This month sees the first cohort of students completing their courses and starting work placements with the Cambridge Undergraduate Quantitative Methods Centre (CUQM). Established last year in the Department of Sociology, the Centre is dedicated to improving the provision of quantitative methods training to social science and humanities undergraduates in Cambridge.

“The UK is already way ahead of many other countries in the availability of large datasets that can be used to inform both policy and social science research,” says Burchell. “Over the next few decades – the career span of current undergraduates – we are likely to see huge advances in the use of quantitative data including datasets that can only by analysed with big data techniques.”

The increasing ubiquity of big data in the social sciences stems not just from the increasing use of massive datasets in areas such as education and economics, but also to a rise in the use of ‘messier’ data – anything from the way that people engage with Twitter and Facebook, to the public records held by government agencies across Europe – which often require data ‘cleaning’ before statistical analysis can be carried out.

According to Burchell, big data is providing a huge resource that is currently underutilised, which is one of the motivations for establishing the Centre.

“We now have access to a lot of large datasets collected either at a British or a European level, but we lack people with the skills to make use of it. It’s been a bigger problem in the UK than in other countries because a lot of our school kids specialise and give up doing maths at a younger age, and there’s this idea that if you were good at numbers you’d end up doing physics or natural sciences and if you weren’t good at numbers you’d end up doing social science,” Burchell explains.

“But even if you don’t end up doing statistical analyses yourself, it’s important to understand how they’re relevant – where numbers are useful and where they can be misleading,” he adds.

Rather than increasing the basic statistical skills of all students in certain disciplines – which has been tried before in many universities – the Centre has focused on providing more advanced expertise to a proportion of undergraduates across many social science disciplines.

Some subjects, such as Psychology and Economics, already have all students graduating with good levels of quantitative skills. CUQM aims to increase the proportion of graduates leaving Cambridge with these advanced skills in the other social sciences, better preparing them to work with large datasets themelves or to understand how others draw conclusions from them.

“These skills will become increasingly vital for careers in social science research, but they will also make students much more employable in most other sectors as well,” says Burchell. The Centre also works to find placements for students with organisations like YouGov, so that they can experience how statistics skills will be relevant in the workplace.

The first year’s activities have been open to students of archaeology, biological anthropology, education, history, land economy, linguistics, politics, social anthropology and sociology. In the coming year, the Centre will extend the exposure to statistics in the social science courses at Cambridge, as well as introducing more examples of quantitative methods into the teaching of these disciplines. CUQM also aims to provide optional vacation courses to those students who currently don’t have a quantitative data analysis component to their degree, thus preparing more social scientists to engage with the world of big data.

CUQM is part of a wider initiative to train social scientists in research methods at the University of Cambridge. The Social Science Research Methods Centre, for instance, complements the work of CUQM by teaching quantitative methods to graduate students, post-docs and lecturers.

@CamQuantMethods

A rare 14^th Century copy of Magna Carta that appears to have been unnoticed for generations, until it was uncovered during research marking the document’s 800^th anniversary, can be viewed online from today (Friday, 12 June).

The copy, which is owned by St John’s College, University of Cambridge, dates back to the reign of Edward I, and is one of just a handful of surviving statute rolls that recite clauses from the famous charter. Edward I was one of the monarchs who reissued a version of the Magna Carta, which was originally produced in 1215, during the reign of King John.

Although it had been preserved in the College archives, the manuscript appears to have been overlooked – and may indeed have been completely unknown to historians – until now. Its significance was only realised when Professor Nicholas Vincent, from the University of East Anglia and head of the national Magna Carta Project, contacted the College to enquire about documents that be believed contained clauses from the charter.

Professor Vincent realised that the item is, in fact, an early-to-mid 14^th Century example of a type of statute roll that would have been used to circulate parts of Magna Carta throughout medieval England. While these were once commonplace, only about a dozen are known to exist today.

Ahead of the anniversary of Magna Carta, on June 15^th, the College is releasing images of the copy online along with a short accompanying film. Members of the public can also view the charter by making an appointment to visit the College archives.

The document’s importance is thought to have gone undetected because no systematic attempt to collect the surviving copies of Magna Carta had been undertaken until the 800^th anniversary project was launched. Even if historians had seen a record of the St John’s copy in the past, they would probably not have recognised its significance as they would have been unaware that it was in roll form.

In fact, for statute rolls of Magna Carta to survive is very rare. Earlier generations considered the parchment of which they were made very useful for secondary purposes, including lighting fires, and even as animal feed! As a result, most such rolls were lost. Judging by the valuation of similar items at auction, the St John’s copy is thought to be worth several tens of thousands of pounds.

Although it was famously agreed to by King John at Runnymeade, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215, much of Magna Carta had been repealed or rewritten within 10 years of its issue. Modified versions were reissued under both Henry III and Edward I, with some of the more radical clauses in particular removed.

Edward agreed to a renewal of Magna Carta in 1297, and then reissued it on 28 March 1300. The roll at St John’s College recites this 1300 reissue and may have been preserved by the Hospital of St John that once stood on part of what is now the College.

In common with various other copies of Magna Carta that have surfaced in the past, the manuscript is part of a larger document. In this case it was stitched together with a lawyer’s copy of the assize of bread and ale, a law which regulated the price, weight and quality of the bread and beer manufactured and sold in England, and was the first in British history to regulate the production and sale of food. The roll also recites clauses from the Forest Charter, which was issued as a companion document to Magna Carta in 1217 and dealt with rights of access to the royal forest.

