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XCO2 futures - the fourth industrial revolution
Robert Webb & Richard Cochrane
(XCO2; Martin Centre for Architectural Research)
Tuesday, 8 pm, 3 December 2002
We are at the beginning of a new industrial revolution – a
sustainability
revolution across all sectors of technology, society and the economy.
XCO2 [ex-cee-oh-too]
1. adj: descriptive of technologies, systems or strategies which aid carbon dioxide reduction through energy efficiency and renewable energy.
2. n: radical innovation hub.
From Neural Principles to Language: On Brain Reflections of
Words and their Meaning
Friedemann Pulvermüller
(MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit)
Tuesday, 8pm, 5 November 2002
Language is constituted by discrete building blocks, sounds and
words, which can be concatenated according to serial order
principles. The neurobiological organization of these building blocks,
in particular words, has been illuminated by recent metabolic and
neurophysiological imaging studies. When humans process words of
different kinds, various sets of cortical areas have been found to
become active differentially. The old concept of two language centers
processing all words alike must therefore be replaced by a model
according to which words are organized as discrete distributed neuron
ensembles that differ in their cortical topographies. The meaning of a
word, more precisely aspects of its reference, may be crucial for
determining which set of cortical areas becomes involved in its
processing. These postulates about the brain mechanisms of language,
which are rooted in principles known from neuroanatomy and
neurophysiology, may provide a framework for theory-driven
neuroscientific research on language.
Multi-sourced Concoctions in Chinese, Israeli, Turkish and
Japanese
Ghil'ad Zuckermann
(Department of Linguistics; Churchill College)
Tuesday, 8 pm, 22 October 2002
Anyone interested in language contact, hybridization, purism,
lexical
enrichment and wordplay will enjoy this talk, which will focus on
multisourced neologization and on camouflaged borrowing in ISRAELI,
TURKISH, MANDARIN and JAPANESE. (Longer
abstract.)
Using Your Voice
Rowena Whitehead (singer and voice teacher)
THURSDAY, 8 pm, 26 September 2002
The voice, the 'Muscle of the Soul', is a powerful communication tool which
can let us down when tension and postural habits affect vocal expression and
resonance just when we want to be at our most impressive. During this
evening you will be invited to use your voice to consider how it functions,
how it can function more effectively and how using your voice for singing
can benefit you. Come prepared to get out of your chair; there will be no
solos and 'non-singers' are particularly welcome.
Rowena Whitehead is a Natural Voice Practitioner who is director of Talking in Tune Community Music and visiting voice lecturer Homerton College and Anglia Polytechnic University.
Crosstalk Summer Social Event
SUNDAY, 5:30 pm, 11 August 2002
We had a barbecue and enjoyed the beautiful Leckhampton garden, including a late-night swim by some of us!
Hands-free writing
David MacKay (Cavendish Lab)
Tuesday, 8 pm, 9 July 2002
Dasher: a completely new text-entry system.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
Human and Divine Justice - New Contexts for Old Psalms
Barbara Moss (Chaplain to University Staff)
Tuesday, 8 pm, 7 May 2002
The Psalms have been used in worship for about 3000 years. Some are songs in praise of God; others are passionate laments against the singer's enemies, against the wicked, and even against God. The late twentieth century saw a number of attempts to write free adaptations, especially of the latter group of psalms, in contemporary settings. I shall compare four versions of one psalm, written in four different continents, and show how the poets brought their own views of human and divine justice, and their own observations of the world, to bear on the biblical text.
Communicating inconspicuously
Fabien Petitcolas (Microsoft Research, Cambridge)
Tuesday, 8 pm, 23 April 2002
It is often thought that communications may be secured by encrypting the traffic, but this has rarely been adequate in practice. Æneas the Tactician, and other classical writers, concentrated on methods for hiding messages rather than for enciphering them; and although modern cryptographic techniques started to develop during the Renaissance, we find in 1641 that John Wilkins, Master of Trinity, still preferred hiding over ciphering because it arouses less suspicion.
This preference persists in many operational contexts to this day and information hiding techniques have received a growing attention from the research community over the last years.
This talk will give some background history of this fascinating area of research and present the main driving forces and applications nowadays.
Chomskyan genomics: a linguistic view of DNA
Zara Josephs (Cambridge)
Tuesday, 8 pm, 26 March 2002
The standard jargon of molecular biology includes terms‹such as translation, transcription, proof-reading and editing‹that reflect parallels with linguistics. There is currently an explosion of genomic data in biology. The set of genomic nucleic acids, like that of natural languages, constitutes an enormous digital information-processing system with a categorial constituent structure. Both systems have multiple levels of information representation; both have an infinity of possible well-formed strings co-existing with powerful constraints on possible arrangements of constituents; and each manifests a dissociation between "well-formedness" of any given string of elements and its specific meaning. But how far does this metaphor take us? This talk will explore how linguistic theory and tools (in particular, transformational generative grammar) could be used to elucidate the fundamental nature of genes and their regulation.
Dim Sum lunch
Charlie Chan's Restaurant (14 Regent Street)
Monday, 1:30 pm, 11 March 2002
Dim sum are small chinese savory dishes, especially filled dumplings.
This was also an informational gathering with Ursula Seibold-Bultmann for the possible crosstalk trip to Erfurt, Germany.
What if? What happens when we re-run the tape of evolution?
Simon Conway Morris (Earth Sciences)
Tuesday, 8 pm, 12 February 2002
Counterfactuals are back in fashion: suppose no Protestant Reformation or no Hitler? Suppose the classical civilizations discovered the New World or the Chinese pursued their maritime programme? What then? So too it is now widely believed that organic evolution is hedged in by contingent circumstances that make any but the broadest predictions a futile exercise. This is of particular relevance to our own predicament: if humans are a biological accident then we are free to make the world as we wish. Such is the much publicized view of S.J. Gould: ideology has hijacked biology. But is even the biological view credible? I will argue that contrary to received wisdom biology is permeated with deep predictabilities, from the beginnings of DNA and proteins, to the inherency of "simple" organisms encoding what is needed for complexity, to the multiple convergences that suggest that far from humans being a freak by-product, their appearance is on the cards from Day 1.
Cosmology -- A theory of the whole Universe
Christopher Gordon (Applied Math and Theoretical Physics)
Tuesday, 8 pm, 29 January 2002
In cosmology the large scale structure of the Universe and its history are studied. Using astronomical data we can get a picture of what the Universe was like in the past. As we look further back in time the Universe looks denser, hotter and smoother. Until about fifteen billion years ago where the density gets so high that we are uncertain about the correct theories of Physics to apply.
Many diverse data sets are explained by our current model of cosmology. However there are still some real mysteries to be solved.