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Science

Royal Institute Christmas Lectures 147

Posted by Hemos from the interesting-reading dept.
category9 writes "One of the best xmas tv highlights for us chaps in the UK is the RI Christmas Letures. Once broadcast by the BBC, Channel4 now have the helm. Past lecturers include the world renowed cybernetics engineer, Prof. Kevin Warwick. This year Sir John Sulston, of Human Genome Project fame, will be talking about genetics and the building blocks of life over 5 lectures. This is a must see for anyone interested in artificial intelligence. The lectures are presented in a format which allows technical detail, but in a way very accessible to those outside the particilar scientific fields. The website has transcripts for anyone not able to receive Channel4, perhaps with streams coming at a later date (lobby Channel4 if you must)."
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Royal Institute Christmas Lectures More

Royal Institute Christmas Lectures

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  • It seemed a bit bland this year, I saw some of Adam-hart Davis' program on BBC2 by accident, which seemed more interesting even though it lacked depth, before switching over to C4. Maybe some of the other lectures will be more entertaining.
  • It would be interesting, but when you can't watch it.

  • HMm (Score:1)

    by Zanek ( 546281 )
    "This year Sir John Sulston, of Human Genome Project fame, will be talking about genetics and the building blocks of life over 5 lectures. This is a must see for anyone interested in artificial intelligence. " The only way I can see him tieing this into AI is by describing the parallels between neural nets and low order organisms Kick ass website [dancclark.com]
  • Does this mean that UK's Boxing Day is over and everybody can surf the *.uk sites again? :)

  • Captain Cyborg (Score:4, Informative)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Wednesday December 26, 2001 @08:00PM (#2753478) Homepage Journal
    Past lecturers include the world renowed cybernetics engineer, Prof. Kevin Warwick.
    *Snigger*

    You clearly don't read The Register [theregister.co.uk]. Warwick is a joke in the Artificial Intelligence community, regarded by most as little more than a publicity hound. He used to go around saying that we would all be human slaves in a robot nation by the year 2000. At the time he came to my university to debate some of the professors in our Artificial Intelligence department, and they mopped the floor with him.

    Having milked the world of Artificial Intelligence for all the publicity it was worth, he then installed one of those chips they use for tracking dogs [theregister.co.uk] in his arm and started claiming that he was the first Cyborg...

    Do a search for "Captain Cyborg" at The Register to learn more about this guy, he gives science a bad name.

    • That would be nice if it was up today. What's up with that? It's been down all day today. I need my daily dose of The Register like I need my dose of Slashdot.
      • I have been reading it all morning.

        • Re:It works for me (Score:2, Informative)

          by _xeno_ ( 155264 )
          Caching nameservers are nice like that - it works for me where I work because the nameservers are very slow to update themselves.

          If I SSH to my school, which does not cache domain names, I get the following:

          Server: non-caching.name.server
          Address: 192.168.1.1

          *** non-caching.name.server can't find www.theregister.co.uk: Non-existent host/domain

          Whereas if I run the same command here, I get:

          Server: caching.name.server
          Address: 192.168.1.2

          Non-authoritative answer:
          Name: www.theregister.co.uk
          Address: 213.40.196.64

          So those without it cached can read it via http://213.40.196.64/ [213.40.196.64] or you can just add it to /etc/hosts or %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

      • The Reg's IP and the latest rumours on their demise were discussed here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25327&cid=2751 007

        Dave
    • Unfortunately, he's very convincing to non-techie people. A friend of mine who does an IT-support job was telling me about this brilliant speaker she saw at a conference. He had gone on about robots and cyborgs and artificial intelligence and all sorts of things. It was only when she mentioned that he was working on turning himself into a cyborg that the penny dropped and I was able to point out that not everyone was convinced by his "experiments".


      By the way, The Register isn't available [slashdot.org] via its usual URL at the moment. So here's a direct link [213.40.196.64] to some of their Kevin Warwick coverage.

    • Try the (ahem) Kevin Warwick Watch: www.kevinwarwick.org.uk [kevinwarwick.org.uk] if you want something more interesting than www.kevinwarwick.org [kevinwarwick.org].

      FEAR KEVIN [kevinwarwick.org.uk]
  • I went to these as a kid, very cool lectures covering some suprisingly difficult stuff with the usual obfuscating crap removed. It was also the only time I got to see TV crews and the amount of hassle it takes to make television, so a learning process on two fronts. If you can get to see one or two of these lectures, do.

    Downside: Eventually you get to university and get taught exactly the same thing with the obfuscating crap put back in again. By the same people.

    Dave

  • John Sulston is probably best known for... (Score:3, Informative)

    by myc ( 105406 ) on Wednesday December 26, 2001 @08:38PM (#2753570)
    his work on the anatomy of the soil nematode Caenorhabditis elegans [swmed.edu] . C. elegans is a simple roundworm that has only ~1000 somatic cells, of which ~300 are neurons. It was originally chosen as a modern model organism to study behavior, beacause of the simplicity of its nervous system. In the worm research community, Sir John is most reknowed for his serial electron micrograph reconstruction of all of the synaptic connections of all 302 neurons of the worm. Thus it is mostly due to his work that C. elegans is the ONLY organism in which scientists know the entire anatomy (that is, the wiring diagram) of the nervous system.

    On a related note, at a recent C. elegans seminar I attended, the speaker made mention of Sir John, saying (to paraphrase) "Only Sulston is interested in these long boring projects, like serial EM reconstructions and the human genome project". Said in jest, of course :)

  • RI website (Score:4, Informative)

    by CatherineCornelius ( 543166 ) <tonysidaway@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 26, 2001 @08:45PM (#2753587) Journal
    This page on the Royal Institution website [ri.ac.uk] has information on obtaining videos of past lectures. Channel 4 will make the current lecture series available on video in due course.

