How do we balance liberty with public safety?

Liberty is believed to be both an intrinsic good in the sense that it is a good because of its intimate relationship to what is widely accepted to be distinctive and valuable about human beings, but liberty is also instrumental good – good through its connection to  human flourishing to the effective functioning of a market place of ideas, which again might be another description of science itself.

It is the fundamental duty of the state to secure the safety of people – but…in which direction lies the safety of people? Does it lie in the free publication of science or does it lie in various sorts of control measures.  

……..some of these are clearly the protections of which Hobbes speaks, others are the set of liberties necessary to protect rights and promote human flourishing. It is the balance between these, it seems to me, which we are concerned.

The challenge is to take responsible risk, in pursuit of among other things, public safety.

There is simply no such thing as risk free approach to security. The precautionary principal is an illusion, because in order to implement it, we have to know in which direction precaution lies, that is just what we don’t know, because it is too complicated to work it out; in almost all cases precaution walks both sides of every street.

‘As we compare the current threat posed by bioterrorism, and our past experience with the threat of influenza, we would argue that the nature itself should be considered the prime bioterrorist.’

‘The whole practice of medicine might be described as the comprehensive attempt to frustrate the cause of nature………. and to prevent nature from killing people in its usual extravagant fashion. If we are to provide for the safety of people, we need a dual uses of solutions.

(John Harris, Merton College Oxford)

John Harris was one of the Founder Directors of the International Association of Bioethics and is a founder member of the Board of the journal Bioethics and is also the joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Watch his lecture here

http://www.voiceprompt.co.uk/royalsociety/030412/players/09.html

Video Interviews with women at Oxford

WATCH INSPIRING WOMEN AT OXFORD HERE

Christine Fairchild is at Jesus College: My role is a new phenomenon in oxford. The idea rose to reach to greater Alumni society, posting and hosting events, helping to leverage their strength and activities. Alumni role is extremely important in their community as role models, and also as mothers. This notion of networking is taken from American universities.

Dr. Lisa Walker teaches at Balliol College: she explained that there are plenty of opportunities to become involved, and that keen athlete students at Oxford are encouraged to join the Boat Club.

Dr. Sarah Thomas, the first woman to be Bodley’s Librarian, talks about her experience as a woman in a leading University role. She is also a Professorial Fellow of Balliol. She worked at Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, Cornell, Congress Libraries.

http://www.ox.ac.uk/about_the_university/introducing_oxford/women_at_oxford/video_interviews.html

What are Singing Plates?

Sound might not be the first thing you think of when you sit down to eat, but Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, has shown that sonic cues play an important role in your experience. “The sound of the food matters,” he explains. “The sound of the packaging matters and atmospheric sounds matter.”

At Oxford’s Crossmodal Research Lab, Spence is attempting to quantify synaesthetic correspondences — the flavour of sound. Take the crisp packet: “There’s no reason in terms of product preservation for the noisy packets,” says Spence. “It must just be some marketing person who thought, ‘It’s a noisy food, it’s got to have the right expectations for the packaging.’”

Anne-Sylvie Crisinel, a doctoral researcher at the lab, asked subjects to match wines, chocolate and milk with musical notes and pitches. Another study had volunteers eat identical-tasting pieces of cinder toffee in a darkened room while listening to music (created by sonic branding-agency, Condiment Junkie) on headphones. When eating to music in a higher pitch, testers rated the toffee sweeter than when they ate to lower notes.

Spence now wants to develop wine glasses that connect to actuators and gyroscopes and start “singing” when you raise a glass to your lips. After that: singing plates. “We get poor information from our tongues about flavour,” he says. “We rely on expectations and beliefs.”

READ MORE HERE

AND HERE

What is GOTO?

Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford (GOTO) is an action-oriented problem-solving community geared towards addressing some of the most complex issues that face the world today. Students and alumni will connect with faculty from across the University of Oxford and their research via this online platform to discuss, debate, and drive new business ideas that address global issues. One issue will be considered per year. For 2013, we will address the Population 21 Challenge – the implications of changing demographics on the world.

