The Pembrokian, Issue 41, Jul 2016

the Pembrokian

ISSUE 41, JULY 2016

Pembroke’s Female Rowers’ Glory

Irene Tracey: Professor, Wife, Mother, BEATING OUR GENETIC Ground-Breaking INHERITANCE Scientist

OUR

FUTUREPROOFING Class of 1979: RESEARCH Reflections on an Historic Year JCR Art: Bratby & Cooke Slaving at the Kitchen Sink

Henry Chandler BACKWARDS (1851): Early MEMORY Digital Pioneer

DRIVERLESS CARS

Global Growth Generators: Women’s Event SCIENCE AND RELIGION: AN ANCIENT ENMITY?

POST GR AD CHALLENGE

Culture & Identity: DrSAFEGUARDING Serra Kirdar (1993) THE AID

Michelle Peluso (1993): Leading the E-Commerce Revolution

INDUSTRY

APP-TREPRENEURIAL CELEBRATING 35 YEARS OF WOMEN STUDENT AT PEMBROKE PEMBROKE’S FIRST MASTER

Celebrating twenty years of the Letourneau organ 19th September 2015

London Reception at the Oxo Tower 10th November 2015

2016 Oxford Alumni Weekend 16th–18th September Annual Alumni Dinner 17th September London Reception 15th November 2017

Post Graduate Research Fair, RAF Club 1st December 2015

Nightcap in The Hall Bar, Gaudy 1995–1997 15th April 2016

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Tesdale Lunch 20th February 2016

Pembroke on the Sofa 27th April 2016

Gaudy – (Up to 1957) 7th April Gaudy (1971–1973) 23rd June Other events planned for 2017 include the annual ‘Sofa’ event and a City Breakfast, as well as the 2017 Annual Fund Series for donors. However, do keep checking on our website (www.pmb.ox.ac.uk) as there are a huge variety of lectures, recitals, talks and performances taking place at College throughout the year at which family and friends are very welcome.

FUTURE EVENTS

Pembroke Annual Alumni Dinner 19th September 2015

PAST EVENTS

Gaudy 1974–1976 4th September 2015

“I’ve seen the future, and it will be.

I’ve seen the future, and it works”.

This is a packed issue – so much so, we had to increase the pages! The Master, Dame Lynne Brindley discusses challenges faced by research libraries when trying to archive the internet.

We kick the whole thing off with an interview with Ingmar Posner, Pembroke Fellow in Engineering, co-founder of Oxbotica, and one of the brains behind the RobotCar. Alumna and Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge, Nicola Clayton (1981), reveals how memories of past events are integral to future planning. Lizzie Stark (2001) discusses her very personal experience of how gene therapy helped her better the odds for her own future, and PhD student Becky Smethurst (2013) reassures us that, despite the great strides of Artificial Intelligence, humans will always be able to do some things better than computers. Current undergraduate Akeel Malik (2013) gives us an insight into how he is already using what to many of us is fairly futuristic technology to enhance his (and others') student experiences.

College Chaplain, Andrew Teal, offers his reflections on science and humanity, and College Librarian Laura Cracknell gives us a brief glimpse of how Pembroke’s first ever Master, Thomas Clayton, played his part through the books he collected and subsequently donated for the benefit of future generations.

Emmett Fitzgerald (1996) discusses how he is attempting to ‘futureproof ’ the mental health of aid workers – a sadly increasing workforce. Finally, many thanks to Will Badger (2011) and Richard Darbourne (2000) who have respectively contributed to our Highly Recommended and 60 Seconds With regular features, at the back of the magazine.

4 The Road to Mobile Robotics 7 Science and Religion: competing or complementary ways of seeing

by Reverend Andrew Teal 8 Not Just One for the Birds 11 Futureproofing our Research Libraries

by Dame Lynne Brindley 12 The Pembroke Post-grad Challenge

CONTENTS

I’m aware that the subject matter has leant heavily toward the Humanities in the last few editions, and decided that for this issue I should look at those Pembrokians innovating in the fields of (broadly) science and technology; my loose theme was ‘future-proofing’ and I determined to consult the experts on how they are working toward our seemingly ever-more fragile future – both as individuals and as humanity. The resulting features quite simply flaunt the diversity of our community, and I can report back, in the words of late rock legend, Prince,

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Once again I come to this Editor’s Letter absolutely fizzing with enthusiasm, inspired by those who have contributed to this edition of the Pembrokian! Every year I wax lyrical on the sheer pool of talent and intellect available to me as Editor when compiling this, your alumni magazine. I like to feature a broad mix of alumni, certainly, but also Pembroke’s Fellows and – of course – students.

15 Student with A(p)ttitude 16 Bettering the Odds, a Personal Reflection Lizzie Stark (2001) 19 Today’s Technology and Ancient Wisdom

by Emmett Fitzgerald (1996) 21 A Quincentenary of Innovation 22 Thomas Clayton

by Laura Cracknell 24 Exploring the Unknown Unknowns 26 News, Views, Schmooze, plus 60 Seconds with Richard Darbourne (2000) 27 Highly Recommended, Will Badger (2011) recommends a cult classic for summer reading

I hope you find it as enjoyable and informative to read as I found it to research, edit and write! Do get in touch with any comments or suggestions – and have a great summer!

Sophie Alumni Communications Editor

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THE ROAD TO MOBILE ROBOTICS IN THE LABORATORY WITH PROFESSOR INGMAR POSNER

Step inside the double oak doors of the Department of Engineering Science’s Mobile Robotics Lab on the Banbury Road, through the austere entrance lobby and you will enter a space where modernist design sits happily alongside chandelier lighting. Glass doors, low–level seating, coffee on tap but also marble fireplace, Victorian high ceilings and what’s that? A robotic snake-arm, of course.

So far, so Oxford.

Walk through the meeting rooms and offices, toward the back of the building and the ambience changes again. You’re in a warehouse and then step beyond that to the garage and here resides one of the mosttalked about innovations of recent times: the Robotcar. (It is at this point that you might look around you and realise that the large THE PEMBROKIAN 4

black box by the door is, in fact, a 3D printer, and that those somewhat block-like structures have been humanised with nicknames and facial features. It’s a room full of robotics and what’s more, there is clear evidence of a particularly hominal humour.

This is where Professor Ingmar Posner, Pembroke’s Fellow and Tutor in Engineering and co-leader of The Mobile Robotics Group (MRG) and Oxbotica (MRG's commercial arm), spends his time, creating our futures.

How does a driverless car work?

There are four stages involved: mapping, localisation, perception and planning. The Mobile Robotics Group is pretty unusual because Paul Newman, Co-investigator,

and I chosen to intertwine our careers in such a way that we can work at the intersection of navigation, which is what Paul does, and perception, which is what I do. In fact, we take all of the individual competencies we’ve developed as a group, which comes to over 130 man-years of tech, integrated in one complete autonomy system which we refer to as Selenium. It is the technology behind the LUTZ pods trialled in Milton Keynes and The Gateway Project in Greenwich. Each unit is equipped with a host of sensors collecting various data and merging it to produce a 3D point cloud.

Once a machine has that it can figure out where it is, can use it to perceive by detecting, for example, people and cars, and whether an object is moving or stationary, and then deciding how to act.

Ultimaker(?)

The Nerve Centre

That’s what I do.

Everything is based on what we call the Experience Paradigm: forever getting better through use by unobtrusively learning from user demonstration. Our core technology for mobile robotics is continually asking three questions: where am I? What is around me? How should I act?

Take the car – the first day the driver is behind the wheel, the technology might identify an object and assume it’s a pedestrian but on further investigation see it is in fact a phone-box. This is fed back into the learning process ‘this can’t possibly be a person, you got that wrong – it’s too tall’.

On day two you’ll still be getting results which are wrong, but you can do the same thing – e.g these objects you’ve identified are flying through the air so they can’t be people. By day three there’s real improvement, and that’s tantalising. And after about five days more mistakes are being ironed out, and you can believe that it might be useful.

So the first day won’t be great, but once you keep going, it gets better and that’s why the Experience Paradigm is so different and applies everywhere: navigation, perception and planning.

This sort of model basing (saying look out for the pedestrians and so the machine detects pedestrians, based on images) is now a fairly common thing – you can already download software that will do this for you – but whether it can do it consistently well

Ingmar and the snake arm

Smiley Robot! in real-time is another matter, and this is where the Experience Paradigm becomes so important. As I drive my car around I would like the perception system to get better around the places where I tend to operate.

Where do the vulnerabilities lie?

A number of places, but that’s not unusual.

Cyber security is clearly an issue but don’t forget it’s only recently that this has developed to a level where it would be of concern. However, we’re at a point where you can do online banking on your phone so I trust that the cyber security experts will come up with a solution that will be viable.

We work with the cyber security experts in the Department of Computing Science here at Oxford but we don’t do any research ourselves as it’s really outside of our expertise.

One issue that we are guaranteed to have is that as this technology rolls out there will be an accident; it is absolutely inevitable.

The problem is that this accident may well be one where we know that if a human had been driving it wouldn’t have happened. The important thing is not to lose sight of the fact that maybe many more accidents would not have happened due to the technology that was in control. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that the type of accidents we see now as a result of human error will change.

It will be challenging to us as a society to look at press coverage of the first accident involving an autonomous vehicle and to still want to carry on with this.