The Magna Carta Project, which is led by Professor Vincent, is a collaborative initiative between several universities that aims to track down lost originals of Magna Carta and create an online database featuring commentary, translations, and research findings about the charter. The team are sifting through hundreds of archives as part of their research.

The St John’s copy is being made available to view as part of the nationwide Explore Your Archive Magna Carta campaign, in which archives around the country that have a copy of Magna Carta are being encouraged to make it available to the wider public.

Tracy Deakin, Archivist at St John’s College, said that it was not uncommon for long-forgotten historical documents to resurface from archives, many of which are being made available publically in a manner that was not possible a few decades ago.  “This sort of discovery is a lot more typical than people might think,” she said. “A couple of generations back, archivists did a very different type of job and would not have been able to command the same kind of accessible detail about everything in their archive in the way that we can now.”

For more information about the St John’s College archives, including visiting times, please go to: http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/archives

New research using high-speed gambling experiments shows that, for most of us, the last experience we’ve had can be the defining one when it comes to taking a decision, coming at the expense of other experiences we’ve accumulated further back in time.

The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, supports the idea that the ‘banker’s fallacy’ – focusing on immediate growth at the expense of longer-term stability that would produce better results – is intuitive in the way many of us make quick decisions.

People’s natural inclination towards a ‘happy ending’ means that we often ascribe greater value to experiences than they are worth, say researchers, meaning that we end up overvaluing experiences with a final uptick over those that taper at the last minute, despite being of equal or even lesser overall value, and making our next moves on that basis.

Writing in the journal, they use the analogy of a three-course dinner: it has mediocre starter, a fine main, and an excellent dessert. This will be viewed much more favourably – and have much more weight in any future decision – than the inverse: an excellent starter and ending with a mediocre dessert, despite the fact that overall both experiences share equal value.

Researchers say that the computational demand to try and factor in all experiences equally would be vast, so our brain constantly updates its internal ‘logbook’ as we go, with each new experience being condensed and then ranked against the previous few for context. Then, a new experience only has to be judged against the running total.

However, a ‘temporal markdown’ comes into play, meaning that the further back an experience, even if still quite recent, the less weight it carries in the next decision despite its relevant value; the most immediate experiences carry much more weight in decision-making than they should – meaning a recent ‘happy ending’ has a hugely disproportionate influence, say researchers.

They say that a wealth of information and experience “leaks” as a result of this cognitive mechanism, leading to false and delusional beliefs that cause wrong-headed and often short-term decision-making despite historical experience that should convince us of the contrary.

Yet a small number of those tested (nine of the 41 participants) were able to maintain an almost perfect capacity to recall previous experience accurately, without the markdown of past experiences, and make solid long-term decisions as a result – almost as if they were “looking down on time” said lead author Dr Martin Vestergaard.

“Most people we tested fall foul of the ‘banker’s fallacy’, and make poor short-term decisions as a result. This may be because they struggle to access historical experience, or give it the correct value, but we also think they become overly impressed with the moment to moment fluctuation of experiences,” said Vestergaard, from Cambridge University’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.

“While the majority of participants made decisions based only on very or most recent events, a minority were able to maintain a seemingly perfect ability – at least within the parameters of the experiment – to see time on an equal footing, unconstrained by the myopia inherent in the decision-making of most,” he said.

“The next stages of our research will be to use imaging techniques to look at whether this ability is linked to certain parts of the brain, or perhaps social conditioning such as age and education.”

Vestergaard did question age and occupation for the initial study, and found no correlation between those who are older, or who have a more or less technical occupation, with this panoptical ability to flatten time, but says the current sample size is too small to draw conclusions.

The experiment involved participants trying to accumulate money by gambling between two sets of gold coins of varying sizes at high reactions times so participants were forced to go on memory and instinct.

Although our genetic information – the ‘code of life’ – is written in our DNA, our genes are turned on and off by epigenetic ‘switches’. For example, small methyl molecules attach to our DNA in a process known as methylation and contribute to the regulation of gene activity, which is important for normal development.  Methylation may also occur spontaneously or through our interaction with the environment – for example, periods of famine can lead to methylation of certain genes – and some methylation patterns can be potentially damaging to our health.  Almost all of this epigenetic information is, however, erased in germ cells prior to transmission to the next generation.

Professor Azim Surani from the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge, explains: “Epigenetic information is important for regulating our genes, but any abnormal methylation, if passed down from generation to generation, may accumulate and be detrimental to offspring. For this reason, the information needs to be reset in every generation before further information is added to regulate development of a newly fertilised egg. It’s like erasing a computer disk before you add new data.”

When an egg cell is fertilised by a sperm, it begins to divide into a cluster of cells known as a blastocyst, the early stage of the embryo. Within the blastocyst, some cells are reset to their master state, becoming stem cells, which have the potential to develop into any type of cell within the body. A small number of these cells become primordial germ cells with the potential to become sperm or egg cells.

In a study funded primarily by the Wellcome Trust, Professor Surani and colleagues showed that a process of reprogramming the epigenetic information contained in these primordial germ cells is initiated around two weeks into the embryo’s development and continues through to around week nine. During this period, a genetic network acts to inhibit the enzymes that maintain or programme the epigenome until the DNA is almost clear of its methylation patterns.

Crucially, however, the researchers found that this process does not clear the entire epigenome: around 5% of our DNA appears resistant to reprogramming. These ‘escapee’ regions of the genome contain some genes that are particularly active in neuronal cells, which may serve important functions during development.  However, data analysis of human diseases suggests that such genes are associated with conditions such as schizophrenia, metabolic disorders and obesity.

