Madingley Minds

One of the advantages of being a tropical biologist is that you have a legitimate excuse to escape the soggy shores of England for a few weeks over the winter. There’s something almost magical about stepping onto a plane in the UK, where the trees are leafless, the nights are drawing in and everyone seems to have a head cold, and disembarking in the tropics, where the humid heat hits you like a wall and everything’s in full flower. These research trips (or ‘holidays’ as one of friends irritatingly describes them) form the backbone of my research on tropical biodiversity and conservation.

Also, they really aren’t holidays. Over the weeks or months I am away, each day is carefully planned to fit into a research schedule that makes the most of my time. First there is the set-up and visa chasing. In my last trip this involved a noisy and smelly week in the centre of Jakarta, running from government office to office delivering passport photos and filling in forms. Then there is travelling to the research area (often quite remote), liaising with local scientists and collaborators, and setting up research plots. Once this is done, there is the careful collection of data. In my case this usually involves surveying for different insect species, collecting specimens using standard techniques and storing and identifying them.

The set-up and distribution of each survey area, the methods used and the types of insects studied are all planned well in advance; determined by the research questions being asked. Once the data is collected, the results are analysed statistically and written up for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals. For applied research the process doesn’t stop there. Perhaps the most important step is to make sure that findings are communicated to other organisations and individuals who can then make use of the information. For my research, presentations to the agricultural industry and conservation organisations are vital in ensuring results actually inform policy and management on the ground.

This whole process of research, from the inception of a research question to planning, project design, data collection, analysis, write up, review, publication and communication, is central to how science works. Most of it isn’t at all glamorous or exciting, but rather careful, balanced and reflective. Only rarely do findings lead to a sudden shift in concepts or how things operate; rather data slowly accumulates which provides support for or against a particular theory or process. As Isaac Newton put it “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” or as Hal Abelson has it “If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.” Science is all about communication and building on the ideas and concepts of other researchers. I sometimes wonder if this careful and interactive core of science is underplayed or ignored when science is portrayed in the media. All too often scientists appear as egg-headed intellectuals, crouching in their high-tech labs awaiting a eureka moment, or, for field biologists, charging through the tropical rainforests without apparent direction on the lookout for a cure for cancer or the discovery of a new species.

At Madingley we have a wide range of courses coming up over the next few months, which break down these misconceptions and give participants a front row seat of cutting-edge scientific research. In each course, participants have the opportunity to interact with the Madingley biology tutors, who are often Cambridge scientists, and to find out more about how research takes place and its application in the real world.

For example in January, you can dive into the topic of marine conservation in Marine biology and conservation: exploring planet ocean. In February, you can discover more about the history of research in Cambridge and the value of biological collections in our Cambridge collections course, which provides a rare opportunity for a behind the scenes look in five of the Cambridge museums. Complementing this, you can also find out about contemporary Cambridge research in How science works.

In March and April you can discover more about natural history around Cambridge with Birds in spring and learn how to collect biological data in the field with Wild Madingley. Alternatively, if you’re more of an armchair biologist, you can learn about fieldwork in the most challenging environments from the comfort of Madingley Hall in Polar challenges for people and science.

So why not sign up to some of our courses and get behind the lab coats and big spectacles to meet real scientific researchers and find out more about what scientists do, and why research is important.

Dr Ed Turner, ICE Teaching Officer and Academic Director in Biological Sciences

‘There is’, as Cornford would have it, ‘only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing. The argument for doing something is that it is the right thing to do.’ (1922, p. 18) My research explores the relationship between education, particularly further and higher education, and social justice (defined as the provision of equality of opportunity for all students irrespective of their personal characteristics or social background).