Do you have a moral responsibility?

Are we heading to a Darwinian state peopled by the uber-intelligent and machines?

We’re so far away from anything that is remotely going to be like that problem. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t think about it at all but there is a misconception about what this sort of technology is able to do.

The latest advances in deep learning are super exciting to us, and it will allow us and our machines to do a lot more things – no doubt about it – but the gap between what the public perceives to be an intelligent system and actually what the technology is doing is vast. It’s very difficult to put a timeline on it right now but whilst our systems can help you to some degree we very much still need a driver who can take over in case of emergencies. We’re working on being able to predict when such an emergency may occur but we’re not there yet.

What other uses may this technology offer, and what is the end goal?

The end goal is full autonomy. Driving is only one application where this technology is useful, but I’m a technology enthusiast and I’m totally driven by my passion for machine learning. Cars are about a fifth of what we do. The core questions of mobile autonomy branch out into many different domains. We can create a centimetreaccurate model of, say, Milton Keynes and just by looking at that you can see how it might be useful for other purposes – town THE PEMBROKIAN 5

3D printed!

planners, heavy goods transportation, building information management, etc – and this is where Oxbotica comes in to the equation. It’s all the same tech for us.

And, there are many places where technology isn’t actually the bottleneck. One thing that I feel very passionate about is assistive technology, specifically with helping people cater for or cope with a decline. For example, imagine a person with motor neurone disease who is diagnosed early whilst they still have full control but they are starting to degenerate.

That person will require a wheelchair and at first will be able to operate it, but as time goes on it will become harder and harder. Imagine technology that has learned through experience about the preferences of the user; what the user likes to do and how they like to traverse their environment. Critically the technology is able to overlook the increase in motion tremors to distil from the actions of the user what the intention is. It’s the same sort of tech going into a different domain. What I don’t know right now is whether anyone would actually be interested in doing this and whether it actually would be useful. Why? Because I don’t have a user group. I can take a car and drive off onto the road, but I don’t have access to a care home and this is something I see in my future at Oxford – access to a significant user base of people who are willing to experiment.

Without feedback how do we know if we’re actually making people’s lives better? In assistive technology, that’s the bottleneck, not so much the tech. I’m a technology enthusiast and I obviously think the stuff that we develop works. I think we could have a vast reach.

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The Evil Genius

Everything is based on what we call the Experience Paradigm: forever getting better through use by unobtrusively learning from user demonstration. Our core technology for mobile robotics it is continually asking three questions: where am I? What is around me? How should I act?

SCIENCE AND RELIGION:

Competing or Complementary Ways of Seeing?

by The Reverend Dr Andrew Teal Both assert the importance of rational norms and laws. Religion, however, perceives that the world is permeated with providence – mostly happy to take a backseat but always there. This means that people of faith can be seen by some scientists to have an agenda: not merely finding nature’s deep design, but finding the designer.

For balance, we asked College Chaplain, Dr Andrew Teal, to provide his unique perspective on the relationship between science and faith. He considers bible-belt Evolutionist theory alongside Darwinist belief, and concludes that the two needn't be incompatible, with co-existence as both his starting piece and end point.

‘Co-existence’, as this student’s laptop proclaims, in Farthings café in the Henderson Building in College, is the dish of the day.

Quite right, and despite too many historical instances of ancient enmity between science and religion, it has been the assertion of the world's religions that the nature of creation uncovers the goodness of a creator. Hopkins writes of the world being ‘charged with the grandeur of God… There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.’

Reading the universe in this way can prompt a rigorous commitment to understanding science. Even in the conflict between the Church and Galileo, the Jesuits, for example, supported Galileo’s theories because they were based on observable evidence. The method of following observed phenomena and building theories from this data reveals that religion wants to find in all things ‘seen and unseen’ a coherence, a natural law. For sure, the methodologies of science and religion are distinct. There is sometimes difficulty in agreeing upon what constitutes valid evidence.

In 19th and 20th century America, the Bible belt brought the question of Evolution and the validity of the Bible’s account of creation into the courts. Even now American education wishes to assert that it is required to teach ‘intelligent design’ rather than explore evolution. There is an anecdotal answer to the problem, which is inadequate: that science tells us how and what, but religion tells us why. This is inadequate to both sides, for surely there is within science an openness to the poetic and the imaginative, the intuitive and even the spiritual. And there is meaning and purposefulness and hard scientific exploration within religious approaches to creation. An account of creation taken seriously in its materialist scientific dimensions will not allow inappropriate spiritualization or sentimentalizing of an interior meaning, which has superiority to the material.

The outspoken Darwinist, Professor Richard Dawkins, has written and spoken at length opposing the religious tendency to impose a spiritual supernatural dimension upon an observable, material universe. His assertion that the material is all that matters is

something that people of faith may agree with, if they take the doctrine of creation seriously. In as much as it is the work of science and religion to look for the richest coherence of meaning and find that deep design. Dawkins himself admits that the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the material world are part of matter’s meaning.

An example is a compact disc. It is possible to translate that into binary code, print it up as 1 and 0 on many reams of paper, so that they may fill a room. But is this the meaning of the matter?

Rather one should find the proper place to put a CD and listen to it. Then, if it is for example a piece of Bach, it may move the listener to tears. These are material tears, all part of the interaction with physical soundwaves translating electronic impulses. One need not rid oneself of the fullest scope of meaning by a fundamentalist materialism which is as brittle as fundamentalist religion.

And certainly it isn’t appropriate to castigate technology, matter, or observational science as lacking meaning. But neither is it necessary or desirable to purge musical, poetic, literary, or spiritual accomplishments from material science.

The meaning is in the process, and that process is holistic, inclusive and multi-layered.

At worst religion can be a vile, suppressing tendency (as can science!). At best, both can unveil a profound respect for matter and reason and give us a reason to respect matter.

Andrew Teal is Chaplain and teaches Early Christian History and Modern Systematic Theology. Recent publications includes a monograph on Athanasius, and From Nicaea to Chalcedon, with Frances Young, published in the UK, US, and in Russian translation as Ot Nikei do Khaldikona: vvedenie v grecheskuyu patristicheskuyu literaturu i eë istoricheskii kontekst (Moskva 2013).

Main image by Simon Thomson https://www.flickr.com/photos/simonthomson

NOT JUST 'ONE FOR THE BIRDS'

HOW MEMORY INFORMS OUR FUTURE

Nicola Clayton (1981) is Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Scientist in Residence with the dance company, Rambert, reflecting her two passions as a scientist and a dancer. After completing her PhD and subsequent postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford (JRF at Linacre College) she joined the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), becoming full Professor in just four years and later Chair of Animal Behaviour. She moved to the University of Cambridge in 2000 and became Reader in 2002 and Professor in 2005. Nicola was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2010. In tandem with this Nicola works with Clive Wilkins, who is a fine artist and writer, dancer and magician, and Artist in Residence in the Psychology department. Their collaboration, The Captured Thought, goes beyond the usual interdisciplinary channels, combining science with dance, literature and magic effects to demonstrate how past and future are inextricably conjoined in memory.

Can you explain how you came to your research and what it involves?

I’ve always been interested in birds and started out at Pembroke studying with Lord John Krebs, reading for a degree in Zoology, based at the Edward Gray Institute for Field Ornithology. I love the elegance of how birds move and THE PEMBROKIAN 8

think, their synchronicity and embodied cognition. This is for two reasons: first, I’m intrigued to know what it’s like to think without words, and secondly because birds have such different brains from ours. You could think of this as an alien form of intelligence because birds have a nucleated structure to their brain whereas our brains have the typical six-layered mammalian cortex. You can draw an analogy and say that if the brain is like a cake mix, the bird brain would look like a fruit cake whereas our brains would look like a six layered Austrian Sachertorte.

As an undergraduate I investigated how marsh tits remember. I was interested in whether memories were more accurate with fewer things to remember, so gave the birds a different number of seeds to hide and looked at how good they were at remembering where their seeds were. The idea was whether the notion of memory interference would mean it would be harder with more items. The analogy is a filing cabinet: if the cabinet is full, do the old things drop out as you put new things in and is it even possible for new ones to be stored in the first place given the old ones are taking up crucial space? So, my undergraduate research project was already at the interface between psychology and zoology.

My PhD still focused on birds, but now looking at how they learn their songs.

From there I went back to John Krebs’ lab as a post-doc to look at the development of memory in marsh tits. One of the main findings was to show that the hippocampus (the area of the brain so important to memory) is a little like a muscle – it’s a case of use it or lose it. We found that the birds that cache food had a much bigger hippocampus than the ones that didn’t, and we were able to show that the hippocampus grows in response to having

to remember. This was subsequently used by Eleanor Maguire now Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, who showed that there is a similar effect in humans, using the example of London taxi drivers learning their routes ('the Knowledge'). Much to my delight, that year I was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society.

The other thing I did at Oxford was compare birds that hide food with those that don’t and that’s really when I started to work with the corvids (jays). I was struck with how smart they seemed to be, and how they seemed to really look you in the eye and follow your movements. I got an intuitive sense then that there was a lot going on behind that beady eye and that they would be really good models for studying more complex things about memory, particularly cognition such as an awareness of times past and future, and the projection of self in time.