Walfred Tang, a PhD student who is the first author on the study, adds: “Our study has given us a good resource of potential candidates of regions of the genome where epigenetic information is passed down not just to the next generation but potentially to future generations, too. We know that some of these regions are the same in mice, too, which may provide us with the opportunity to study their function in greater detail.”

Epigenetic reprogramming also has potential consequences for the so-called ‘dark matter’ within our genome. As much as half of human DNA is estimated to be comprised of ‘retroelements’, regions of DNA that have entered our genome from foreign invaders including bacteria and plant DNA. Some of these regions can be beneficial and even drive evolution – for example, some of the genes important to the development of the human placenta started life as invaders. However, others can have a potentially detrimental effect – particularly if they jump about within our DNA, potentially interfering with our genes. For this reason, our bodies employ methylation as a defence mechanism to suppress the activity of these retroelements.

“Methlyation is effective at controlling potentially harmful retroelements that might harm us, but if, as we’ve seen, methylation patterns are erased in our germ cells, we could potentially lose the first line of our defence,” says Professor Surani.

In fact, the researchers found that a notable fraction of the retroelements in our genome are ‘escapees’ and retain their methylation patterns – particularly those retroelements that have entered our genome in our more recent evolutionary history. This suggests that our body’s defence mechanism may be keeping some epigenetic information intact to protect us from potentially detrimental effects.

Reference
Tang, WWC et al. A unique gene regulatory network resets the human germline epigenome for development. Cell; 4 June 2015

Charities have long wrestled with the issue of persuading people to donate their time to worthy causes. Many potential time-givers donate money instead due to the perceived psychological costs of giving their time – which is by definition limited.

But new research co-authored at the University of Cambridge finds that ‘moral identity’ can overcome time aversion because it affirms and reinforces this identity, especially when the cost of giving time rises – and charities can use this key insight in recruiting people for time-giving tasks.

Significantly, the study found that charities can issue ‘moral cues’ that trigger such moral identity and make people more likely to donate their time to good causes – a key practical finding for the charitable sector. Defining ‘moral identity’ around a set of nine traits including kindness, caring and generosity, the study found that moral identity can be activated by showing people images of ‘moral exemplars’ such as Gandhi and Mother Teresa, and quotations focused on the same idea such as: “Wherever there is a human being, there is a chance for kindness.”

According to the study, a strong moral identity may reduce time aversion not despite the higher cost of giving time, but rather because of it. Put another way, giving time more strongly reinforces the moral self, compared to giving money, according to the researchers, who call time aversion a ‘socio-psychological malady.’

The study, entitled “I don’t want the money, I just want your time: how moral identity overcomes the aversion to giving time to pro-social causes”, has just been accepted for publication by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“The study has significant implications for how charities and other good causes recruit volunteers for time-giving tasks,” says co-author Eric Levy, of Cambridge Judge Business School. “We found that there is a strong connection between moral identity and the willingness to donate time.”

One key finding was that when the cost of giving time rises, people with a high moral identity may be more motivated to give their time, and those with a low moral identity are more averse to giving their time. Conversely, in low-cost situations, those with a high moral identity are less apt to give their time than are people with low moral identity.

This suggests that charities need to consider levels of ‘moral salience’ in their promotional material and other outreach to potential time-givers.

According to the study, if charities wish to recruit volunteers for low-time-cost tasks they may be better off targeting individuals whose moral identities occupy a less central role within their self-concept. Conversely, if they wish to recruit volunteers for tasks with a high time cost they may do well to target individuals whose moral identities occupy a more central role in their self-concept.

The research paper comprises four separate studies. The first finds that moral identity can make giving time appear less costly; the second and third find that a ‘moral cue’ reduces time aversion even in unpleasant situations (such as emptying dirty hospital bedpans) and when time appears to be scarce (by enhancing a perceived connection between the time-giver and the beneficiary of the time donation); the fourth accounts for the real costs of time, finding that the ‘chronic salience of moral identity’ especially lessens time aversion when giving time becomes increasingly costly.

The study was co-authored by Americus Reed II of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Adam Kay, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia; Stephanie Finnel, a marketing support services specialist at BAYADA Home Health Care; Karl Aquino of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia; and Eric Levy of University of Cambridge Judge Business School.

Adapted from a Cambridge Judge Business School story.

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I’m not kidding,” Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google famously observed in 2009. It seems a difficult assertion to take seriously, but six years on, there is little question that their skills are at a premium.

Indeed, we may need statisticians now more than at any time in our history. Even compared with a decade ago, we can now gather, produce and consume unimaginably large quantities of information. As Varian predicted, statisticians who can crunch these numbers are all the rage. A new discipline, ‘Data Science’, which fuses statistics and computational work, has emerged.

“People are awash in data,” reflects Zoubin Ghahramani, Professor of Information Engineering at Cambridge. “This is occurring across industry, it’s changing society as we become more digitally connected, and it’s true of the sciences as well, where fields like biology and astronomy generate vast amounts of data.”

Over the past few years, Richard Samworth, Professor of Statistics, has watched the datarati step out from the shadows. “It’s probably fair to say that statistics didn’t have the world’s best PR for quite a long time,” he says. “Since this explosion in the amount of data that we can collect and store, opportunities have arisen to answer questions we previously had no hope of being able to address. These demand an awful lot of new statistical techniques.”