Watch the launch of the alumni component of the new problem-solving community: Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford (GOTO). Learn more about the first GOTO topic, “Shifting Demographics” and how alumni can join the conversation.

http://goto.sbs.ox.ac.uk/

OPEN ACCESS WISER programme

WISER: Open Access Oxford – what’s happening? (Thursday 21 Feb 11.00-12.00) (wk6) Radcliffe Science Library - From 1^st April researchers funded by RCUK funding councils will be required to make their research papers open access either via free unrestricted access to the final version on the publisher’s web site or by deposit of the accepted manuscript (after peer review) in an open access repository within 6 months (or 12 months for AHRC and ESRC).    Come along to a briefing on open access for research publications and Oxford’s position. We will be covering: Green vs. Gold open access publishing; funder mandates and publisher policies; the Oxford Research Archive (ORA) and Symplectic; and how to find more information and help.

Who is this session for?  Research Support staff, administrators, librarians and researchers.

Presenters: Juliet Ralph and Linda Atkinson

WISER: Mendeley for Reference Management (Wed 27 Feb 14.00-16.00) (wk 7) -  Mendeley is a relatively new reference management tool and one which is receiving a great deal of extremely positive feedback. It does all the things that traditional reference management packages do (for example allowing you to build up a database of citations and insert them into word processed documents) but also has collaborative features for researchers.   This session will be of interest to anyone looking for an alternative to Endnote and RefWorks as well as those who are new to reference management.  Please book your place online
Presenter: Oliver Bridle

Keeping up with Bodleian Libraries training opportunities: Why not follow join our mailing list by sending an empty email to wiser-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk, follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/oxwiser or visit the BodWiser blog at http://bodwiser.wordpress.com

Not a member of Oxford University? – If you are not a current member of Oxford University but would like to attend a workshop please contact usered@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Please quote your Bodleian Reader or Rewley House Continuing Education Library card barcode number.

Coursera: Education as Human Rights

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting: Plutarch cited in Daphne Koller:

WATCH INTRODUCTION VIDEO HERE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FvJ6jMGHU&feature=youtu.be

Watch Daphne Koller, Creator of Free Education Coursera on Education as Human Rights

Explore free courses from edX universities

HARVARD, TORONTO, MIT UNIVERSITIES AND MANY MORE: CLICK HERE

Peter Tufano’s Financial Engineering

Peter Tufano: How Financial Engineering Can Advance Corporate Strategy:

Click to download here

Harvard Business Review

Unchartered Freedom

 

 

First Talk: I remember when a boy that my first feeling upon being left to browse at will in a large library was one of bewilderment and irresolution. The wealth around me was so abundant that I did not know what to appropriate. There was the sense of greatness on the onne side and of incapacity on the other. Book after book was taken down from the shelves, glanced at, and returned unread. Thousands of volumes were around me, and yet, dearly though I loved books, I felt disappointed, and could not understand the feeling. My own little library of fifty or sixty volumes had been a source to me of unbounded pleasure, and here in a Realm of Gold I felt much as a hungry man may feel who gazes upon a feast to which he must not sit down.

I did not know at first what ailed me, and it was long before I discovered that in literature as in life what Wordsworth call ‘unchartered freedom’ is good neither for mind nor body…..

John Dennis, Realms of Gold, Grant Richards, London, 1899, pp 237

(PR85D461899)

 

BOOK SALE UPTO 75% OFF

 

 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOK SALE

 

 

Arthritis in Children and Adolescents

Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis

Ilona Szer, Yukiko Kimura, Peter Malleson, and Taunton Southwood

464 pages | Colour photographs, halftones, tables and line drawings | 276x219mm

978-0-19-263292-0 | Hardback | 16 March 2006

Price: £170.00   SALE PRICE ONLY £42.50

 

Public understanding of credit cards and interest compounding?

Debt Literacy, Financial Experiences, and Overindebtedness

Peter Tufano et al, NBER Working paper No W14808,

Abstract:
We analyze a national sample of Americans with respect to their debt literacy, financial experiences, and their judgments about the extent of their indebtedness. Debt literacy is measured by questions testing knowledge of fundamental concepts related to debt and by self-assessed financial knowledge. Financial experiences are the participants’ reported experiences with traditional borrowing, alternative borrowing, and investing activities. Overindebtedness is a self-reported measure. Overall, we find that debt literacy is low: only about one-third of the population seems to comprehend interest compounding or the workings of credit cards. Even after controlling for demographics, we find a strong relationship between debt literacy and both financial experiences and debt loads. Specifically, individuals with lower levels of debt literacy tend to transact in high-cost manners, incurring higher fees and using high-cost borrowing. In applying our results to credit cards, we estimate that as much as one-third of the charges and fees paid by less knowledgeable individuals can be attributed to ignorance. The less knowledgeable also report that their debt loads are excessive or that they are unable to judge their debt position.

Download this paper here