Western Scrub Jay by Chao PC

When I moved to UC Davis there were a lot of Western Scrub Jays on campus and I began to study their caching behaviour given they were also fellow corvids. I was intrigued by the fact that they hid perishable food as well as nuts. This led me into investigations which proved for the first time that animals (birds) have episodic memories; that they could remember time. Before then, people thought that episodic memory was unique to humans as only humans had need of it. The work with the jays showed they rely on memory when caching food, because perishable items decay, and decay at different rates depending on the type of food and the environment in which it is stored – worms rot quicker on a warm day in full sun as opposed to shady place a cool day.

From looking at time and the past, I became interested in future planning and was able to show through my work that the jays were able to think about the future and, crucially, to plan for it. In a series of papers published in Nature and Science I was able to demonstrate not only evidence of this but also that they display interest in the social side of things, and can keep track of other individuals. They actually go to great lengths to protect their caches and can recognise other specific birds and adjust their protection tactics accordingly.

So the research moved on from ‘what and when’ to ‘what, when and who’.

I’ve always been interested in birds and started out at Pembroke studying with Lord John Krebs, reading for a degree in Zoology, based at the Edward Gray Institute for Field Ornithology.

Doesn’t the fundamental difference in the brain structure make it hard to draw parallels?

Think about PCs and AppleMacs: both of them function, but differently. An expert wouldn’t want to rely only on how one or the other operates, and it’s a similar scenario with birds and humans.

For example, everything in bird world is speeded up. In fact, if you want to listen to birdsong properly, it is best to slow it down to half speed and then you can actually hear the notes. It’s the same with sight – birds see and hear things much faster than us and so process information much more quickly. Recent research, particularly by Erich Jarvis’ group at Duke University, is now revealing that despite the differences in architecture, bird and human brains are much more alike than we thought. Bird brains do have a cortex and the connections are similar to that of the mammalian brain.

Like with the AppleMac and the PC, they run on different interfaces but there is much convergence in the end pattern.

I realised that there was a conundrum: there are phenomenological aspects that I can’t study in birds but it would be silly to say if I can’t study them I should ignore them. I started to wonder if I could develop tests in humans, inspired by the caching and memory tests I had done with the birds. I wanted to discover whether or not children could ‘pass’ these sorts of tests at the same age that they pass other kinds of tests of episodic memory and future planning. Could the work from the birds inspire research on children and even adult humans? The results were positive, which doesn’t in itself prove that humans work in the same way as birds, but it’s certainly converging evidence to bear on the problem that would be consistent with that theory.

How do you get from the past (memory) to the future?

Well, we’ve done recent work, published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, thanks to a Mid-Career Experimental Psychology Prize, where we give adult humans menu choices (akin to the jays having to cache food and make choices of what they’re going to cache based on past experience). We find that people aren’t very good at planning ahead!

They’re overly influenced by their current state – the classic example is the pretty common knowledge that it’s a bad idea to go supermarket shopping when you’re THE PEMBROKIAN 9

Think about PCs and AppleMac’s: both of them function, but differently. An expert wouldn’t want to rely only on how one or the other operates, and it’s a similar scenario with birds and humans.

hungry. We found that people base their decisions for the future on their current state, even if they are aware that it will change in the future.

because the question then becomes whether we can do it because language in our story telling abilities enable us to then ‘tell’ the story with or without words.

As humans, when we talk about remembering the past, we are alluding to our awareness of the passage of time and a kind of fluid subjectivity. I love the TS Eliot quote from Burnt Norton, one of The Four Quartets

This led me to consider these connections in terms of tango and contemporary dance because they both illustrate aspects of the thinking processes. Contemporary dance is such a powerful medium for expressing quite abstract concepts and thoughts, and tango because of all the social connection it contains: you’re an animal with four legs and two beating hearts. The idea is that there is a leader and a follower, but after the first step you are moving as one: ‘engrossed in the flow, responsive only to the music and the mutual synchronicity of your heart beats’. The basic structure is very simple, based on walking backwards and forwards and to the side, and yet the nuances can be very complex. A bit like language in a way, as what gives language its complexity is not the number of words, but the recursive property, the fact that in a different order the words can mean something completely different, and the nuances can be used in such a way as to create those ambiguous moments, or those poetic expressions of something that capture more than a mere description. In my work, this arts/science collaboration is all about questioning what is it like to think without words, as well as with them, and how we can express wordless thoughts. Is it possible to think beyond words? Would understanding these constraints on our cognitive system allow us to see further, to plan better and remember differently?

“Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past.”

The whole idea that memory is present in time future and not time past is very pertinent. I believe that our ability to remember in this subjective way has probably arisen because memories are designed for the future and not for the past.

Most of the time when we talk about sharing our memories we mean episodic memories although of course we also create semantic memories which are made up of learned information (e.g. the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066). Our episodic memories are personal, subjective and these often consist of alternative realities. That is what makes them so good for scenario building – they’re for story-telling and thinking about the future. That’s not something I can easily test in the birds because we don’t have nonlinguistic agreed markers of these things, these phenomenological aspects of the conscious experience and thinking about the past and the future. How can we know in the absence of language? In principle this can be conveyed without words, which is precisely what interests me, and this is where dance and magic effects are so pertinent. Any form of visual or acoustic art give us examples of how we can capture thoughts wordlessly. Of course, that is far from saying therefore animals do that too, THE PEMBROKIAN 10

That’s why the artistic work I do with Clive Wilkins in our project, The Captured Thought, is attracting so much attention.

Clive is my tango partner, and in addition to being a fine artist and a writer, he is also a professional magician and a member of The Magic Circle. So our performances are

about asking whether there’s a capability to think beyond words through integrating arts, science, magic and tango – that seems like a strange combination but magic is actually very powerful! I’m coming to understand more about what magic tells us about psychology, and it is really exciting.

Surprisingly few psychologists have explored magic and yet it seems a very obvious tool to use if you’re interested in perception and memory, cognition and consciousness.

You know jolly well you can’t possibly have seen what you think you’ve seen and yet your mind is still tricked into believing that something happened that didn’t happen.

The effects reveal a lot about how we are so busy looking for what we expect to see that once we see a pattern we stop looking, because at that point we simply anticipate what we expect to see. That’s one of our constraints as humans in future-planning.

My next scientific projects, funded by the ERC and ESRC, are to investigate causal reasoning in adult humans and young children, and to see if there’s a way of translating this into tests for birds.

Memories are for the past, but they do not constitute an accurate record of what happened – not only are they subjective, but there is also an anomaly about time because we don’t actually play our memories backwards, we jump back to a point in time and then we play those memories forward again. We think the future will be more similar to the present than it ever is and as a consequence we’re not very good at making predictions. The White Queen in Alice in Wonderland shrewdly remarks “it’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”.

Our experiences tell us so much about the world but they also constrain us precisely because they interfere with our ability to see, to remember and to plan ahead.

FUTURE-PROOFING OUR RESEARCH LIBRARIES

by Dame Lynne Brindley, Master

digital technologies are disrupting society and economies on a global scale, so, too, are they speeding up opportunities for new knowledge creation and innovation, and providing unparalleled new avenues for scientific research that require massive datasets and responsible long term stewardship.

Historically, libraries have been the keepers of knowledge, safeguarding the records of civilisation, systematically ordering and structuring formal knowledge and preserving it over thousands of years.

They have had centuries of practice and remain committed to the preservation, codif ication a nd dissemination of knowledge, and to the importance of transmitting culture from the generations that have gone before to those that are still to come.

The concept of benign neglect has been a relatively effective policy for preserving materials of the papyrus and print eras.

Interventions have been carefully executed by conservation experts and sophisticated, large scale storage facilities, usually off– site, have slowed the deterioration of collections on a mass scale.

However, whilst the values and practices associated with great physical libraries remain today, the communications revolution requires libraries to think very differently about digital publishing, collecting and digital preser vation.

Paradoxically in this age of digital abundance it is harder, not easier, to secure knowledge for future generations. Just as

With the average life of a website some 44 to 100 days (a disputed figure, but in any case representing a very short and fragile life), concepts of comprehensive collecting or preservation are non-starters and archiving this data presents significant computer science challenges. The British Library’s first archival trawl of the .uk open web domain resulted in some one billion web pages for perpetual storage.

Furthermore, research libraries have always collected the personal, political, literary, and scientific ‘papers’ of famous individuals. Today these archives are dynamic; internet and multi-media focused – consider the archive of Tim Berners-Lee, Stephen Fry, Barak Obama, Carol Ann Duffy; they are all way beyond paper, with streams of emails, tweets, YouTube clips, broadcast television and radio, blogs, personal digital photographs and more.

Contemporaneous archiving is necessary, with preservation considerations beginning at the point of creation: sweeping up after death and delving in attics or suitcases is no longer realistic. What is required is a continuous partnership with living figures. And, of course, we are seeing individuals being their own living archive, recording instantaneously the main events of their own lives, through life-logging, ‘selfies’ and social media postings.

What knowledge libraries should be collecting and why, are more complex and ever-more vital questions to address. But how to choose? If there are lessons of history let me cite the British Library and its unrivalled newspaper and popular magazine collection housed in the North London suburbs at Colindale. Come the 21st century, in a very fragile state, the digitisation of millions of pages is underway, preserving this critical research resource – for social and cultural studies, medical and family history, travel, trade, and economic trends, to mention but a few. The new database itself (some 10 million digitised pages and growing fast towards 40 million pages) creates new knowledge to be mined and is, in its turn, creating new knowledge to be assimilated and preserved.

