Wk

Audio-only: https://soundcloud.com/royal-institution/recipe-for-a-skyscraper