‘Big data’ is most obviously relevant to the sciences, where large volumes of information are gathered to answer questions in fields such as genetics, astronomy and particle physics, but it also has more familiar applications. Transport authorities gather data from electronic ticketing systems like Oyster cards to understand more about passenger movements; supermarkets closely monitor customer transactions to react to shoppers’ predilections. As users of social media, many of us disclose data about ourselves that is as valuable to marketing as it is relevant to psychoanalytics. Increasingly, we are also ‘lifeloggers’, monitoring our own behaviour, health, diet and fitness, through smart technology.

This information, as Ghahramani points out, is no use on its own: “It fills hard drives, but to extract value from it, we need methods that learn patterns in the data and allow us to make predictions and intelligent decisions.” This is what statisticians, computer scientists and machine learning specialists bring to the party – they build algorithms, which are coded as computer software, to see patterns. At root, the datarati are interpreters.

Despite their ‘sexy’ new image, however, not enough data scientists exist to meet this rocketing demand. Could some aspects of the interpretation be automated using artificial intelligence instead, Ghahramani wondered? And so, in 2014 and with funding from Google, the first incarnation of The Automatic Statistician was launched online. Despite minimal publicity, 3,000 users uploaded datasets to it within a few months.

Once fed a dataset, the Automatic Statistician assesses it against various statistical models, interprets the data and – uniquely – translates this interpretation into a short report of readable English. It does this without human intervention, drawing on an open-ended ‘grammar’ of statistical models. It is also deliberately conservative, only basing its assessments on sound statistical methodology, and even critiquing its own approach.

Ghahramani and his team are now refining the system to cope with the messy, incomplete nature of real-world data, and also plan to develop its base of knowledge and to offer interactive reports. In the longer term, they hope that the Automatic Statistician will learn from its own work: “The idea is that it will look at a new dataset and say, ‘Ah, I’ve seen this kind of thing before, so maybe I should check the model I used last time’,” he explains.

While automated systems rely on existing models, new algorithms are needed to extract useful information from evolving and expanding datasets. Here, the role of human statisticians is vital.

To characterise the problem, Samworth presents a then-and-now comparison. During the past century, a typical statistical problem might, for instance, have been to understand the relationship between the initial speed and stopping distance of cars based on a sample size of 50.

These days, however, we can record information on a huge number of variables at once – the weather, road surface, make of car, wind direction, and so on. Although the extra information has the potential to yield better models and reduce uncertainty, in many areas, the number of features measured is so high it may even exceed the number of observations. Identifying appropriate models in this context is a serious challenge, which requires the development of new algorithms.

To resolve this, statisticians rely on a principle called ‘sparsity’; the idea that only a few bits of the dataset are really important. The statistician identifies these needles in the haystack. Various algorithms have been developed to select the important variables, so that the initial sprawl of information starts to become manageable and patterns can be extracted.

Together with his colleague Dr Rajen Shah in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Samworth has developed a method for refining any such variable selection technique called ‘Complementary Pairs Stability Selection’. This applies the original method to random subsamples of the data instead of the whole, and does this over and over again. Eventually, the variables that appear on a high proportion of the subsamples emerge as those meriting further attention.

Scanning Google Scholar for citations of the paper in which this was proposed, Samworth finds that his algorithm has been used in numerous research projects. One looks at how to improve fundraising for disaster zones, another examines potential biomarkers for breast cancer survival, and a third identifies risk factors connected with childhood malnutrition.

How does he feel when he sees his work being applied so far and wide? “It’s funny,” he says. “My training is in mathematics and I still get a kick from proving a theorem, but it’s also rewarding to see people using your work. It’s often said that the good thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s back yard. I suppose this demonstrates why that’s true.”

Inset image: left to right, Zoubin Ghahramani and Richard Samworth

In 1999, NATO bombs rained down on Belgrade, hitting various targets including a TV centre just 300 metres from Ivan Rajic’s flat.

His mother lived in fear that a neighbouring newspaper office would be next on the list. His father, meanwhile, was documenting the situation in a daily diary for a Norwegian newspaper. The series of articles was later published as a book, which Ivan has recently translated into Serbo-Croat. The diary details his father’s views on a war which he believed had much more to do with conflicts between elite groups in Kosovo, Serbia and the West, than with ethnic hatred.

Ivan’s father, Ljubisa Rajic, died two years ago, but his ideas and influence helped shape Ivan’s political views and his interest in nominally nationalist struggles in Europe today. For his PhD at Cambridge he is focusing on how different levels of regional development within countries can form the basis for independence movements. He is looking in particular at the recent referendum on Scottish independence.

Ivan [2009], who was born in Belgrade, was brought up in a house full of politics and ideas. His father, who founded the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Belgrade, was always very politically active. He was a leading member of the Association for Yugoslav Democratic Initiative, one of the first democratic parties after the introduction of multi-party democracy in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s.

Although he became disillusioned by party politics by the mid-1990s, he remained an outspoken public intellectual. Ivan’s mother, a retired meteorologist, shared the same views as his father.

Ivan’s father was a leftist and an atheist,  who saw the Yugoslav wars as a conflict between elites, who used nationalism and religion to further their aims. Ivan was taught not to sing nationalist songs and he refused to cross himself on school trips to  monasteries or churches of cultural importance.

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia affected him in other ways too. During primary school a refugee from Sarajevo came to live with the family. She was from an ethnically mixed marriage, and her father, an ex-army officer, had been tortured.

Having a father who was a professor and public intellectual and being surrounded at home by around 7,000 mostly non-fiction books gave Ivan a significant advantage in his education at a time when the country’s education system was suffering from economic and political turbulence. Ivan applied to study economics at the University of Belgrade.