Having grown up in a working-class community in the 1970s, studied sociology at the University of Essex in the 1980s and spent much of the 1990s teaching GCSE, BTEC and A Level it is, perhaps, unsurprising that for me exploring educational differences and inequalities and their underlying causes seemed morally correct. It was, ‘the right thing to do’. Recent government changes to education in England, like the replacement (on less generous terms) of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (2010) and the increase of university tuition fees to a maximum of £9,000 per year (2012), have only confirmed my research agenda. It remains, ‘the right thing to do’.

This research agenda is de facto political, I make no specious attempt to disguise it as ‘public-spiritedness’, because the structure and funding of education are the products of government ideology (Cornford, 1922, p. 23). It is, however, also empirical. It seeks to map educational differences and inequalities accurately, using statistical techniques, and then explain the underlying causes of these differences and inequalities drawing on interviews with students, teachers and managers in education. The results of the research projects I have undertaken, both individually and in collaboration, have been at times predictable and, at times, surprising. Some have also courted controversy.

My first major research project, published as Educational Attainment and Society (2007), assessed the relative impact of gender and social class on students’ examination results at GCSE and A Level. This question had arisen as a result of my experience as a teacher. The results of the analysis of data, derived from questionnaires, interviews and secondary statistics, showed that: 1) the effect of social class on examination results – to the advantage of the middle class – was approximately five times greater than the effect of gender (to girls’ advantage); 2) the gender gap (to girls’ advantage) tended to weaken between GCSE and A level, but the magnitude of the class effect persisted; and 3) the size of the gender gap (to girls’ advantage) was relative to social class (it was weaker for upper middle class students and much more sizable for working class students). I tried to explain these differences developing a theoretical model of the relationship between gender, social class and education which was, borrowing from Eckstein (1997), labelled congruence theory.

To those familiar with the results of educational research from the 1950s, these results were of little surprise. The vogue for studying the ‘closure of the gender gap’ in the late 1990s, however, resulted in some feminists responding to my findings as ‘motley’ ‘truth-claims’ ignorant of 21st century educational thinking (Arnot et al. 1999; David 2008). In trying to ‘do the right thing’, that is appraising the relative impact of gender and social class on attainment, I had apparently hit a raw nerve in education studies. In contrast, other researchers were highly supportive commenting, for example, ‘I would advise you to read this book by a promising researcher for its discussion of the role of theory, its elegant approach to methods, and the substantive findings’ (Gorard 2007).

Neglecting Cornford’s (1922) advice to the young academic politician, basically avoid making your own way in academia for this makes you ‘dreadfully disagreeable’, I responded to my critics by publishing Theory Building in Educational Research (2010/12). This text seeks, unashamedly, to map the ‘crisis’ in the quality of explanations which currently pervade education studies, as they have little or no power to explain social processes, and provide a system of logic and methods to promote superior explanations. It also considers – as another manifestation of ‘the right thing to do’ – the development of curriculum innovation strategies to promote social justice as a result of education. Responses to Theory Building have ranged from leading educational scholars privately chastising me to published responses praising the political analysis of the researcher’s role as ‘remarkable’ (Jarvis 2012). In education studies, there is little agreement over the meaning of ‘doing the right thing’ and the pursuit of knowledge of the relationship between education and social justice promotes divisions, which reflect the sectional interests of researchers (almost irrespective of the truth).

My current research projects include collaborative work on the Evaluation of the Cambridge Bursary Scheme, with Dr Joan M Whitehead in the Faculty of Education, and an analysis of variations in pupils’ educational behaviours by gender and social class which seeks to develop curriculum innovation strategies to enhance attainment. The results of the former project have been, at times, surprising. We have found pupils’ social class background has little impact on determining their decisions concerning university applications in Year 12, despite the widespread belief to the contrary (Kettley and Whitehead 2011). Results also show how men and women adapt differently to funding opportunities in higher education and how this can impact on their degree results (Kettley et al. 2008). The results of the latter project are to be published as Educational Practice and Society (2013). Here I will continue to make myself dreadfully disagreeable, despite Cornford’s (1922) warning to the academic politician, because the moral commitment to ‘do the right thing’ should not be contingent upon the responses of others. Politics is always personal as well as social.   