Of course we could simply leave it all to the commercial sector, or could we? Why have libraries when you can find everything on Google say many? But technologies and commercial companies come and go, and in fifty years it seems a fairly certain bet that Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and others will either have disappeared or seem as antiquated as the fax or telegram.

The academy, through its libraries and other knowledge agencies has as a core part of its enduring mission the vibrancy of research and scholarship. Future-proofing through knowledge preservation and access of our intellectual, scientific and cultural memory is the priceless cornerstone of a civilised and advancing future.

Further reading: Abby Smith Rumsey, When we are no more: how digital memory is shaping our future, Bloomsbury 2016 THE PEMBROKIAN 11

THE PEMBROKE POST-GRAD CHALLENGE OR ‘TREAT US TO YOUR TREATISE IN 250’ For this forward-looking edition of The Pembrokian we’ve challenged the five participants of our inaugural Graduate Research Fair, held in London last December, to ‘pitch’ their research to us – the challenge being to do so succinctly and engagingly in 250 words or less!

Academic Director, Nancy Braithwaite comments, “Perhaps the biggest change in Oxford in recent years has been the growth in the number of graduates in the university.

Nearly 40% of Pembroke’s student body now consists of graduates, and 45 of them have scholarships from the College.

They’re a vibrant, international group doing extraordinary things – from the six students studying for the Masters in Public Policy,

who are drawn from the world’s future public leaders, to the students studying for their doctorates in our scientific doctoral training centres, working at the cutting edge of science. And of course a number of them are former Pembroke undergraduates, inspired to continue their studies at their ‘old’ College. They enrich Pembroke enormously – from organising research sharing events to mentoring undergraduates; working with our own Fellows; helping with our access events; participating in our sports teams and building Pembroke as a strong academic community. Our graduates are the leaders of the future – not just in academe, but in all walks of life. We’re passionate about recruiting and supporting the best of them.

JONATHAN DOWNING (2009) Machines and Choices:

In a sea of choices what do we want?

DPhil student in the Engineering Department researching in the field of Machine Learning.

“Perhaps the biggest change in Oxford in recent years has been the growth in the number of graduates in the university" Academic Director, Nancy Braithwaite

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Online and in our working lives we are bombarded with an extraordinary number of choices: What movie to pick next on Netflix? How can I tune the many parameters of my client’s medical device? Given a user’s browsing history, what product will they most likely buy on a website? This information overload can be reduced by machine learning algorithms which are employed to learn what we like, namely ou r pr e f e r e nc e s , a nd m a k e recommendations for things we may like in a simple and natural way.

Instead of trying to rank many choices in one instance, the problem is broken down by presenting the user with a much smaller and manageable number of choices. More interestingly, predictions of user behaviour

can be made for choices that have never been presented or experienced by the user. Our current and future work revolves around developing more expressive models of human preferences and incorporating game theory in order to improve prediction ability and reduce the number of choices needed.

Excitingly, we are applying our preference learning models to Human-Agent Collectives (HACs). HACs are essentially humans and smart software (agents) engaged in flexible relationships in order to achieve both their individual and collective goals e.g. disaster response. For humans and agents to work most efficiently together they have to work to their collectives strengths and be mindful of their preferences, therefore it is important to create the correct incentives in order to make this happen.

CHRIS TERRY (2014) Modifying Networks – facing up to complexity in ecology Chris is a DPhil student in the Department of Zoology, part of the NERC Doctoral Training Program in Environmental Research.

FILIPPO CERVELLI (2012) Now is the Time!

The Vacuum of Immediacy in Contemporary Japanese Literature and Popular Culture.

Filippo came to Oxford in 2012 to sit for an MSt in Modern Japanese Literature, which has served as a basis to expand and build his current doctoral project.

Japanese literary critics have described the weakening of “pure” literature after the 1980s. However, their comments may be read as a suggestion to reconsider the value of literature and of cultural output(?) in the contemporary age. This study addresses such issues by investigating forms of literature and popular culture (manga and anime) produced in Japan between 1995 and 2015. As Art voices the suffering of the age, a wide analysis of the current artistic panorama in Japan becomes crucial to complement the investigation of an age often not considered as offering great room for humanistic academic research. From the analysis of contemporary Japanese works emerges an emphasis on immediacy, summarised by the phrase ima deshō, [Now is the time] originally introduced in 2009 by teacher-turned-celebrity Hayashi Osamu.

This expression captures an age where individuals only concentrate on what is immediately before them, and react to it through not deeply thought-out actions aiming to compensate for an ideological desert. By analysing contemporary writers, manga/anime, and other works, the dissertation investigates how various artists portray immediacy and reactions, or remedies, within this vacuum.

I study ecological systems, focusing on the consequences of the fact that relationships between species depend on the wider network of populations.

Standard representations of the interactions between predators and prey ignore the context-dependence of biological processes, and therefore potentially do not offer a good understanding of how ecosystems will respond to future disturbances. So far, my DPhil has focused on developing a framework to study how a third-party species affects the rate at which a predator consumes a prey, for example, setting out different (and sometimes opposing) ways to measure the ‘strength' of a modification of an interaction.

To develop the first detailed case study of these effects in a dynamic system, this summer I will be setting up caged communities of aphids and parasitoid wasps. These tiny wasps provide tidy study systems since they reproduce by laying their eggs inside aphids, eventually killing and ‘mummifying’ it. The number of killed aphids can be counted to give an accurate measure of the interactions between species in the system. I will be tracking their populations over several generations to gather the data to construct detailed quantitative models. Armed with this understanding of the system I will be able to determine how the interactions are dependent on the collection of species and how this is affecting the dynamics of the system.

In my final year I hope to develop simulations of much larger systems to see if any general principles can be determined.

VALERIA RUEDA Achieving the American Dream: Cultural Distance, Cultural Diversity, and Economic Performance Valeria is the Rokos Career Development Fellow in Economics and is managing the crowdsourcing project for INET’s (Institute for New Economic Thinking) at the James Martin School, Oxford “CoreEcon”, an open-source economics curriculum developed at Oxford, Sciences-Po, Santa Fe Institute, and UCL. Cultural differences can either be a barrier or a springboard for economic success.

Cultural similarities ease economic transactions, while cultural differences can act as a barrier to economic exchanges. For instance, trade might be easier in LatinAmerica than in South-Asia because all the countries share the same language. However, cultural differences can also be thought as a springboard for economic success. Difference can be a source of innovation when different skills complement one another.

As a result of large migration waves, the United States is a unique laboratory in which to study cultural differences in an institutionally unified area.

We show that the average relationship between cultural differences and income

varies depending on a number of factors like trust or xenophobia. Individuals from cultural backgrounds that are different to the average of the regions where they live will only succeed if the people around them are also more likely to be trusting or open to foreign cultures.

Economic integration within a society is the result of an interactive process. If inherited cultural distance can become an economic advantage, it will only be so in an environment that is open to such differences. Our results therefore give a more nuanced picture of how cultural differences interact with economic development. While recent literature has sometimes claimed that cultural differences hinder development, we show that this is only true in an environment with a persistent history of mistrust and aversion towards alterity.

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FLORIAN EGLOFF (2013) Cybersecurity and the Age of Privateering: a Historical Analogy Florian Egloff is a Clarendon Scholar and DPhil Candidate in Cyber Security at Oxford’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security and has a professional background working for the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and Banking.

Cyberspace is held mostly in private hands. Whilst states invest in building dedicated capabilities, other actors have found opportunities in exploiting the insecurity of cyberspace. Drawing on the historical analogy of security arrangements on the seas, the thesis conceptualizes actors according to their proximity to the state, and examines their overlapping

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Florian Egloff was recognised by the audience in London at the Graduate Research Fair last December, as giving the presentation with the most clarity, conviction and integrity. He was presented with a contribution towards his research. and conflicting interests. Similar to the development of navies in the context of mercantile companies, privateers, and pirates, state actors currently interact with security and ICT companies, state-affiliated hacker groups, and cyber criminals. Learning from history allows for a rich understanding of the forces giving rise to the multiplicity of actors shaping the security arrangements on the seas and to do the same in cyberspace.

First, actors in cyberspace have similar proximity to the state as the mercantile companies, pirates, and privateers did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Second, the levels of state capacity in

cybersecurity resemble the situation in the seventeenth century, when some states transitioned from the use of privateers to professional navies. Third, the analysis of the regime against privateering has shown that it can be traced back to unintended consequences of state-sponsored and statetolerated non-state violence, coupled with a growth of commercial opportunities for sailors. Similarly, in cyberspace one might expect unintended consequences to increase over time. Whether states will be able to coordinate their behaviour in order to control these unintended consequences, while preserving the positive effects of cyberspace, remains an open question.

STUDENT WITH A(P)TTITUDE!

AKEEL MALIK: ONE TO WATCH

Akeel Malik (2013) was born in Manchester and is currently in his final year studying Economics & Management at Pembroke.