During his studies, he came across How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor by the Norwegian economist Erik Reinert. His father had brought him the Norwegian original on one of his trips to Norway.

The book was to prove very influential in his thinking on economics. “It was critical of two things. One is the flawed notion that economic development comes spontaneously from free markets. The other is the fact that one school of thought is dominant in economics – neoclassical economics – and that it has narrowed down economics to mathematical modelling,” says Ivan. He translated the book into Serbo-Croat soon after he got it.

Ivan finished his undergraduate course in 2009 after having already started to work as a junior economist in a think tank in Belgrade. He applied to continue his studies at Cambridge and started his MPhil in Development Studies in 2009, progressing to a PhD. For both he has received the support of a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

His first idea for his PhD was to explore some of the inefficiencies in the former Yugoslav economic system, the explanations for which he thought had been oversimplified by some as being down to the fact that it was not capitalist enough.

“If you grow up in any of the post-Yugoslav republics, you hear all the time how the economy was inefficient, how workers’ self-management was a stupid idea, how it was wrong to industrialise,” he says. “But, all that makes little sense. For starters, why is the IMF austerity programme imposed on Yugoslavia in the 1980s excluded from any analysis of Yugoslavia’s economic problems? You also hear all the time how the Yugoslav wars were about ethnicity and religion. But what caused the war was the domestic elites manipulating people into hating and fearing each other, combined with a very healthy dose of Western elites engaging in divide-and-conquer imperialism. So, you have two areas – politics and economics – that are, of course, connected, but severely misunderstood. I thought that perhaps if they were analysed in a better way, a real connection could be seen.”

Ivan’s supervisor suggested he focus on a more current topic. The Scottish referendum was just about to take place. He sees the roots of the latest move towards independence in Scotland as being economic and originating from the neoliberal slant that the UK has taken over the last several decades, which has heavily impacted most areas (Scotland included) outside of the South East.

“There are many parallels between Scotland and the UK, Catalonia and Spain, Quebec and Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and a host of other examples,” says Ivan. “In all those cases, the trail leads back to certain similarities in the political economy of the countries in question. We need to understand how and why such moves towards independence happen. Because, as a number of examples show, the country where I was born included, things can end up in a very, very bad way.”

It’s a common occurrence: when faced with a problem which is similar to one which has been faced before, most people will default to what worked in the past. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But while this approach often works, it can also limit thinking and prevent alternate, and possibly better, solutions from being considered. In psychology, this phenomenon of being ‘stuck in a rut’ or failing to ‘think outside the box’ is known as fixation, or the ‘Einstellung’ effect.

Fixation occurs in all sorts of settings, such as with the interpretations that scientists make of their data, the decisions that managers make in organisations, and in the diagnoses that physicians make. It’s is also an issue in design and engineering, where knowledge of earlier solutions can inadvertently narrow the range of answers that designers explore when responding to new problems.

Since the phenomenon of design fixation was first demonstrated in experiments over 30 years ago, researchers have worked to understand how it is influenced by the types of example solutions that designers are aware of, the design methods that they use and the interactions that they have with other team members.

“Whether designing a new toy, a new bridge, or a new piece of software, fixation can stop the creative process cold: severely limiting the way in which we see a problem and the variety of solutions we explore,” said Dr Nathan Crilly of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “However, there is still a lack of in-depth research on fixation in the real-world settings that experimental research is meant to simulate. In particular, we have little knowledge of how fixation occurs in professional design projects that have conflicting objectives, long timescales and experienced team members.”

To address this gap in knowledge, Crilly recently conducted a qualitative study with designers working in innovation consultancies about their awareness of fixation and the strategies they use to overcome it. The study found that although various formal methods are used to promote creative thinking, reflecting on prior episodes of fixation is the most effective way of guarding against such episodes in the future. The analysis may help to build a framework for new strategies to combat design fixation – developing tools and training that help designers to avoid becoming fixated in future. The results are published in the journal Design Studies.

What causes fixation varies from person to person, and from project to project, but common factors include a commitment to initial ideas, project constraints that prevent exploration, and organisational cultures that give people ownership of their ideas, which gives them the incentive to defend them.

Common factors that prevent fixation include diverse teams, making and testing models and facilitation of the creative process by people who are familiar with fixation risks. However, experience can be a both a blessing and a curse when it comes to preventing fixation. As designers gain more experience, they learn how certain approaches succeed or fail, with the experience of failure particularly prominent in their minds. This accumulated knowledge can cause designers to become increasingly conservative, with experienced designers sticking to a restricted set of solutions that are known to work.

While experience of failure can lead to fixation, other forms of experience can help to prevent it. For example, by working on a variety of different projects, designers are exposed to the many ways in which any given problem can be solved. This experience of variety acts to remind designers that the current problem they are addressing must have multiple possible solutions too, even when they are seemingly stuck on one way of looking at it.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, as designers accumulate design experience, they also accumulate experience of fixation, either in themselves or in those they interact with. These episodes of blindness might only be recognised in retrospect, but by reflecting on them, designers can learn to recognise their biases and learn to resist them. Over time, designers become better at identifying the situations in which fixation is a risk and better at implementing countermeasures. For example, one of the participants described their own thought process as they work: “You always think your idea’s good, there’s psychology in that … And then you push other ideas to the side, mentally. … [But] the more projects you do then the more you … self-analyse.”