The focus of my research – exploring the relationship between education and social justice – is reflected in my teaching for the Institute. The pursuit of social justice through education might, at first glance, seem like an oxymoron in the context of an elite university. Yet, when James Stewart first began providing public lectures to working men in the late 1860s, it was precisely social justice as a result of ‘accessibility’ to elite higher education that he sought to promote (Kettley 2007).

If, like me, you are interested in issues of education, social justice and debates in the social sciences more generally, the Institute offers a range of courses from non-accredited open access programmes to full Master of Studies degrees. The Madingley Weekly Programme contains courses such as ‘Education, education, education’: The success and failures of British schooling and Inventing childhood. Our online courses, meanwhile, include Rebels without a cause? Youth cultures in modern Britain and our weekend programme includes Crime and deviance: Nuts, sluts and perverts? Additionally, the Institute provides a Master of Studies in Advanced Subject Teaching.

If you'd like to comment on any of the issues raised in this article, you can do so using the 'Add comment' link at the bottom of the page.

Dr Nigel Kettley, University Lecturer and ICE Academic Director in Education and Social Science

Main reference

Cornford, F M (1922) Microcosmographia Academia: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes. (Reproduced in full in: Johnson, G. (1994) University Politics: F M Cornford’s Cambridge and his advice to the Young Academic Politician. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)

I have just spent a week with my family at the Edinburgh Festival. The city was absolutely buzzing with creativity, festival-goers and tourists buying kilts and fake bagpipes. There was plenty on offer for us all: my husband went to see stand-up comedy and sampled whisky, my children met Barney from Blue Peter, and there was plenty of fascinating history all around me. The nearest church was no less than Canongate Kirk and buried in the kirkyard were the moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) and the poet Robert Fergusson (1750-1774).

Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. He was the founder of political economy and hugely influential to shifts in intellectual thought about the nature of the market. Smith’s magnificent tombstone might have been aggrandised in the 1930s. Such ideas are important to my research on the history of poverty and attitudes towards the poor, which underwent radical change over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nassau Senior (1790–1864), Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, was architect of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The principles of the New Poor Law were centralisation, uniformity, less-eligibility, and the workhouse test.

The poet Robert Fergusson was frequently impoverished. He published his poems in the Weekly Magazine and a collection Poems in 1773, while his other poems were published posthumously. By late 1773 he was very ill, possibly with syphilis. Seven months’ later he fell downstairs and became delirious; he was committed to Edinburgh’s Darien House Asylum, where he died, aged just 24, on 17 October 1774. He was buried two days’ later in the Canongate churchyard in an unmarked grave. Fergusson was Robert Burns’s favourite Scottish poet, and Burns paid for a headstone for Fergusson’s grave, with the epitaph:

No sculpturd Marble here nor pompous lay
No stoned Urn nor animated Bust
This simple Stone directs Pale cotia’s way
To pour her Sorrows o’er Poets Dust.

The statue pictured here is a much more recent addition (2004) and was sculpted by David Annand.

Edinburgh is also famous for the serial killers William Burke (1792-1829) and William Hare (1792/1804-?), who committed at least fifteen murders in the city in order to sell the bodies to the surgeon Professor Robert Knox (1791–1862) for dissection. He gave them between £8 and £14 for each corpse. They were discovered and arrested. Hare turned king’s evidence and was released; Burke was hanged on 28 January 1829 at Lawnmarket and faced the same fate as his victims: his corpse was dissected. The surgeon was Knox's rival, Sir Alexander Monro. Burke’s body was viewed by 30,000 people and his skeleton preserved and displayed in the anatomical museum of Edinburgh University. It was reported that Hare took employment at a lime kiln and that, when his identity became known, other workers threw him into the lime, which blinded him, and that he became a beggar with a dog on Oxford Street, London. The medical profession required a steady stream of corpses to dissect for the training of medical students, drawn from convicted murderers, the dead poor, and (sometimes) grave robbing.