Whilst at school, he started a successful social media marketing agency and has since cofounded an app called Ublend (ublend.co) with two other Oxford students. Ublend is an Education Network that currently has 20,000 users and stretches across 12 universities in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Switzerland and the United States. It was valued at £1.1 million in a recent seed round.

What inspired you to create Ublend?

My co-founders had studied at a host of other universities before coming to Oxford, and it became clear to us that there was a universal need for a platform that centralises the many opportunities available to students. Events such as speaker talks, sports fixtures, careers presentations, etc. are often organised by a variety of different societies and departments. Ublend aggregates these events in order to make them more accessible, and we have recently added some new features with the aim of creating the world’s first ‘education network’ to really help students make the most of their time at university.

How familiar were you with ‘the tech’, and how much of a challenge was mastering it?

I have no knowledge of coding other than some basic online courses! However, we were fortunate to find some really talented programmers who joined the team early and enabled us to create a functional product quickly, and continuously improve it. The real challenge was trying to understand the many different ways in which people use technology in daily life, and thinking about how best to engage them with the platform in order to grow the user base.

How familiar were you with online entrepreneurship?

I received a Pembroke travel grant in my first year to visit Stanford University and research the links between venture capital and student start-ups in Silicon Valley. It was a fantastic experience and I was lucky enough to communicate with a range of venture capital firms and also with Oxford alumnus Michael Moritz. In my second year, I organised a trip to Silicon Valley for a group of Oxford students and we visited over 20 tech companies in the space of ten days. We spent time at the big names like Google and Facebook, but the most interesting parts of the trip came from earlier stage companies such as Quid (quid.com) and Wickr (wickr.com).

Following the trip I was extremely fortunate to have dinner with PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, and a group of renowned Oxford-based Artificial Intelligence academics such as the philosopher Professor Nick Bostrom, in what will no doubt remain the most interesting dinner table discussion of my life.

Are there other areas which interest you?

With the support of the Pembroke Annual Fund, a friend and I launched the Pembroke Innovative Ventures & Technologies (PIVT) society and organised an event titled ‘Space: A new entrepreneurial frontier?’ The purpose was to draw attention to the growing amount of research and entrepreneurial activity in the UK that’s focused on the space sector, and encourage attendees to apply the same sense of excitement and endeavour that’s often associated with the ‘space race’ to their chosen area of focus (whether academic or commercial).

What’s next?

I have always had an interest in property development and real estate, and would like to explore the ways in which I can combine this, perhaps the most tangible asset class available, with the arguably quite intangible world of Silicon Valley tech.

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BETTERING THE ODDS

USING SCIENCE TO CHANGE THE FUTURE

Lizzie Stark came to Pembroke as a Visiting Student in 2001. Since returning to the US she has established a successful career as a narrative nonfiction author, as well as an expert on the subculture of live action roleplay (LARP). Following confirmation that she had inherited one ‘broken’ BRCA1 gene (meaning the mutated gene could not fulfil its normal function of preventing tumour formation, significantly raising her risk of developing breast cancer), she made the decision to undergo a preventive double mastectomy.

In 2014 Lizzie published the stunning and critically acclaimed book, Pandora’s DNA, which combines a medical history of breast cancer diagnoses and treatment with her own personal history of the many women in her family who developed the disease. It also describes the choices she and her family were able to make.

Is it always better to know?

When I took my BRCA test, the consent forms warned about “psychological side effects,” and I initially pooh-poohed them. What is a little mental pain compared to cancer death?

Unfortunately, the psychological side effects can be considerable. A 2014 study in Psychology Health & Medicine found the emotional impact of being a healthy woman diagnosed with a BRCA1/2 mutation was similar to that of patients diagnosed with cancer.

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That was certainly true of my own experience.

My mother developed cancer at 30 and again at 35, and my grandmother developed cancer three times, in her 30s, 40s, and 50s. They are far from the only cancer cases in my family.

When the doctors told me I shared the same BRCA1 genetic mutation that had caused their cancers, I felt as though I had received a death sentence rendered in slow-mo. Though I was physically healthy when I received the results, I felt devastated. But once it was clear that we shared the same genetic mutation, I was able to do something about my risk, which was a huge relief.

What was the overriding impetus: fear or pragmatism – or can they not be split?

Fear and pragmatism are connected, because it’s terrible to live in constant fear. I think of my fear as rather like a medical symptom. With my family history, it was natural and completely rational to fear cancer. And there was a pragmatic decision—preventative surgery— that could remove some of that fear by reducing my risk of developing breast cancer by about 90 percent.

Are heart and head level on this? Your book is vivid with emotion. Is this how you make sense of your situation?

So often, the language used to convey medical information is eye-rendingly dull. My background is in journalism, but I crunched my medical research onto the page using a technique I picked up while reading critical theory at Pembroke: let the strange diction wash over you for a while until the words start making contextual sense. Then I translated it into plain language. However, I didn’t want anyone reading my book to have to use this approach! Boring the reader is the cardinal sin of narrative, so I tried very hard to bring liveliness to every possible line in the book. I left in accounts of my favourite grisly medical procedures, and omitted everything that put me to sleep.

Humans have always made tough choices vital to survival. In the past, these decisions were even more brutal. People will do almost anything, no matter how painful and terrible, if they think it will save their lives.

As a feminist, I insist that my emotions are part of who I am as a human who happens to also be a patient. Cancer scares most people.

And that fear has real-life consequences when it comes to care—whether it’s the man who delays a colonoscopy out of fear of the results or a woman whose ambiguous mammography results scare her away from cancer screening permanently. Better to be upfront about that fear rather than let those emotions secretly dictate treatment that might not be to a patient’s long-term benefit.

These are the early days of the application of our knowledge on gene/genomes; what may the future hold and what was your experience as an early adopter?

Inherited mutations on BRCA1/BRCA2 only account for about 25% of inherited breast cancer cases. That means that there are loads more genetic links waiting to be discovered— and not only for breast cancer! In the coming years we’ll learn how many more genes influence risk of disease from asthma to

Fear and pragmatism are connected, because it’s terrible to live in constant fear. I think of my fear as rather like a medical symptom.

Alzheimer’s. Whether and how this will impact care remains to be seen, but unlocking the genome also has the potential to revolutionize treatment of some diseases, including cancer.

I asked for mammograms and ultrasounds.

Never mind that the treatment protocol I was requesting had been devised by BRCA experts from a coalition of several dozen of the world’s leading cancer centres.

Here’s how it works: cancer boils down to genetic alterations. When a critical gene or set of genes in a cell gets screwed up (by heredity, environmental exposure, aging, etc.), unchecked cell growth—cancer—can result.

By studying the difference between the screwed-up DNA of a tumour and the normal DNA in the rest of a patient’s body, doctors can identify which genes drive and sustain tumour growth in a particular patient, and potentially target treatment, not just to the cancer, but to the particular strain of cancer in a particular patient. The field is in its early stages, but I’m watching it with anticipation.

When I went to BRCA specialists, they were used to mutants like me—I didn’t have to whip out a stack of peer-reviewed medical papers to get the standard of care.

Early adopters should go to a specialist if they are able, because society and medical establishments are set up for the “average” patient. When you go to a specialist, it’s much more likely that t hei r “aver a g e” patient will resemble you. The medical science on cancer risk and BRCA1 shows that before my mastectomy, my lifetime risk of developing both breast (55–65%) and ovarian cancer (39%) was extraordinarily high. Despite this, ordinary medical facilities insisted on treating the 27-yearold me as a crazy hypochondriac when

What are your thoughts on other elective surgeries?

While I understand that medically, my mastectomy was considered “elective,” it felt essential to my continued health and wellbeing. Living with the knowledge that I had a better than fifty percent chance of developing the same disease that killed or maimed my mother, grandmother, and great aunts was basically hell on earth. My basic attitude is that it’s your body and you’re in control of what you do with it. Every surgery comes with

its own risks and pay-offs, and whether it’s ‘worth it’ for you will depend on your unique life situation.

People are wary of ‘meddling’ with our genes through genetic testing and gene therapy. Is there a line and if so, where?

Depends on what you mean by “gene therapy.”

For example, the discussions around embryos being screened for genetics prior to IVF implantation have been debated by bioethicists for some time: I believe the current consensus is that it’s one thing to correct a defect to spare a baby future pain, but quite another to enhance a human being: ensuring that a baby isn’t born with a serious spinal problem that will kill them soon after birth is probably OK, but making sure your baby has athletic ability is a greyer area.

These lines get muddled rather quickly depending when you try to define “future pain.” Some scholars have argued that embryo selection constitutes discrimination against the sick and disabled, and that it could lead to a human population that is less diverse.

There’s also the medical concern that we don’t know how genes interact fully enough, and that manipulating the human genome on an embryonic level could cause unintended consequences generations down the line.

On the other hand, “gene therapy” is sometimes used to describe the burgeoning field of immunotherapy, which uses viruses to hack your immune system so it can recognize and attack cancer cells. I think that sounds pretty awesome.

What about the legal situation regarding the information we now have access to through an increased understanding of our make-up?

Everyone has their own genetic susceptibilities hidden in their DNA, so we all have a vested interest in preventing the abuse of genetic

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Lizzy at Pembroke

information. In the US it’s illegal for employers to discriminate based on that information since the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) became law in 2008.