    RI is a quaint, somewhat ruritanian institution. Most of the membership are rather stuffy and insist on wearing formal evening dress to the discourses, and there is a tradition that no questions are taken from the floor (you have to buttonhole the speaker afterwards). The staff and the Director, on the other hand. are very unfussy and very helpful. The Director is Susan Greenfield, who is known as a broadcaster on neurology. They do have a lovely old building in Albemarle Street, however, with an absolutely excellent Faraday museum. Research into inorganic chemistry is still carried out in the basement where Faraday had his original labs.

    • 1994 Journey to the Centre of the Brain
      Dr. Susan Greenfield

      That was, IMHO, the best RI Xmas lecture of them all. Since then, Greenfield has been in the media a lot more (but not in the way Kevin Warwick has) and is certainly a revered expert on matters of the brain.

      Much of this lecture contained comparisons of brains and computers, and the way in which they may work together in the future. There were also a lot of practicals.

      It's when they're about geology, 'how the earth was formed', plant or human biology that they get mega boring. Who wants to see a plant get cut up? The math and tech ones rock :)
      • She was given a peerage last summer too - now Baroness Greenfield.
      • 1994 Journey to the Centre of the Brain
        Dr. Susan Greenfield
        [...]

        Much of this lecture contained comparisons of brains and computers, and the way in which they may work together in the future. There were also a lot of practicals.

        Traditionally the RI Christmas lecture series features at least one child-gratifying explosion. I shudder to think what Susan Greenfield must have gone through in order to fulfil this brief--whose brain did she blow up, and did she wear a protective rubber suit?

  • my damn dog has one of these chips, and he's definitely more entertaining (and prbably smarter) than warwick

  • kevin warwick (Score:2, Interesting)

    by category9 ( 521982 )
    perhaps there was a slight hint at sarcasm in my reference to kevin warwick, but we all love him really. he even offered me a place on his course at Reading uni. i decided against.
    when i said AI, i kind of meant neural nets, alife, and such things. i admit i could have worded it better. oh well, its a first article for me, better luck next time.

  • Ugh. (Score:1)

    by Ozeh ( 542218 )
    In the past I've been quite a fan of the RI Xmas lectures. What a pity that they now involve Warwick. The profiteering, egotistical, megalomaniacal cur.
    • He gave the lectures one year, and it wasn't actually as bad as I might have expected (decided to watch them for comedy value as much as anything else).

  • Dirty BBC bastards (Score:2, Funny)

    by rde ( 17364 )
    I got home from work just in time for the Christmas lecture, this morning, only to find that our friends on the BBC had started a similar science programme half an hour beforehand. It was called Come to Your Senses [bbc.co.uk] and it was pretty good. Unfortunately, it means I missed most of the damn Lecture.
    Maybe it's just my misanthropic nature, but I can't think of any reason for putting on such a similar programme at the same time that doesn't involve fucking over Channel 4.
    Offtopic? Perhaps. But I'm bitter, and needed to get it off my chest.

    On an unrelated matter, I recently got hold of the book of a series of Christmas Lectures given by Sir William H. Bragg in the 1920s. It's noteable for the fact that it's not afraid of explaining maths to the audience. He also wrote The Universe of Light, a popular science book that contains actual equations!.
    • The programme you mention (Come to your Senses) is a prime example of the BBC creating a middlebrow personality (Adam Hart Davies) and then using them to brand programme series (Starting with Local Heroes - which both I and my children enjoyed, through What the Romans did for us ... What the Victorians did ...). They then wheel out their "personality" and use them as a spoiler against another programme which is standing on its content.

      But then they have a pretty cynical approach to viewers anyway - someone will decide to kill off a popular programme (e.g. Mastermind) and take a familiar pattern. First you move it around the schedule - if it's a programme enjoyed by older viewers then you should shift it to a late evening slot after they've gone to bed. Then you shift it to a different night. Then you miss a couple of weeks for some sporting event, so that people who make a point of watching the programme don't know whether it's on or not. This should lose you enough viewers that you can say "finished due to falling audiences".

      Dunstan
  • I'll pay 10$ per VHS tape if there isn't ALOT of them to be taped. I live in the states, and I am a scientific computing major interested in genetics and artificial intelligence(no relation in my book). If there aren't alot of tapes, this will rule.

    email me:sager@andrew.cmu.edu
    • Dyou have a PAL VHS player or does your VHS player play PAL format tapes. Cos your in the US which uses NTSC I seriously doubt it, and most people who can pick up Channel 4 are I believe in europe, so you wouldn't be able to play the VHS tapes anyway. Just read the transcripts. From the previous Christmas lectures I've seen, they've been dumbed down to make it easy for everyone to understand, and usually don't contain much stuff that people who already follow the field don't already know
  • I am a briton and I hate the licensing fee, whenever I watch BBC I get half way through the program, need a pee and am waiting for the adverts, and it takes me bloody twenty minutes to realise there arent any bloody adverts and I have to miss the bloody program to pee! Its soo damn annoying!
    • whenever I watch BBC I get half way through the program, need a pee and am waiting for the adverts, and it takes me bloody twenty minutes to realise there arent any bloody adverts and I have to miss the bloody program to pee

      Ever heard of VCRs?
  • I was working in Italy for 6 months this year and I really missed my Channel 4, (if I could only choose one channel that would be it). Does anybody know if it's possible to get Channel 4 in Italy (I'm willing to pay!)?

    Shoot some Fish! [happyworm.com]
  • Oh man, these things used to be really good. i remember ones about AI and the Human Brain. but this year its just irritated me, that guy is just annoying. and it feels like A-Level content dressed up for 8yr olds! it doesnt achieve anything

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