A research assistant from Oxford University’s Translational Neuroscience and Dementia Research Group will take place in a thirty-hour endurance event early next month to raise money for investigating potential cures for Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr Francesca Nicholls, 31, is currently involved in research which transforms the hair and skin cells of Alzheimer’s sufferers into nerve cells in order to test new treatments. The research is funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK, a charity founded in 1992 by private benefactors concerned about the lack of treatment for the condition.
‘Race the Tide’ is organised by Alzheimer’s Research UK and will take place between 10th and 11th September. It is a trek along St Cuthebert’s Way, the medieval walkway running from Melrose, Scotland to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, which is only accessible during low tide. The course is over 100km long, made more difficult by the hilly terrain. With hundreds of participants, the event is expected to raise tens of thousands to fight the degenerative disease.
Dr Nicholls’ has begun training for the hike by walking through the Oxfordshire countryside, although admits that walking for over twenty-four hours may be something of a challenge. She is hoping to exceed her initial fundraising target of £800 as local media has raised the profile of her campaign.
More than 850,000 people in the UK suffer from dementia. Although the majority of them are over 65, roughly 40,000 people under that age are victims of early onset Alzheimer’s. There is currently no cure for the disease, but drugs delaying or reducing its symptoms are being developed in increasing numbers. A greater awareness of the disease has also led to better personal care and an increased focus on counselling for suffers and their families
To donate or find out more about Dr Nicholls’ fundraising campaign visit justgiving.com/fundraising/FrancescaJNicholls.
Despite missing out to Cambridge this year in some national and international university rankings, Oxford has redeemed itself in a study that shows it produces more millionaires than any other institution in the United Kingdom.
Research by Elite Traveler magazine and wealth consultancy firm WealthInsight pegged Oxford as the fourth-largest producer of millionaire alumni in the world, behind US institutions Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and Stanford.
Cambridge and the University of London also placed inside the top 15 universities worldwide, the former just edging out the latter on the list. The United States dominated the list, with every other spot in the top ten going to universities there.
There is some question over the extent to which measures like this can be used as litmus tests for graduate earnings as a whole: the Guardian and Complete University Guide rank Cambridge higher in ‘graduate prospects’ and ‘career after six months’ respectively.
Oxford’s wealthy students have made headlines before, with 44.4 per cent of students admitted in 2015 having attended independent schools, suggesting that Oxford may already hold an advantage in wealth accumulation over other universities in Britain.
Previous research into billionaire graduates has shown similar results, with nine of the top top ten universities with the most billionaire graduates in the United States, along with Cambridge.
A report by the Intergenerational Foundation in July found that the £400,000 lifetime earnings boost often touted as the payoff for tuition fees in the British university system could only be achievable by Oxbridge graduates.
The full list of universities ranked by millionaire graduates can be found here.
If you like feeling smug about tourists, try the Radcliffe Camera!
Living in Oxford, you’ll quickly become accustomed to the hordes of tourists waiting to ambush you around every corner, with their matching caps and their inability to stand anywhere other than the middle of the road. But nowhere do they congregate more than underneath the Radcliffe Camera, that big round one in all the photos where historians and literature students spend most of their waking hours. No-one ever tires of brandishing their Bod card as they push through the crowds and dramatically sweep through the gate, before taking one quick look round when you get to the door to make sure they all saw you do it. Stereotypes are there to be played up to.
If you like industrial décor, try the Gladstone Link!
I’m glad the Gladstone Link exists. No, really. There’s nothing better than cold, dead metal, strip lighting and impassive white walls to encourage you to drill out an essay as fast as possible. Connecting the Radcliffe Camera and the Old Bodleian buildings – two of the nicest places in the city – it resembles a factory more than a library, and that’s before you even get to the dead-eyed historians inhabiting it. And then it goes down another level! And you can’t even take books out of the Lower Gladstone Link, forcing you to stay in that dungeon as it slowly drives you insane.
If you like the heat of a thousand suns, try the SSL!