Then there’s gene patenting. In my book I discuss Myriad Genetics, which operated on a service monopoly model in the US. They took out numerous patents pertaining to the BRCA1/2 genes, including patents on the genetic sequences as they appear in every human body. As a result, if you wanted to know whether you had a BRCA1/2 mutation, they were the only option available.

In a landmark decision in 2013, the US Supreme Court ruled that human genes may not be patented, even when isolated from the rest of a person’s genome. Essentially, this means that Myriad can no longer be the sole provider of genetic tests for BRCA1/2 in the US. It will also make whole-genome sequencing cheaper, as paying even a small royalty on every gene in your body would produce a test that was prohibitively expensive.

Does it make you feel more in control of your body? And, therefore, your personal future?

Since I was raised by feminist parents, I’ve always known that I’m in control of my body, despite what my culture would sometimes have me believe. My preventive double THE PEMBROKIAN 18

mastectomy at age 28 was an expression of this control, rather than a revelation of it.

In removing my healthy breasts, I’ve reduced my personal risk of breast cancer by about 90 percent and added something like three to five years to my life expectancy.

The key word in that last sentence is “reduced.” No surgeon can remove 100 percent of breast tissue, so I still do bear some risk. With my ovaries intact, my high risk of developing ovarian cancer remains.

Ovarian cancer is a lethal disease that kills more than half of women diagnosed with it within five years. So, I’ve bettered my odds but I cannot control what happens in the future.

Any regrets?

Sure—tons. I wish I’d eaten lamb testicles when I had the chance while on holiday in Greece, that I wasn’t so mean to Lisa C. in fifth grade, and that I’d written more holiday thank-you notes to my grandmother. But about the surgery? No.

Since I was raised by feminist parents, I’ve always known that I’m in control of my body, despite what my culture would sometimes have me believe.

My preventive double mastectomy at age 28 was an expression of this control, rather than a revelation of it.

TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY AND ANCIENT WISDOM

by Emmett Fitzgerald (1996)

Emmett spent over two years in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, first as the camp manager coordinating all essential services and later as policy advisor to the Government of Haiti. For 18 months, he managed the design, fundraising and implementation of a $70 million re-housing program and coordinated a multi-agency effort assisting people to leave the camps and find safe homes.

Following his degree in Theology, Emmett received a Fulbright scholarship to attend Columbia University, where he earned a Master's degree in International Affairs.

Emmett started working as a management consultant for Deloitte but moved to humanitarian work in 2005, running emergency health care programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has been involved in humanitarian relief for over ten years.

As a global society, we rely on 450,000 aid workers to bring security, comfort and basic services to millions of people affected around the world by humanitarian emergencies. Humanitarian aid workers often operate in the same theatres as the military, but they do not receive even a fraction of the protection, training or support. Working in countries affected by war and natural disasters is inherently s t re s sf u l, but t he p s yc holog ic a l consequences are exacerbated by the lack of training before, during and after deployment. As a result, according to a survey in The Guardian last year, 79% of aid workers suffer from PTSD, depression, anxiety and other mental health issues.

The mission of the CBR Project is to improve the lives of millions of disasteraffected people around the world by reducing the costs and improving the quality of care delivered by humanitarian aid workers. We help aid workers to combat the physical and psychological

In 2014, following a period of profound burnout, Emmett first experienced the Contemplative-Based Resilience (CBR) Project as a beneficiary. He directly credits them with giving him the tools, skills and resilience to return to humanitarian relief work with the UN in response to the Nepal earthquake in 2015. Ultimately, Emmett took over leadership of the CBR Project because of his passionate belief that more relief workers need to benefit from the training, skills and support that he received. effects of the chronic stress they experience in conflict zones and natural disaster situations.

I knew I needed help when I had been back from working in Haiti for over 18 months and was still in bad shape: anxiety, sleeplessness, horrible panic attacks – I had the symptoms of PTSD but wouldn’t admit to it. When a friend suggested I try the CBR training course in 2014. I had never tried meditation and had done yoga only a handful of times, so I was skeptical that four days of sitting with my legs crossed was going to achieve anything more than cramp.

Working with a psychologist, sharing stories with peers, being taught simple breathing techniques and yoga – its sounds so simple, but the four days I spent with the CBR Project were transformative. A few weeks later I went back to full time work for the first time in over a year.

From 2004–2014, the number of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world almost doubled to 80 million as a consequence of more protracted conflicts and an extraordinary increase in natural disasters linked to climate change. (Source: UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) Experienced aid workers are in short supply and therefore cycle endlessly from one conflict or disaster to the next, often without stopping to pause and digest their experiences. Meanwhile, at the other end of the career cycle, new staff are being rushed untrained and under-prepared into complex emergencies. Unsurprisingly, a world-renowned medical aid organization has privately reported that a third of all staff drop out after just one assignment, creating huge recruitment costs. In fact, the failure to adequately prepare and support staff has enormous negative consequences at three levels: • Individua l relief workers suffer increased trauma, perform under their potential and leave jobs earlier.

• Relief organizations operate less efficiently, with higher costs for insurance and medical care, and high sta f f turnover c ausing loss of institutional knowledge and higher recruitment costs.

• Populations in need receive a lower quality of care from agencies with high staff turnover and relief workers who are less experienced, under-trained and over-stressed.

Arguably, the greatest threat to the humanitarian aid industry’s future is a failure to address a crisis of mental health among its staff and therefore a failure to evolve and professionalize in a manner which will give confidence to donors.

Despite an increase in humanitarian needs around the world, donations to charitable causes have been stagnant since the financial crisis and have not risen in line with the economic recovery. The aid THE PEMBROKIAN 19

industry needs to do more with less resource over the coming years, and cannot continue to waste money on recruitment and/or fail to keep the most experienced, talented staff from becoming gradually less effective or quitting the industry.

Tents, tarps, vaccines, water treatment kits, clothing, latrines… there are a hundred goods and services people may need in a crisis. But, no matter what humanitarian cause or agency we choose to donate to, the success of every relief program always comes down to the same thing – is there a team of effective aid workers on the frontlines making the right decisions under pressure?

When we donate to charitable causes, we hope that those working on the front lines do their job with a sense of equity and humanity, and so many of them do. Aid workers witness and work through scenes which many of us find difficult even to watch in news reports, from bodies lying for weeks in rubble, to public panic and anger during epidemics, or mothers holding malnourished children in underresourced health centres.

Working in these environments has significant psychological impact and we need to recognise that this will inevitably affect the quality of the assistance delivered.

The training programs provide knowledge, tools and peer support through immersive group training sessions designed by worldwide leaders in the f ields of psychology, trauma, meditation and somatic therapy. We integrate three tools – psychological education, yoga and meditation – to achieve the ABC of resilience: awareness, ba lance and connection.

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Additionally, technology has, over the past six months, become central to the CBR Project’s approach as we prepare to move to far greater scale and develop new products and services beyond residential training programs. To achieve wider access and provide lower-cost services, the CBR Project business model now includes a bespoke mobile app which was developed in partnership with a leading private sector provider of mindfulness in the workplace.

We hope this will help put the CBR Project’s cutting-edge curriculum on a large-scale platform. Aid workers can now access written material, audio and videos of the course materials from anywhere in the world and the Beta version of the app is being tested by aid workers from Nepal to South Sudan and Turkey.

This is not the only significant advance that the project has made. One of the initial challenges for the CBR Project was its place at the intersection of two sources of stigma in our society: mental health and meditation.

It is encouraging that the societal conversation around mental health has moved on enormously in the last decade, and the issues of stigma are discernibly shifting.

Psychological stress, and the disorders that accompany it, are widely recognized as major contributors to absenteeism, high staff turnover, low morale and reduced productivity at work. Stress has also been shown to significantly impair memory and the ability to learn.

At the same time, the rising awareness of benefits of yoga has created a billion dollar industry and concurrently, huge numbers of clinical research studies on meditation have shown improved productivity, creative thinking, and health outcomes. As a result, meditation is now routinely used by leading businesses across the tech,

insurance, finance, and medical industries.

US Insurance giant Aetna made meditation and yoga programmess available to their staff and saw an eleven to one return on investment through raised efficiency and lower health care costs. The pilot with staff was so successful that they now incentivise meditation and yoga to customers by offering lower premiums. In fact, the entire concept of the CBR Project follows examples of the private sector where the benefits are already clear.

Looking to the future, over the next five years the CBR Project’s milestones for growth focus on expanding access to services so that thousands more aid workers will have access to the psychological support they need. In 2016 there are training programs planned in Turkey for those dealing with the Syrian migration crisis, and programs in West Africa to help medical staff and volunteers cope with the extraordinary psychological legacy of the Ebola epidemic.

In parallel with rolling out the app, research and advocacy around these issues will be a focus as the CBR Project looks to play a central role in shifting attitudes and practice for the entire industry.

As much as possible, the CBR project seeks to be a free resource to relief workers and is currently reliant upon the generosity of private donors.