If you, too, are interested in social history, and particularly the themes of poverty, disease, and the history of medicine, then you might like to study local history at the Institute. After Christmas (term 2) I am teaching on the Undergraduate Diploma in Local History II, ‘Poverty, disease and medicine in the local community c.1500-1914’. Many of the themes discussed in this blog will be covered in the course: attitudes to poverty and provision for the poor; disease, including syphilis; and the professionalisation of medicine, in terms of medical practitioners and their training, the provision of hospitals and asylums, and the role of the poor law in the provision of medical care. Early poor relief is also explored in terms 1’s course ‘The people and the parish, c.1500-1700’.

The Madingley Weekly Programme also contains related courses, such as ‘Lock ‘em up!’, which considers the prisoner of war camp, the prison, and the workhouse, and ‘Inventing childhood’, which explores the history of welfare legislation and education reform. There are also Weekend courses at Madingley Hall: ‘In and out of the workhouse: Victorian and Edwardian poverty issues’, ‘Surnames in the United Kingdom: origins, meaning and history’, ‘Chapel: in search of a lost culture’, and ‘Churches and chapels of Cambridge’.

If you would like to undertake your own research then you might be interested in the Undergraduate Advanced Diploma in Local History.

Dr Samantha Williams, ICE University Senior Lecturer and Academic Director in Local History

Madingley Hall is not somewhere one would expect to meet the Devil. The Hall is just too beautiful and people who work or visit here, by and large, seem far too reasonable and busy to have time for that kind of thing; it would, I imagine, be very distracting. The Buddha that sits peacefully looking out over a pool under the North Terrace, appears a religious figure more suited to the character of the place than the Prince of Darkness, and the calm presence of the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene, that you pass on your way up the drive, and which has been there, in one form or another, for almost a thousand years, would, one assumes, make it unlikely that he would want to drop in.

However, as part of the research for a book I am currently writing, I came across the details of a trial held in Cambridge in 1659 in which some people were accused of not only meeting the Devil at Madingley Hall but supping with him too (whether spoons were used or not, or how long these might have been, is not on record). Indeed, two of the party arrived at the Hall for their diabolical dinner party one chilly November night on the back of an unfortunate woman from a nearby village whom they had changed into a horse; the victim showed off the injuries she received from the bridle in case there was any doubt about her testimony.

Plenty of people, including a number of scholars of the University, believed the woman's account. John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim's Progress, went into print supporting her claims, and a pamphlet published in London entitled Strange and Terrible Newes from Cambridge made the incident a story of national interest. It was a serious accusation: if found guilty the accused would have been put to death.

Of course, accusations of magic are something that have preoccupied societies for millennia and raise fascinating questions of the kind we explore in a range of courses at the Institute. What, for example, do people really believe when they make such accusations? As the author Apuleius of Madura pointed out when defending himself against just such a charge in the Roman empire, those who really believe in the powers of magicians would surely be the last people who would risk taking such people to court. And as we can see in a range of different cultures and epochs, accusations of magic, like accusations of madness or badness, came to be part of the way that societies define themselves and keep those that are different or are perceived to be a threat to the status quo at bay. It is no surprise to find that the individuals accused of dining with the Devil were Quakers, members of an unpopular new sect that had recently arrived in Cambridge and some of whose female adherents had already been whipped through the streets of the city for daring to preach, something that had not gone down well with young, male clergy being trained in the University.

And what happened to the accused? They were fortunate to be acquitted. The judge decided that the whole thing was probably the result of a bad dream, a sensible judgement that resembles one a few decades later when another judge famously dismissed a charge of witchcraft on the grounds that he knew of no law in England against flying.

