Research Talks
All members of Darwin are encouraged to present their research at informal seminars held on Tuesdays and Thursdays during term. Everyone is welcome, whatever your degree or discipline.
Darwin members pick up lunch from 12:00, taking it into the Richard King Room (on the left at the top of the stairs leading to the dining hall) or 1 Newnham Terrace (straight through at the far end of the dining hall). Wine is served. Non-Darwin members are welcome to attend, although lunch is only available to guests of members. The talk begins at about 1:15 and lasts for about 20 minutes and is followed by questions over coffee. We adjourn at 2:00pm at the latest.
Upcoming Talks
In this talk, I explore quarantining as a more ethical method for delimiting the spread of Hate Speech via online social media platforms. Currently, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google generally respond reactively to such material: offensive messages that have already been posted are reviewed by human moderators if complaints from users are received. The offensive posts are only subsequently removed if the complaints are upheld; therefore, they still cause the recipients psychological harm. In addition, this approach has frequently been criticised for delimiting freedom of expression, since it requires the service providers to elaborate and implement censorship regimes. In the last few years, an emerging generation of automatic Hate Speech detection systems has started to offer new strategies for dealing with this particular kind of offensive online material. Anticipating the future efficacy of such systems, the present article advocates an approach to online Hate Speech detection that is analogous to the quarantining of malicious computer software. If a given post is automatically classified as being harmful in a reliable manner, then it can be temporarily quarantined, and the direct recipients can receive an alert, which protects them from the harmful content in the first instance. The quarantining framework is an example of more ethical online safety technology that can be extended to the handling of Hate Speech. Crucially, it provides flexible options for obtaining a more justifiable balance between freedom of expression and appropriate censorship.
Wind impacts trees and forests in two ways: (1) through direct damage and (2) by causing them to adapt their growth forms. The effects of wind are relatively well understood in plantation forests, where they can have severe economic impacts. I will discuss how knowledge and techniques from the plantation industry can be transferred to tropical forests, and so aid conservation efforts. I will also give an overview the relevant research on this topic and outline future research directions.
In 1616, a Japanese galleon glided into Acapulco. It was the third time a Japanese vessel had done so that decade, flummoxing Spanish officialdom in Manila, Mexico City, and Madrid. It turned out to be the last; the final act in Tokugawa Japan’s two-decade effort to puncture the Spanish monopoly on trans-Pacific commerce. The Spanish Empire rebuffed this effort, successfully defending its commercial and navigational prerogative. But the Japanese repaid in kind, and within a decade Spaniards were no longer permitted in Japan. In this talk, I explore how this little-known attempt at outreach helps redefine our idea of what constitutes diplomacy and how it deepens our understanding of the frictions inherent to early modern encounters.
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What clues do we have to help us tell the stories of people who lived hundreds of years ago? This paper traces the journey of a 13th-century manuscript at Cambridge University Library (Gg.6.42) from Cirencester Abbey in Gloucestershire to Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire. At first glance, this book would seem to be a dead end for learning about the mysterious Geoffrey who wrote it in the 1240s. We will see how it is possible to combine textual, material, and archival evidence to identify this person and discover a story of political intrigue that surrounds this book.
Ice cores hold valuable information about Earth's past climate, which help us to better understand climate processes on long timescales and ultimately inform and refine future projections of climate.
I'm part of the WACSWAIN ice core project. WACSWAIN is interested in the Last Interglacial period (~113,000 years ago) when the Earth was around 2 degrees C warmer and sea levels several metres higher than today. This represents an interesting target of investigation; to understand what led to this sea level rise e.g. whether or not the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed or retreated and by how much, would help us to make better predictions about potential sea level rise as a result of anthropogenic climate change.
My research looks at the last glacial cycle (115,000 years ago to present) and I am hoping to pick apart how the climate varied across Antarctica during this time. My work will include a trip to the West Antarctic island, Sherman Island, in January 2020, where I will make use of the British Antarctic Survey's Rapid Access Isotope Drill, and I will drill ice down to 420m in just a few days.
Gender discrimination is often seen from a human rights perspective; it is a violation of women’s basic human rights, as embedded in the Universal Declaration, the UN Charter and other such founding documents. However, there is overwhelming evidence that restrictions and various forms of discrimination against women are also bad economics. They undermine the talent pool available to the private sector, they distort power relationships within the family and lead to inefficiencies in the use of resources. They contribute to create an environment in which women, de facto, are second class citizens, with fewer options than men, lower quality jobs, lower pay, often the victims of various forms of violence, literally from the cradle to the grave. They are also not fully politically empowered and have scant presence in the corridors of power, whether as finance ministers, central bank governors, prime ministers or on the boards of leading corporations. Why is gender inequality so pervasive? Where does it come from? Does it have cultural and religious roots? And what are the sorts of policies and values that will deliver a world in which being born a boy or a girl is no longer a measure of the likelihood of developing one’s human potential? A look at some of these and other such difficult questions
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