They are seeking supporters who recognise the vision and are willing to help the programme secure longerterm government and large foundation funding. For more inforamtion, visit the online fundraising website: www.changingaidwork.org

AQ UI N 1868 1728 1623

If THOMAS BROWNE (1623) had not written Religio Medici we may have been spared endless soul-searching. He influenced not only prominent physician William Osler (‘founder’ of modern medicine) but also Carl Jung. However, ultimately he must also bear responsibility for the ‘Misery Memoir’ genre

ON TI VA

C

RY OF A N IN E T NO N E

In 1728 SAMUEL JOHNSON came up to Pembroke. The ultimate wordsmith, he single-handedly wrote a comprehensive English Dictionary and changed the way in which we document language (and also inspired a much-loved episode of Blackadder, featuring Robbie Coltrane as the somewhat irascible lexicographer!)

1942

Although FREDERICK JOHN JERVIS SMITH (1868) achieved only a ‘pass’ in Classics from Pembroke, once he discovered his passion in the Physics Lab he went on to become a most prolific inventor. Amongst his many patented inventions was the Tram Chronograph and, of its myriad uses, perhaps the most ‘future changing’ was when it was used to record the speed of a “furiously driven” horse-drawn butcher’s van in the High Street. The chronograph demonstrated that the van had been travelling at an “excessive” twelve miles per hour and thus the first recorded instance of the universally-feared speed trap.

Without GORDON LEWIS (1942) aeronautics may have been destined to a slow take-off. His ground-breaking work in aeronautical engineering led to the development of the Harrier Jump Jet, marked out by its vertical take-off which. In turn, this led to the development of Concorde and a now bygone (*sadface*) era of high-speed luxury travel.

2000'S

Fear not for the future!

We’re only 16 years into the 21st Century, plenty of time for any of our alumni to make their mark!

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THOMAS CLAYTON First Master and Forward Thinker

by Laura Cracknell, College Librarian

BENEDICTA NORELL (BLANQUET, 1989)

Locked away in the McGowin Library stack is a collection of manuscripts that were almost certainly donated by one of the most important figures in Pembroke's history. We cannot say more than 'almost certainly', as so few records remain of Thomas Clayton, last Principal of Broadgates, first Master of Pembroke, Regius Professor of Medicine, and Co-founder of what is now the Oxford Botanical Gardens.

There is no entry in The Dictionary of National Biography, and when he does feature in books and articles, it is usually in relation to his most famous pupil, Sir Thomas Browne.

Yet in his day, Clayton was not only lauded as a great doctor, but as a man of influence on the very way medicine was practiced. His lectures are referenced in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, where he is said to have reminded his listeners that divinity and medicine are two ways of achieving the same end: that of healing, one of the spirit and the other of the soul. This view that body and soul must both be addressed if a person is to become well is something that Thomas Browne would later take up, but arguably originated with Clayton.

Clayton's forward thinking was recognised through his appointment as the Tomlins Lecturer in Anatomy, a post he may well have been instrumental in creating, and which played a part in the University's programme of updating its medical curriculum in the seventeenth century. He was also one of the founders of the 'physic garden', which would later become Oxford's Botanical Gardens, one of the first of its kind in the country. Through this, and his associations with the leading intellectuals of the day we can surmise that Pembroke under his leadership was a forward-thinking and exciting place to study.

Further evidence of this can be gleaned from considering his collection of manuscripts, THE PEMBROKIAN 22

some donated to the Bodleian, others left to Pembroke. They reflect a broad interest: botanical texts, herbals, and the key medieval texts, including Rhazes and Avicenna. In Pembroke's collection, one manuscript (MS8) contains The Therapeutica of Alexander Trallianus, a wide-ranging work on diseases and their treatments. Six more manuscript books contain collections of texts, with manuscripts on different subjects and from different periods bound together apparently by size rather than topic. This can make them difficult to navigate through, as multiple copies of the same text are found in different books, but worthwhile with lists of important herbs to be found alongside ink recipes.

Taken as a whole, the collection represents a snapshot of the medieval medical canon as it was known at the time.

Alongside this collection, the Library also owns one of only two complete copies of

Clayton was not only lauded as a great doctor, but as a man of influence on the very way medicine was practiced.

The Breviarum Bartholomei, a key medical text of the medieval age, also assumed to have belonged to Clayton. (At some point it seems to have been lent to the antiquarian Brian Twyne who was at Corpus Christi College. We assume this, because it was returned with marginal notes – it seems that the phenomenon of scholars writing in loaned books is nothing new!)

The author of The Breviarum, John of Mirfield, seems to have been connected to the Priory and Hospital at St Bartholemew's in London, and his book makes no claims to originality but collects together much of the practical medical knowledge of his day

(around the fourteenth century). Its early date and its demonstration of the medical knowledge of the time give it significant historical interest. Despite this, very little is known about the author himself, but he seems to have had access to a wide range of earlier medical texts and his main concern was practice, not theory. There is little anatomy in the texts, and even less the examination of the causes of the illnesses this book was intended to diagnose. On the other hand, the lists of symptoms and remedies are extensive, and our manuscript includes a final quid pro quo section in which the author helpfully indicates which medicines and herbs are suitable substitutes for each other. In addition to the main text – the other copy of which is in the British Library – Pembroke's copy contains further unique material, The Sinonoma Bartholmei, which acts as a glossary for the main text and which was published by a Pembroke Fellow, JLG Mowat, in the Nineteenth Century.

There is a very fine page at the start of The Breviarum with an illustration of St John the Baptist and the arms of the Abbey at Abingdon (left). This itself is of interest, as an Abbey might be expected to have John of Mirfield's other major work, The Florarium Bartholomei, a religious work, rather than this wholly medical text. Why and how they came to own the medical version is a mystery we will probably never unravel.

Whilst we are fairly sure Clayton owned the Breviarum along with the rest of the texts, this is mostly an educated guess: we know that Clayton donated a large number of books to the College Library and we know that the manuscripts themselves were bound together in the mid-Seventeenth Century (around the time of Clayton's death). Given their subjects, and the similar donations to the Bodleian of

medical manuscripts, assuming that they were originally in the possession of the first Master seems both logical and reasonable.

However, there is no inscription, and no donors book to tell us where they came from.

The texts are not organised within their bindings. One – MS21 – spans the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries in 23 different texts!

The attempts of later generations to repair the bindings coupled with the nature of the bindings themselves made them very difficult to open and read without risking permanent damage. The Library was therefore very grateful for the funding from the Wellcome Trust two years ago which enabled us to digitise and conserve these important texts.

Most importantly, it has allowed them to be read in much greater detail than previously possible via our Digital Collections website.

As these texts are known in other copies, having online versions enables medical scholars to compare versions from multiple countries, potentially tracing the movement of scholars and knowledge around medieval Europe.

Recently, Professor Monica Green, of Arizona State University, found that MS10 contains part of a work that was presumed lost since the eleventh century, a discovery made using her own photographs and confirmed through our new high-resolution images. So, it seems that Pembroke's manuscripts still have things to teach us, and as we continue to explore and open up the collection to a wider audience, who knows what else we will find? It seems safe to assume that Thomas Clayton, living at a time of change and discovery within the world of medicine, would approve.

To see Pembroke's medical manuscripts online, please go to http://digitalcollections.pmb.ox.ac.uk To read Monica Green's article on her discovery in MS10, see http://www.pmb.ox.ac.uk/Green THE PEMBROKIAN 23

EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS and how a ‘thingy’ proved that computers aren’t as clever as we may fear

“Looking up when I was a kid” inspired Becky Smethurst (2013) to study astronomy and she has quickly become ‘one to watch’ in her field of Astrophysics – both for the quality of her research and her ability to engage the public with the wonders of the Universe surrounding us– no mean feat! Becky has been heavily involved in Galaxy Zoo, a project involved in combining public engagement with academic research and, for this future-looking edition of The Pembrokian, we caught up with Becky in Farthings Café to learn more.

In 2007, before I started as a graduate student, there were about a million images of galaxies that needed classifying and Galaxy Zoo was set up in an effort to classify the shapes of these galaxies and give scientists critical insight into how they had evolved. It was already well established that spiral galaxies could merge together and form ‘blob’ shapes, but more detail on the number of spirals and the number of ‘blobs’ (elliptical galaxies) formed was needed to help determine the evolutionary pathways taken by the universe.

Astronomers and astrophysicists couldn’t just use computers to ‘read’ these images because computers can only spot what they’re trained to spot – they miss the things we don’t know about, the ‘unknown unknowns’.

Hanny's Voorwep (credit NASA Sloan Digital Sky Survey)

THE PEMBROKIAN 24

For example, if there’s an image of a spiral galaxy to be categorised you could programme the computer to recognise a two-armed spiral (a dense core with two spiral arms coming out of it) but say the image was slightly irregular – one of the arms was protruding further than the other, or there was a third ‘arm’ just slightly visible – a computer would miss these, or any other deviation from the norm.

One of my favourite examples of this involves a Dutch school teacher, Hanny van Arkel.

She was classifying a galaxy, which had already been seen by five or six people before her, and asked about a strange green ‘fuzz’ she had noticed elsewhere on the image. It could have been anything – a fingerprint, or even something which had gone wrong in the image reduction process – but she was curious enough to ask and when the science team couldn’t explain it, the troops were called in! Everyone observing over the next couple of weeks was asked if they had time to look at this strange object.

No matter how much data is produced, and no matter how much we feed back to train the computers to greater levels of accuracy, humans will always be the key players because there are always going to be those unknown unknowns.