Interestingly, the Quakers went on to publish their own account of the case as they still felt the need to clear their name. In it they argued, amongst other things, that the accuser must be a liar because she claimed they had joined the Devil in a meal of mutton, rabbit and lamb but no one, not even the Prince of Darkness himself it seems, could possibly have got hold of lamb in November.

Things have clearly changed a great deal over the centuries; lamb can now be seen on the menu at the Hall in November. I still do not think that Madingley is somewhere you are likely to encounter the Devil but perhaps, on reflection, it is not as improbable as it once was.

Dr Justin Meggitt, ICE University Senior Lecturer and Academic Director for the Study of Religion

[Those interested in thinking further about evil might enjoy the forthcoming weekend course, God and Evil, an exploration of the theological and philosophical problems that the existence of evil raises for belief in God.]

Last month I was in the Channel Island of Jersey for the opening of my museum exhibition, Occupied Behind Barbed Wire. During the German occupation of the Channel Islands, around 2,200 people were deported to French and German civilian internment camps (a number not including those who were deported to penal prisons and concentration camps for acts of resistance).

Since 2006 I have been working with former deportees, collecting their testimonies and attending their twice-annual reunions. As an archaeologist, my particular interest is in artefacts, or in this case, the hand-made arts and crafts that they brought home with them from the camps, and I have now seen well over 100 private collections of such items in the homes of former deportees.

These objects are fascinating, and include items as diverse as sports trophies, ash trays and hair curlers made out of Red Cross food tins; handbags, shoes and jewellery boxes made from Red Cross parcel string; dolls’ cots made out of empty Red Cross cardboard boxes; and paintings, greetings cards, concert programmes and other artwork drawn on the back of brown parcel wrapping paper. In the past, such items as these have been seen as the meaningless but pretty ephemera from such places, and very much secondary in importance to diaries and documents. Today, however, these items are viewed as crucial witnesses to, and enablers of, survival. While Red Cross parcels may have enabled the deportees I study to have survived physically, the objects they made helped them to survive emotionally and psychologically.

As an archaeologist, I am used to interpreting objects. It has been fascinating to use these skills to help me understand 20th century objects. In the stiff-upper-lip 1940s, people poured their emotions, hopes and fears into the objects they made, making them powerful items, pregnant with meaning.

If you are interested in acquiring these same skills of artefact interpretation, why not sign up for our Undergraduate Certificate in Archaeology programme? Or, if you want to learn more about internment camps, prisons and workhouses, and the different ways in which historians and archaeologists approach such institutions – and to hear more about the deportees that I work with – I can recommend Lock ‘em up, one of the new Madingley Weekly Programme courses available in 2013.

Next year, in the Undergraduate Diploma in Archaeology programme, we have a tremendously exciting line-up of courses prepared. I will be teaching a course on Conflict Archaeology, during which we will examine WWI, WWII and other 20th century conflicts from an archaeological perspective (and I will be talking more about working with POW groups). This will be followed by a course on Museums and Heritage, which will pick up some of the same themes.

I have a particular interest in the heritage of WWII, especially of the German occupation of the Channel Islands (as can be seen from my website!). The Germans left behind hundreds of concrete fortifications or bunkers in the islands, and one thing that I have found again and again when talking to those who restore these bunkers today is that many of them have had supernatural experiences inside these places. There is a seemingly widespread acceptance in the Channel Islands that many bunkers are haunted by the ghosts of German soldiers. At first I disregarded such tales, as serious archaeologists are not supposed to deal with ghost stories, but then I had my own frightening experience. The more people in the Channel Islands I told, the more of them told me their stories. Back in Cambridge I began to chat to members of the Anthropology department about it, and they told me of the experiences and beliefs of people in various parts of the world where they carry out their fieldwork. And so the idea was born which will culminate in a fascinating (and chilling!) weekend course to be held at Madingley Hall: Dealing with the dead: ghosts and spirits from around the world. This course will run from 30 November – 2 December 2012 and my anthropological colleagues and I will tell you about spirits and ghosts in the Channel Islands, Mexico, India, Siberia, Mongolia, Indonesia and Amazonia.