Despite their awareness of the risks of fixation and the steps they take to guard against it, designers also recognise that fixation is a difficult problem to control. In the creative process of developing new products, systems or services, designers must show commitment and persistence in the face of ambiguity and repeated setbacks. This makes it difficult to maintain the levels of openness and flexibility that are required to challenge previously accepted ideas or even ideas that are only just emerging.

This tension between persistence and openness is characteristic of many creative activities, whether in the sciences, the arts or in business. According to Crilly, to tackle this conflict it is important to gain a better understanding of the various creative behaviours that people exhibit and the barriers that block that behaviour.

“By understanding the nature of fixation, we’ll be able to develop the tools and techniques that effectively address it in the contexts where it occurs, and understand how these tools should be presented to the people who will use them,” said Crilly.

The research has been funded by the UK Physical Sciences & Research Council (EPSRC).

The battle lines have been drawn: consumers have broken free of traditional formats and schedules, and we now want our content wherever and whenever it suits us. It’s the biggest disruption the entertainment industry has ever seen, driven by new technology. As Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Director of the MPhil in Management at Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS), Dr Allègre Hadida is always fascinated by what’s driving change. So she posed the question: just what will we be watching in 2020 – and what will we be watching it on?

Hadida identifies several shifts that have recently changed the way we consume audio-visual content: first, platform proliferation. “TVs have become almost obsolete in most homes,” she says. “Now we can watch on mobiles, tablets – and soon, probably, watches. This has reshuffled the chronology of media. All the boundaries between cinema, TV, DVD and online have become blurred.”

Then there are our new patterns of binge-watching, which is changing our relationships to episodic content. Take the second season of Netflix’s blockbuster House of Cards: when it became available, all at once 660,000 viewers chose to watch the entire season in the space of three days. They didn’t want to wait a week for a new episode. So Netflix ensured they didn’t have to. “Binge watching has been allowed by the availability of content online and on those mobile platforms,” Hadida points out. “But will it change the narrative structure we adopt when telling stories and the way we produce stories?”

And what of the many new platforms – Amazon Instant, Sony’s Crackle, Walmart’s Vudu – emerging to serve our insatiable desire for new stuff? “There’s an evolution in the value chain of media production,” says Hadida. “Content aggregators such as TV channels have a growing concern that they might be squeezed out of that value chain altogether, as we increasingly find our own content and watch it without their filters. There’s a growing trend of hitherto content distributors going into content production. By 2020, will Netflix still exist, for example? Will Amazon be the one-stop shop for everything content related?”

But it’s also easier for anyone with an idea and a bit of technical know-how to get their content in front of millions. Millennials now spend more time watching amateur YouTube content than they do at the cinema. The new YouTube superstars are beauty vloggers like Zoella or Minecraft movie maestro Stampy, building vast audiences with little more than a webcam and an eye for what works. The content providers know that the next generation of talent is incubating online, and that’s where they’re looking. But will this see a downturn in quality? “I see five-year-olds watching content on YouTube and getting bored if it lasts more than five minutes,” says Hadida. “We’re told quality content is key – we have HD quality – but if thousands of people are now watching very poorly filmed amateur videos, 50 times in a row, what happens to their perception of quality content then?”

So where next for filmed entertainment? How will its nature and format change over the next five years? Who will be the winners and losers? We asked three industry insiders for their insights into Hadida’s question.

Alex Gonzalez, formerly marketing co-ordinator for Disney’s international marketing department, is currently studying for an MBA at CJBS, specialising in culture, arts and media management.

Two major changes will drive what we watch. The first is data. Take Google and Netflix, two of the biggest data aggregators in the world. They know more about us than we know about ourselves, and they’re vying for our eyes to watch their content. So they’re creating content based on what they think we’ll like. House of Cards was created because Netflix looked at the actors and directors people liked. They liked Kevin Spacey and David Fincher. So why not put them together? That data-driven content creation means we’ll always have a show we’ll want to watch. But there’s a danger there: what about discovering new content? How do we get a show that we don’t know we want yet – like Breaking Bad? So finding new shows, that’s going to be a new problem to solve. We don’t want to watch the same shows week after week. We tell ourselves we do but I don’t think that’s what we really want.

And then there’s symmetry – in information, and in ability. To elaborate: there are a lot of stakeholders in the industry. You have a lot of agents who negotiate for the stars, you have unions who protect screenwriters and directors and so on. But now, there’s a lot of information coming out from behind the curtain – how to make a movie. How to finance a movie. Where to find talent. Now people are saying: if we know all this, what do we need agents for? And we also have this symmetry of ability. Kickstarter and Indiegogo have made it possible for anyone to raise the money for a film, and get it out there themselves, getting a fan base – even if it’s just a seven-second Vine. People are thinking: hey, I can do that. Who wins? The consumer. You guys can just sit back and enjoy it.

Brett Granstaff (Cambridge MBA 2012) is an actor, writer, director and producer.

It’s predicted that by 2020, China will be the world’s biggest market for movies for viewership and box office, and will surpass the US. We’ll also be seeing more big data used to craft and create not just TV shows but also films. We’re already seeing this. A lot of films are using a lot of foreign locations and stars to increase their sales. Transformers: Age of Extinction was a massive hit in China and featured a lot of Chinese locations and Chinese stars like Li Bingbing. Look at Fast Five – it used Brazilian locations, and its South American box-office was huge. Hollywood’s been forced to wake up to the importance of foreign markets. To be honest, I didn’t use to care that much about them. That’s all changed.