Air conditioning was invented multiple decades ago, but the Social Sciences Library doesn’t seem to have caught on to that. Instead, it exists to give every student working there a chance to experience that nasty sweat you get after running for a train for several hours at a time. Middle of winter? Take some time to strip off those four extra layers you had on, and then freeze yourself as soon as you step out the building! Depths of summer? Slowly suffocate as the lack of ventilation stimulates life inside a sealed glass cube! Just another high price to pay for studying PPE.
If you like misery, try the Sackler!
God, I hate the Sackler. How can a library be this depressing? What have they done to make it like this? Maybe it’s the focus on art history, meaning everyone in there is either aggressively good-looking or a hippy. Or the fact you can’t take rucksacks larger that a sheet of A4 upstairs with you. Or perhaps the circular design, which means you can only see the desks extending around both in front and behind you, with seemingly no end. I don’t know what it is, but it’s miserable, and I would have to be dragged kicking and screaming back in there.
If you like Drake’s latest album, try the Weston!
Yes, I’m totally going to make this dreadful joke, and nothing anyone says is going to stop me. The Weston’s recently-completed refurbishment has given the library a lovely reading room on the top floor, with a lovely view of the old heart of the city looking out over Broad Street. Even better, there’s a terrace on the floor above to give a completely unobstructed view of Oxford’s spires. All in all, this is the best library in Oxford if you’re a fan of great views.
If you like science, try the Radcliffe Science Library!
I’m not really sure why scientists need a library, to be honest. Isn’t science just full of formulae? Why don’t you just look them up online? If I was a scientist, with future job prospects and all that jazz, I’d probably try to avoid reading books as much as possible, and do fun things like dissecting alligators or building jet planes. I’ve heard that both of those things definitely happen, although I also hear that designing bridges is getting a bit tiring for the engineers and they’d like to move on to something more fun, like light switches.
The University of Oxford has been ranked as the seventh best university worldwide, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). In the table, which was published on Monday, Oxford gained three places from last year’s performance, scoring 58.9 out of a possible 100 points.
Harvard maintained the top spot, as it has done since the ARWU’s creation in 2003. Cambridge moved up to fourth for the first time since 2009, having previously been ranked fifth. Oxford and Cambridge are, once again, the only UK universities in the top ten, whilst 15 of the top 20 universities are American.
The AWRU is also known as the Shanghai Ranking as it is produced by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy. It focuses on research quality, using six indicators which include the number of Nobel Laureate and Field Medallist staff and alumni as well the number of articles published in the journals Nature and Science. Although AWRU has been criticised for its focus on sciences over humanities, it is still one of the most highly esteemed university rankings across the world.
Methods of ranking universities can differ considerably, with the Times Higher Education (THE) World Rankings earlier this year placing Oxford second and the California Institute of Technology first. Meanwhile, the QS World University Rankings, published by Quacquarelli Symonds, placed Cambridge second and Oxford sixth. Differences in ratings can be attributed to the different metrics used in each system. The THE chooses to focus to a greater extent on teaching, whilst QS has historically been criticised for reliance on reputation and peer review indicators.
2016 is the first year in which Chinese universities have appeared in the AWRU’s top 100. Tsinghua University was placed 58th and Peking University 71st. This is also the first year in which more than five Australian universities have been awarded top 100 places.
Oxford’s applications for entry in 2016 were higher than Cambridge, with 19,124 teenagers applying compared to 16,719 for Cambridge: a difference of around 15%. In both cases, there were a record number of applicants, with a total of 35,843 prospective Oxbridge students.
Multiple explanations have been put forward for the discrepancy, including Cambridge’s more stringent A-Level requirements, with many humanities courses requiring A* grades where Oxford does not, and Oxford’s more aggressive outreach schemes.
Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, stressed the role of admissions targets in increasing applications to Oxford when talking to The Daily Telegraph: “[Oxford] has taken into account contextual factors and it has reserved a number of places for students from who have been entitled to free school meals. Oxford is also encouraging people from a diversity of backgrounds to apply.”