If this course only whets your appetite for more, why not sign up for Apparitions: ghosts, angels and demons in modern Britain in Spring 2013 if you want to find out how academics deal with the supernatural!

Dr Gilly Carr, ICE University Lecturer and Academic Director in Archaeology

Marshmallows and liquorice allsorts. Tuck shop merchandise perhaps – but these can also be used to illustrate fundamental concepts in materials science (of which more below).

Attending the recent Materials Education Symposium in Cambridge, participants extolled the virtues of silly putty as a teaching material, and demonstrations included liquid nitrogen, bursting balloons, and over-stretched springs (reshaped with a hairdryer).

You might be forgiven for imagining that we were not treating our subject with sufficient seriousness, but underlying all of this is an important issue. Any communication or teaching makes assumptions about prior knowledge – what can you take for granted that your students already know?

In the case of students studying materials science, it is normal for their academic backgrounds to be quite varied, and it is important that we do not make too many specific assumptions. Despite that, most people already know far more than they realise about the behaviour of materials. We have abundant experience of materials from the everyday world around us, and we can use that experience to illustrate and inform our understanding of new concepts.

So how do children’s sweets come into this? We’ll start with the marshmallow – and be prepared for sticky fingers.

Squeeze it gently between your thumb and forefinger (so that it can spring back again), and notice how it bulges out sideways. Most solid materials approximately conserve their volume under stress, so if you squash them, they get wider. Normally we don’t notice this because the contractions and expansions are so small, but with a marshmallow the effect is big enough to see (and of course it is also obvious for rubber bands, but you shouldn’t eat those). Engineers need to know exactly how much wider or narrower a component will become under a load, so we need to measure how big this effect is and we call the resulting number Poisson’s ratio. For our marshmallow, we can work out its Poisson’s ratio by dividing the fraction by which it gets wider, by the fraction by which it gets shorter, and the same calculation can be done for any other material as well. Because the conservation of volume is not exact, this number varies for different materials, and it is a fundamental ‘elastic constant’. Students are often surprised to discover that one of the few materials that really does conserve its volume under compression is rubber – very few other materials are truly incompressible in this way. Cork is also unusual in having a negative Poisson’s ratio (when you compress it, it becomes narrower instead of wider, which is why it works as, well … a cork). This happens because natural cork has a cell structure that can collapse like a concertina, and the same property is now being developed and exploited in ‘auxetic materials’. To learn more about these, you could start with this article from the internet magazine Plus, which is part of the Millenium Mathematics Project.

Next let’s consider the thin-layer sandwich variety of liquorice allsort – three layers of sugar paste with two of liquorice in between. Imagine squeezing the sandwich held flat between your thumb and forefinger. The sugar paste is softer, so these layers compress relatively more than the liquorice sheets. Now squeeze it sideways (it might be best to eat the first one and start again with a fresh one!). This time the sandwich is harder to compress, because we cannot compress the soft sugar paste without also compressing the harder liquorice by the same amount. You have learnt that a composite (combination of two materials) responds to the same force differently, depending on how it is oriented. Actually you already know this, unless you never played with your food as a child. We can go on to describe this mathematically, working out how much thinner the composite becomes for the same force applied in different directions. The mathematics applies not only to liquorice allsorts, but also to plywood, carbon fibre composites and to any other engineering material with more than one distinct component.

I could go on from here - ham sandwiches, for example, are useful in visualising defects in the crystal structure of metals (you can learn about those from this learning package on the DoITPoMS website) - but I think it is time for a snack. I wonder what I packed amongst my teaching resources?

If you are interested in learning more about Materials Science, you might like to register for the ICE residential course on Exploring the Nanoworld, which will be running from 7-9 September 2012. Look at out for others in 2013 as we expand the range of Physical Sciences courses available at ICE.