You’re going to see a lot more day-and-date releases – where a film is simultaneously released in cinemas and other platforms. Amazon is going into theatrical distribution. They’re going to be releasing, they say, up to 12 films a year. Ten years ago, there was a six-month window between a film being released in the cinema and getting it on DVD. It’s been shortened and shortened. Now, with Amazon’s film, it’s going to be three weeks. A lot of the theatres are saying they won’t show Amazon movies because of that. They want their window. So there’s going to be a huge fight between the theatre owners and online distribution services.

Will people still be going to the movies? Sure. But the entire theatre atmosphere is going to change. You’re going to see a lot more luxury offerings in theatres. They’re popping up here a lot in LA right now. And they are pretty much all sold out at weekends. They’re charging a premium for services such as having certain showings where kids aren’t allowed. They serve alcohol. You get a full menu and waiter service. It’s high end. It’s all about the experience. People still want that social element that the movies provide.

Suranga Chandratillake (University of Cambridge, 2000) is a General Partner at Balderton Capital. He was previously an entrepreneur and engineer. Suranga founded blinkx, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge in 2004. He lead the company as CEO through its journey of moving to San Francisco, becoming profitable and going public in London where it achieved a peak market capitalisation in excess of $1bn.

To start with, what are we going to be watching this stuff on? I believe that by 2020, every single screen that we have access to will be a fully networked device that knows who you are. So whether it’s your watch, your computer laptop screen, your desk monitor, your TV, tablet or phone – they will all have a high-speed internet connection and be able to deliver TV and video content. And most importantly they’ll know who you are. There’s already talk of how Apple and Google are both looking at using front-facing cameras on phones to recognise who you are.

And because it will know who we are, it will know what we’re interested in – something that’s suddenly become available that we ought to know about, whether it’s personal – like a voice message from your mum – or whether it’s larger in concept – a TV show that you might like, a relevant event. So a pervasive video environment that is personalised and aware of the individual.

Gone will be the days of having different kinds of video experiences tethered to different devices. We’ll access anything, any way, based more on when we want to consume, when we have a free minute, rather than something we’re happy to be sat in front of. Thus far, video’s been very much controlled by this cycle of adverts and hours and half hour. I think that’s going away and I think we’re going to see the birth of some really exciting new formats. I think we’ll see a lot of experimentation around that kind of thing.

But it will be hard, I think, for the guys in the middle. There is still a lot of work to be done – facilitating payment systems, helping people discover new content, finding out what’s good and what’s not so good, curating content, bundling stuff that’s relevant together. That’s not all going to be done by computers. But the organisations that have traditionally done that for us, until now, are the TV networks, film studios and music labels, I’m not sure that they’re set up to do it in this new world. Some of them will figure it out and transform themselves. Others will cling on to the old models for too long. And still others, of course, will build entirely new, huge companies. That’s going to be the really interesting shift.

Originally published on the Cambridge Judge Business School website. 

The natural world is already in peril, yet demand for water, food and energy are set to rise further as the global population grows and climate change takes hold. Increased demand for one of these will alter the availability of the others. Businesses sit at the heart of this ‘nexus’ of interactions, both depending on and impacting on the environment. What academic research could help make their operations more sustainable?

Working with leading researchers from the Departments of Geography and Zoology, the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership’s (CISL) Nexus2020 project is bringing together ideas from the 6,000 alumni of our executive education programmes, business people, academics, policy-makers and members of the general public.

The project is part of the Nexus Network, an extensive network coordinated by CISL, the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia, and supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. With its considerable outreach across business, academia and government, CISL encourages conversation and stimulates the research that is most helpful to companies.

We want to know what you think are the most important questions around business practice that, if answered by 2020, could help companies manage their dependencies and impacts upon food, energy, water and the environment.

How can we meet future needs for food, energy and water without degrading our natural environment and putting companies out of business? Can we meet increasing demand for energy without making climate change worse? How do we produce enough food and energy with less water? These are the types of questions we are looking for.

In September, we will bring together leading members of the academic and business communities to rank the submissions and identify the most important questions for research. We’ll present these at the Nexus Network annual conference in November, by which point research will be underway.

The process of gathering questions and prioritising research needs is not new: Cambridge’s Bill Sutherland identified the 100 ecological questions of high policy relevance in the UK in 2006. More recently a project led by Jules Pretty looked at the top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture, and Lynn Dicks has replicated this process to look at the conservation of wild insect pollinators and the UK food system. These ranking exercises are extremely valuable and have had consequences for high-level policy, including Defra’s National Pollinator Strategy. These approaches also encouraged scientists to come together to develop workshops and led to the identification of initial priorities for programmes such as the UK’s Global Food Security Research Programme.

With the UN’s 2014 report highlighting that one-fifth of the world’s aquifers are being overexploited, how do ensure that corporate actions are alleviating water-related stresses? How do we communicate the urgency of sustainable farming methods when 10 million hectares of arable land are being eroded or degraded every year?

Whether your question is around policy, business education, rights, science, finance, or best practice, take part in this project – we want to know what you think.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, shows that the activity of almost a quarter of our genes (5,136 out of 22,822 genes tested) differs according to the time of year, with some more active in winter and others more active in summer. This seasonality also affects our immune cells and the composition of our blood and adipose tissue (fat).

Scientists have known for some time that various diseases, including cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis, and psychiatric disorders, display seasonal variation, as does vitamin D metabolism. However, this is the first time that researchers have shown that this may be down to seasonal changes in how our immune systems function.