Dr Julia Paolitto, Media Relations Manager for Oxford University, commented,“While it’s too early to be able to attribute our increase in applications to any one particular factor, we would take it as a positive sign that the increase in our outreach activity (and effective targeting of groups most under-represented at Oxford) is having an impact on our applications.”
Roughly 29,143 applicants did not secure a place this year – up by 1,044 or 4 per cent – from the 28,099 last year. This figure was a 6% rise on the 27,500 teenagers who were turned down in 2014/15.
Oxford has 3,200 places available, a fewer places than Cambridge’s 3,500 available spots.
Two centuries ago, the academicians of elite fine art schools in cities such as Paris, Florence, and Amsterdam – where the aesthete ruled supreme – would scorn and inveigh at the sight of Michael Craig Martin’s seminal An Oak Tree, 1973. (Water, Glass)
An Oak Tree, Michael Craig Martin, 1973. Photo credit: Anietie Ekanem
The thought of such a piece would very much not have crossed their minds, as art existed solely in the media of painting, printmaking and sculpture, inspired by nature with the work of art being true. What ‘truth’ means has been debated since the Platonic era, through to John Ruskin in the 19th-Century. Evidently, this question of truth coexisted with conceptual art in Britain during this radical period in history which this exhibition explores. For the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and Second-wave Feminism were all key turning points between 1964 and 1979.
It was this fluidity and continuum of art being pushed to its limits as a consistent means of understanding the world which was prevalent and worked well in this exhibition, Tate Britain’s ‘Conceptual Art in Britain: 1964-79’.
In art’s history, there is a continuity of art being a mediator between the human and the world, often showing what we, as a people, might lack. It counterbalances us: think the Pre-Raphaelites painting pastoral scenes amid the industrial revolution, or France in the late 18th-century using Neoclassicism as a corrective to its decadence. Instead, this exhibition creates and presents us with questions regarding what we consider art to be, in parallel with a period of rapid change. However it doesn’t give us the answers: it doesn’t provide us with a means to correct or re-balance us. Rather, it emphasises what we lack:the answers to questions which the artists themselves have raised.
Soul City, Roelof Louw, 1967. Photo credit: Anietie Ekanem
When visiting this exhibition, one is thrown into the deep end. It is intimidating. Given the connotations of what ‘art’is defined as, one might be taken aback when they are faced with blank white walls with salutes to semiotics, mirrors, and pyramids of oranges. Pretentious or ambitious, you decide — but the exhibition unapologetically triggers a personal response and way of deciphering what it is you see. Conceptual art places the idea above the aesthetic, and in looking and reading, there is a lot of thought that has gone into the art work that form the exhibition. The art in the exhibition makes us look inward at our own conceptions and ideas, drawing a continuous line of how we see and experience art from the past to our present.
Mirror Piece, Ian Burn, 1967. Photo credit: Anietie Ekanem
This is why I would posit that it is this post-Wilson, pre-Thatcher period which saw the apex of abstraction. For this conceptualism is rooted in its thought, as opposed to lack of technical skill, or its being reactionary for the sake of being so. It is challenging and it makes you think, which might not be for the person seeking a calm afternoon (the Georgia O’Keefe is across the Thames at Tate Modern). This exhibition forces you to get on its level, and that makes it compelling.
Oxford University has received mixed results from the National Student Survey (NSS). Nationwide, Oxford came joint 20th with 15 other higher education institutions, with an overall student satisfaction rate of 90 per cent. Whilst the Oxford University Medical School received the highest satisfaction rating of all British medical schools, the Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) took the bottom spot in the NSS tables for the fifth year in a row.
The NSS is a series of 23 online questions relating to six areas of the learning experience as well as student unions and overall student satisfaction. It is aimed at final year undergraduates, and assesses universities and other higher education providers on a number of satisfaction-based criteria every year. The 2016 poll, which was released on 10th August, had a sample size in Oxford of 2919 finalists. Across the country the poll showed student satisfaction remained at record levels.