Dr Erica Bithell, ICE Academic Director in Physical Sciences

One focus within the philosophy of language is the study of speech acts. These are things someone does by uttering certain words in a certain context – apologising, forgiving, asking, telling, warning, promising, blaming, awarding, asserting, permitting, sentencing, and so on.

Understanding speech acts is part of understanding the richness of language. It is also part of understanding how to make social, legal and political progress. Speech acts are central to this aspect of public life, as William Jones’ recent petition for Alan Turing to be posthumously pardoned for a 1952 conviction reminded me.

Turing’s sexual relationship with a man meant he was found guilty of ‘gross indecency’. He lost certain rights and he was given hormone treatment. Clearly, the old criminalisation of sexual acts between men is ghastly. But is a pardon the right speech act with which to address the situation?

This question turns out to be complex, not least because there are various potential analyses of what kind of speech act a pardon is; of what it brings about and what it relies on. As a first stab, we might treat pardoning as a species of forgiveness. But then we have a problem: a pardon seemingly presumes that Turing did something wrong, which misses the point. The legislation was bad because it legislated against something which was not wrong.

Perhaps, instead, to pardon is to overlook or disregard the act – as if Turing had not broken the law after all. But what does this mean? Are we to treat the world as if Turing had not had a homosexual relationship? That isn’t the appropriate response. So are we just to disregard the fact that it was illegal? Then the challenge is to square this with the fact that there was a law against sexual acts between men, a law which others are still regarded as having broken.

Then maybe to pardon is to correct an error in the application of a law. For example, perhaps there is some information which changes the nature of the case and was originally overlooked. But then a pardon is not the right thing for Turing – his act was within the remit of gross indecency legislation. In fact, asking for a pardon would put us in danger of obscuring what the law was aimed against. And that wouldn’t do. We recognise that the legislation is repugnant precisely because we realise what it was aimed against.

I think the Turing petition gives us a fascinating and delicate real-life case study for understanding what speech acts to perform when and why. Moral and social progress can be substantially furthered by the speech acts we perform, just as it can be thwarted by them. It’s so important to be able to ask for and deliver the right ones. So we should be paying attention to the philosophical issues which lie behind them.

I’ll be saying more about speech acts and the petition over the coming weeks at the new ICE Philosophy homepage.

If you are interested in Turing’s work, you might also be interested in Codes, ciphers and secrets: an introduction to cryptography, one of the courses in our upcoming Science Summer School.

Dr Emily Caddick, ICE Academic Director for Philosophy

After his bold beginning, Ed hands me the blogging baton and I can begin the second leg (a hard position to run, a sprinter friend tells me).

In town, the Cambridge Spring Wordfest is about to commence and looks very exciting this year; the book of the festival is to be Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, the all-time best dangerous book for girls.

Published in 1979, it’s one of those books that changed – and continues to change – lives, and I wish a free copy of it was given to every teenage girl buying the anaemic Twilight series. Carter rewrites the classic fairy tales, including ‘Bluebeard’ (the heroine’s mother gallops up in the nick of time and shoots the murderous husband) and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (Little Red chops off the Wolf’s paw, then later notices that Granny is missing a hand…). The Bloody Chamber tales luxuriate in the atmosphere and imagery of these strange stories we give to children, but invert their warnings and interdictions. Her wild girls embrace wolves and find their mates in manly beasts rather than beastly men.

Rewriting and reworking classics has become routine: the spirit of Carter’s revolutionary work has, in the latest round of fairy-tale revision, been repackaged for TV audiences in generic and disappointing TV series such as Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Of course, literary recycling is a time-honoured tradition, with stories and myths passing from generation to generation to be rebeaten into new shapes for contemporary audiences so that we can trace the passage of hard-wearing characters from Oedipus to Little Red Riding Hood from era to era. Occasionally, new kinds of rewriting manage to both delight readers with their own originality and send us back to an original to test out the limits of their reinterpretations. And, like film versions of novels, rewritings divide readerships who either enjoy any opportunity to encounter old favourites again, or are horrified by the freedoms taken with much-loved classics.