“This is a really surprising – and serendipitous – discovery as it relates to how we identify and characterise the effects of the susceptibility genes for type 1 diabetes,” says Professor John Todd, Director of the JDRF/Wellcome Trust Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory. “In some ways, it’s obvious – it helps explain why so many diseases, from heart disease to mental illness, are much worse in the winter months – but no one had appreciated the extent to which this actually occurred. The implications for how we treat disease like type 1 diabetes, and even how we plan our research studies, could be profound.”

An international team, led by researchers from the JDRF/Wellcome Trust Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory in the Department of Medical Genetics, Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, examined samples from over 16,000 people living in both the northern and southern hemispheres, in countries including the UK, USA, Iceland, Australia and The Gambia. These samples included a mixture of blood samples and adipose tissue.

The researchers used a variety of techniques to study the samples, including looking at the cell types found in the blood and measuring the level of expression of the individuals’ genes – a gene is said to be ‘expressed’ when it is active in a particular cell or tissue, usually involving the generation of proteins. They found that the thousands of genes were expressed differently in blood and adipose tissue depending on what time of year the samples were taken. Similarly, they identified seasonal differences in the types of cells found in the blood.

Seasonal differences were present across mixed populations in geographically and ethnically diverse locations – but the seasonal genes displayed opposing patterns in the northern and southern hemispheres. However, the pattern of seasonal activity was not reflected as strongly in Icelandic donors. The researchers speculate that this may be due to the near-24 hour daylight during summer and near-24 hour darkness in winter.

One gene of particular interest was ARNTL, which was more active in the summer and less active in the winter. Previous studies have shown that, in mice at least, the gene suppresses inflammation, the body’s response to infection; if the gene has the same function in humans, then levels of inflammation will be higher during winter in the northern hemisphere. Inflammation is a risk factor for a range of diseases and hence in winter, those at greatest risk will likely reach the ‘threshold’ at which the disease becomes a problem much sooner. Drugs that target the mechanisms behind inflammation could offer a way of helping treat these diseases more effectively during the winter periods.

A particularly surprising finding was that a set of genes associated to an individual’s response to vaccination was more active in winter, suggesting that some vaccination programmes might be more effective if carried out during winter months when the immune system is already ‘primed’ to respond.

During European and Australian winters, they argue, the thresholds required to trigger an immune response may be lower as a direct consequence of our coevolution with infectious organisms, which tend to be more prevalent during winter. Interestingly, people from The Gambia showed distinct seasonal variation in the numbers of immune cells in the blood that correlated with the rainy season (June-October), during which time infectious diseases, particularly mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, are more rife.

“We know that humans adapt to changing environments,” says Dr Chris Wallace. “Our paper suggests that human immune systems adapt to show different seasonal variation in equatorial regions with fewer distinct seasons compared to regions at higher and lower latitudes with more pronounced differences between winter and summer.”

It is not clear yet what mechanism maintains the seasonal variation seen in the immune system, though it may be due to environmental cues such as daylight and ambient temperature. Our internal body clock – known as our circadian rhythm – is in part coordinated by changes in daylight, which explains why people in jobs that do not fit with the daily cycle, such as factory shift workers or crews on long haul flights, can be affected by poorer health.

Professor Todd adds: “Given that our immune systems appear to put us at greater risk of disease related to excessive inflammation in colder, darker months, and given the benefits we already understand from vitamin D, it is perhaps understandable that people want to head off for some ‘winter sun’ to improve their health and well-being.”

The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the type 1 diabetes charity JDRF and the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Professor Mike Turner, Head of Infection and Immunobiology at the Wellcome Trust said: “This is an excellent study which provides real evidence supporting the popular belief that we tend to be healthier in the summer. Seasonal variation to this extent is a fascinating find – the activity of many of our genes, as well as the composition of our blood and fat tissue, varies depending on the seasons. Although we are still unclear of the mechanism that governs this variation, one possible outcome is that treatment for certain diseases could be more effective if tailored to the seasons.”

Karen Addington, Chief Executive of JDRF in the UK, said: “We have long known there are more diagnoses of type 1 diabetes in winter. This study begins to reveal why. It identifies a biological mechanism we didn’t previously know of, which leaves the body seasonally more prone to the autoimmune attack seen in type 1 diabetes.

“While we all love winter sun, flying south for the whole of each winter isn’t something anyone can practically recommend as a way of preventing type 1 diabetes. But this new insight does open new avenues of research that could help untangle the complex web of genetic and environmental factors behind a diagnosis.”

Reference
Dopico, XC et al. Widespread seasonal gene expression reveals annual differences in human immunity and physiology. Nature Communications; 12 May 2015.

The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. The Society’s fundamental purpose is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

The Fellows elected from the University of Cambridge are:

Professor Ali Alavi – Department of Chemistry

Professor Jane Clarke – Department of Chemistry

Professor Anthony Edwards – Gonville and Caius College

Professor Zoubin Ghahramani – Department of Engineering

Dr Katen Patel – MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, said: “Science and its application are at the core of so many aspects of our modern lives. From treating infectious diseases, to building safe bridges and tunnels, searching out life on other planets and even vacuuming our living rooms, science helps us understand ourselves better and it makes life better.

“Without scientific knowledge, we might not be able to solve some of the greatest challenges of our time: food shortages, climate change and tackling diseases.

“The scientists elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society this year are leaders in their fields and have contributed much to the scientific endeavour. We are delighted to welcome them alongside the likes of great British scientists such as Newton, Boyle and Darwin.”

View the full list of new Fellows and Foreign Members.