Galaxy (credit NASA Hubble Space Telescope) First of all, we had to figure out if it was real, and what distance it was at. To do this, we got a spectrum of the galaxy, which is where we split the light into individual wavelengths or colours (think the front cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album). With that we could tell it was real and was also at the same distance as the galaxy Hanny was classifying.

Moreover, we could also tell what this weird ‘fuzz’ was made of, because certain elements emit light at a very specific wavelength (or colour). We saw there was lots of oxygen and it takes a lot of energy to make oxygen give off that much light.

The story we ended up piecing together was that another neighbouring galaxy had been torn apart by gravity as it had passed, and had streamed out its gas and stars. The energy in this huge interaction then triggered a black hole at the centre of the big galaxy, throwing off huge jets which collided with the remanent stream of the small galaxy: the energy from the black hole sparked this huge reaction of star formation and activity and allowed the fuzz to glow brightly enough for Hanny to spot it. Astronomers didn’t know at this point that such a thing was possible – it had never been seen before. Once it was found users knew what to look for and found 30 or so more. A computer however, would never pick something like this up, it would have ignored everything but the galaxy in the centre of the image which it had been programmed to assess.

this because everyone loves space, right? It’s cool, it’s awesome and putting these pictures online and inviting the public to help out gave people a unique opportunity to see images and spot things never seen before.

Importantly, it offered people a chance to get involved and genuinely aid scientific research!

A lot of people are enthusiastic about space, but either don’t or aren’t able to pursue a career in science – now they’re given a chance to log in and help out. I published a paper last year where, in addition to my name and my co-authors, public classifiers of Galaxy Zoo were all credited via a webpage– it’s great to think there could be a ten year old out there, who wants a career in astronomy and already has his or her first academic credit.

and no matter how much we feed back to train the computers to greater levels of accuracy, humans will always be the key players because there are always going to be those unknown unknowns.

So, it’s exactly this kind of thing that we need humans for – we need them to be curious when they’re looking at the data. Once we have the user classifications (that set of millions of images classified to an accuracy of 97%) the information gleaned can be fed back to the computers and they in turn will ‘learn’ from that. What we’re finding from the computer scientists on the project is that no matter how much data is produced,

Human evolution has been driven by curiosity: ‘what’s over that hill?’, ‘what’s beyond that sea’ and, of course, ‘what’s that in the sky?’ It’s fantastic to think that there are so many people in Oxford satisfying human curiosity. There’s a load of great science happening and a lot of that is based on knowing that there are still ‘unknowables’ out there just waiting to be discovered".

Now Galaxy Zoo has spawned The Zooniverse – a ‘people-powered’ research site – which is responsible for all sorts of data classifications – from moon craters to the sea floor, animals in the Serengeti and even transcribing documents written

by Shakespeare’s contemporaries which not only further our understanding of Elizabethan England, but also adds to our knowledge of the evolution of our language – pretty cool!

In her question to the forum, Hanny referred to the green fuzz as a “voorwep” which is the Dutch word for ‘thingy’ and now Voorwep is the actual astronomical term of reference for these phenomena!

It is these strange and interesting things which lead to the revolutionary discoveries.

Galaxy Zoo was created to allow the public to help out and there was a huge appetite for

Becky observing at the CSO telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii THE PEMBROKIAN 25

NEWS,VIEWS, SCHMOOZE...

This page is for alumni to share their news and update us on their whereabouts and life events. Further, if anyone is interested in promoting their business here, by offering exclusive alumni discounts, we welcome all contributions.

Please contact Sophie Elkan in the Development Office

If you aren’t yet following us on Twitter: (@PembrokeOxford) then please do! Plus who knows who you may find following Pembroke?

THE PEMBROKIAN 26

I have a new life to report: last year I was appointed the Executive Director of the Bhutan Canada Foundation. We send teachers of English, Science and Maths to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. By strange coincidence, last Spring, as I was leading a group of ten worthies on a tour of our schools in Bhutan, one of our group, Stephen Ader (1963) and I realized that we had both attended Pembroke. My group also included the Master of Pembroke, Cambridge and another Cantabridgian. We reconceived Boat race rivalry as we white-water rafted in separate boats down the Pho Chhu river. Oxford won.

Three contenders for the most Pembroke photo ever:

Andrea Geddes Poole (1981)

@PembrokeOxford

Matthew Clayton-Stead (1999) Matthew sent this beautiful picture of Alexander George Frederick ClaytonStead ,born on 16 September 2015 to Matthew ClaytonStead (1999) and Claire Clayton-Stead (nee Smith) (2002) on his first visit to Pembroke this May. James Hyndman (1981): My partner, Natilija Jasic, is an artist from Serbia, and she was so enraptured by those Oxford Blue, grey and man-pink stripes that she's Pembrokized my garden shed and furniture with the same colours.

Not satisfied with this, she then tiled the roof with laminated covers and some pages from back issues from The Pembrokian and The Pembroke Record!

Richard Hoyle (1994) Richard is pictured here at the Christening of his baby boy in Pembroke’s Damon Wells Chapel. Richard and Alexandra chose Aruna Karunathilake and Lorenz Oesterreich (both 1994) to act as god-fathers to baby Henry Pembroke Hoyle, or 'Pem', as he is known.

60 SECONDS WITH...

RICHARD DARBOURNE (2000) Richard Darbourne (2000) followed a Theology degree with three years working for the Swire Group in Asia. On returning to the UK he quickly established himself as an award-winning Producer. He currently produces the West End hit revival of Guys and Dolls (nominated for six Olivier Awards this year), working with fellow Pembrokians Charlie Parsons (1976) and Michael Lynas (1975). Forthcoming productions include Avenue Q, Sunny Afternoon, Legally Blonde and Pride and Prejudice.

Classic or Contemporary?

Classic...I was a bit of a novice to the classical world and the first play I produced was a new translation of Hippolytus by Timberlake Wer tenbaker. Those speeches from Theseus about the human condition are absolutely incredible. Well worth reading.

Pick a mask…

The smiling one Educate or Entertain?

Hard one but ultimately theatre has to enter tain.

West End or Broadway?

Broadway still takes the bold risks of new musicals and fresh scores in the way our venues don't dare at the moment. So I'd say Broadway.

Olympic ‘Gold’en moment?

The first medal ceremonies I ran were in the Weightlifting at the London 2012 Olympics and were the most intense 10 minute periods ever. The simplest thing of putting a silver flag first followed by a gold followed by a bronze and saying 'Yes, GO!' shook the nerves like nothing else. The two volleyball finals will stay with me as well.

The difference between a beaten silver medal team and a triumphant gold one is prett y striking and getting either to be in the right place at the right time was near impossible.

The boat is rocking. Do you a) sit down or b) call on Lady Luck?

Hopefully sit down right in the firing line of Lady Luck.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

With such a wealth of successful, informed, expert Alumni, we dedicate the back page to an expert recommendation, between friends...

The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars by Steven Brust is a slim volume, which, so far as I know, did not make any of the bestseller lists when it emerged in 1987. It has now far outlasted critic Cyril Connolly’s ten-year test for immortality, however, having remained in print since that first edition to become something of a cult classic among writers of science fiction and fantasy.

Will Badger (2011) holds an MFA in Fiction from NC State University and an MSt in English Literature from Pembroke College, Oxford. He is currently Browning Senior Scholar in English at Pembroke, exploring representations of witchcraft in the plays of Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists.

Will has contributed significantly to the culture of the College in recent years, cofounding the annual JRR Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature and, more recently, has been working with the Tolkien Estate to establish a permanent memorial to Tolkien in College. He is currently involved with The Oxford Techno-Creativity Research Network (OxTRN), exploring the human-artefact interface and its impact on the telling of tales.

It is a book about writing, and about creation generally, a book which braids together two narratives. The outer tells the story of painter Greg Korvacs, an American of Hungarian descent (like Brust himself ), who does painterly things: he works in his studio, mostly on a massive new painting of Apollo, Artemis, and Uranus – the sun, moon, and stars; he spends time with his girlfriend as they negotiate their connections to each other and to art; and he interacts with a group of fellow artists, giving and receiving criticism. As he works on the new canvas, Greg tries to bring his process into focus for himself and the reader, and he seeks to understand what it means to be an artist and how that mantle is related to the act of creation.

in outsmarting the bumbling ministers of the King certainly have parallels to Greg’s solutions to problems that arise in the course of attacking the canvas; setbacks mirror each other as well. Perhaps that is why this book has lasted: in its linked magical and realist tales, it captures the rhythms of creation across media, not only the rushing floods of inspiration but also the recalcitrant eddies and false channels. I find myself returning to the book again and again, and I recommend it highly not only to lovers of fantasy, but to creators of all stripes, from visual artists to scientists.

Meanwhile the inner narrative is Greg’s retelling of the Hungarian folktale of the book’s title. It literally begins with ‘Once upon a time’. This story is about Csucskari the taltos, a Hungarian shaman and trickster figure, who relies on his wits to overcome malevolent monsters, make off with the sun, moon, and stars, and set them safely in the sky.

It is not always obvious what the sections of folktale have to do with the mimetic, outer story that surrounds them; it is certainly nothing so straightforward as allegory. I find it useful to think of the narratives as changing each other simply by being brought into a relationship and considered together.

Csucskari’s resourcefulness and creativity

THE PEMBROKIAN 27

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