Later this year, I’ll be teaching the various adaptations that have been made of Jane Austen’s novels, including the many film versions and the recent run of supernaturally-infected rewritings including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. One of the essay titles for the summer school students who will be taking a similar course will invite them to produce their own rewriting of Austen (please do comment below with your own suggestions for Austen enhanced …).

Next month, the blogging baton passes to philosopher Emily Caddick.

--- Dr Jenny Bavidge, ICE Academic Director for English Literature

PS. If you’re missing Adrian Barlow’s elegant blog entries, then there is good news. His new book Extramural is out this week from Lutterworth Press.

Related weekend courses at Madingley Hall:

• Reading contemporary bestsellers: identity and innovation (18-20 May)
• Nordic Noir: ice crime (15-17 June)
• Fairy tales in opera (3-5 August)
• History, memory and storytelling: prose and poetry of the 21st century (3-5 August)
• Pride and Prejudice Part Deux: adapting and rewriting the classics (19-21 October)
• The Sherlock Holmes phenomenon (7-9 December)

Look out also for our Literature Summer School in July and August.

This Saturday, wrapped up in a blanket and a scarf, I sat in our chilly conservatory for an hour and saw two blackbirds, a starling, a collared dove and a jackdaw in the garden.

Not the most impressive bird list you might say, but I think this one is important because it was my record for this year’s RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch. This amazing survey has been running for over 30 years, and has proved invaluable for tracking the long-term waxing and waning fortunes of some of Britain’s most familiar garden birds. Data for the scheme isn’t collected by professional ornithologists or scientists, but by interested members of the public, who each give up an hour of their day once a year to record the species they spot in their garden or local area.

Since the survey started, the numbers of some of our commonest species, such as the house sparrow and starling, have plummeted. Not that this scheme was set up to simply record the demise of biodiversity in the UK. Rather, by cataloguing how populations are changing, such information can inform conservation policy which can ultimately halt these declines.

The Big Garden Birdwatch isn’t the only way that interested amateurs are helping conservation and taking part in 'citizen science'. In fact, there are dozens of initiatives where citizen scientists are making a real contribution to conservation in the UK. For example, you can volunteer to take part in Moth Night 2012, run a butterfly transect with Butterfly Conservation, record breeding birds in your garden with the British Trust for Ornithology, and monitor plant distributions with the Botanical Society of the British Isles. You can also get involved with surveying and practical conservation more locally by taking part in work parties or monitoring projects at Wildlife Trust reserves around Cambridgeshire.

Amateur naturalists have been recording the species they see in their local area and making biological collections for centuries. In fact the UK has perhaps the best biological record of this kind in the world. In the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, we have such specimens dating back hundreds of years, representing an invaluable record of how species numbers and distributions have changed.

So why not get involved in citizen science yourself? There have never been more opportunities to contribute to research, to make a difference to conservation, and to learn more about the wildlife in your local area. What’s more, volunteering is even good for you and has been shown to increase your sense of happiness, satisfaction, self-esteem and physical health! More importantly it’s fun.

If you would like to learn more about ecological monitoring, conservation and natural history with the Institute of Continuing Education, then you can register on some of the weekend courses we are offering in 2012:

• Birds, gardens and hidden secrets (13 April), run by Peter Holden (who, while working with the RSPB, devised the first Big Garden Birdwatch!)
• Name that plant (15 June), run by Patrick Harding
• Conservation: from theory to practice (7 September), run by Jake Snaddon, Holly Barclay and Ed Turner
• Biological collections at the University of Cambridge: a unique historical record (7 December), run by Russell Stebbings

Dr Ed Turner, ICE Academic Director for Biological Sciences