Oxford University performed particularly well in satisfaction with the medical school, in which 99 per cent of medical students agreed that they were satisfied with their experience of the course, with 87 per cent claiming high satisfaction. Dr Tim Lancaster, Director of Clinical Studies, commented: ‘It is wonderful to receive this appreciation from our students for both our six and four year medical courses. The NSS consists of 22 questions and covers six domains in addition to overall satisfaction. Oxford achieved high scores across all domains. This reflects not only the excellence of teaching throughout the two courses, but the high quality of the administrative staff who provide such a high level of organisation and cohesion. Effective partnership with our NHS partners is another crucial part of this success. I would like to thank all the scientists, clinicians and administrators who contribute to our team.” He added, “It is particularly pleasing that Oxford is able to achieve high levels of both student satisfaction and graduate achievement.”
On the other hand, only 34 per cent of Oxford students who responded to the National Student Survey (NSS) 2016 described themselves as ‘satisfied’ with their student union, whereas 37 per cent described themselves as neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.
Across Higher Education Institutions in the UK the average satisfaction level with studnet unions was 62.3 per cent; top of the table was Leeds University Union, which had a 92 per cent satisfaction rating. Student unions at two other collegiate universities, Durham and Cambridge, were also around the bottom spots, with satisfaction rates at 35 and 37 per cent respectively.
OUSU VP Eden Bailey commented, “Most Students’ Unions, unlike OUSU, have physical facilities and resources encompassing bars, club nights, cafes alongside clubs and societies, and all manner of other things. We unfortunately don’t have this kind of space, visibility, or the funding to provide it. For most Oxford students, their College’s Common Room comes closer to the kind of status, facility, and familiarity that Students’ Unions at other universities have.
A huge challenge we face is that not many people realise that a number of the great things that common rooms do offer are facilitated by OUSU, from discount contraceptives to developing papers and other resources to lobby Colleges on important issues. This year we’ll be providing common rooms with more support than ever before, with a huge new training programme which will offer free training not just for common room presidents, but for students who want to get involved in everything from looking after a society’s finances to being trained as a first respondent to sexual violence.
A lot of our most crucial work for students is behind the scenes, and much of it confidential, for example negotiating with the University on issues to do with fees and funding, particularly in light of the government’s recent Higher Education Bill. A lot of what we achieve as student representatives on committees may not seem like particularly flashy or highly visible ‘wins’ but they make a huge difference to students’ access to and experience of education at Oxford. However, one thing we definitely want to work on this year is ensuring that all of our ‘wins’ are delivered and communicated through a variety of channels that reach an increasingly wide range of students.
Additionally, some of OUSU’s best work is through the support offered to students who are most marginalized by the University and Colleges, and this is reflected in the NSS score – we have notably higher ratings of satisfaction from students who identify as BME than as white, and from women than men.
So, in many ways, the NSS rating highlights that many students don’t know very well what OUSU does. So perhaps it’s not surprising we don’t get rated so highly. But in addition to expanding what we are already doing well, making this visible is something we are committed to improving.”
Publications such as the Times Higher Education have begun to speculate that a ‘new elite’ of popular universities might emerge from university rankings based on student satisfaction. In this year’s NSS results of the 24 universities to score 90 or above, only six are from the Russell Group.
Crayfish in the River Cherwell have caused the partial collapse of a wall belonging to Magdalen College. The wall, located alongside Addison Walk and near Magdalen Bridge, has been damaged by crayfish burrowing into it. The position of the wall on a bend in the river has made it suitable for the crayfish to take root there over a period of several years, causing severe structural damage.
Magadalen College have told Oxford City Council that the damage poses risk to the Grade-I listed Water Meadow, a popular area for riverside walks in Oxford. It is believed that the cost of repairing the damage will amount to thousands of pounds.
Proposed repair works include inserting underwater concrete supports and lining the wall with a trench sheet that will reduce future burrowing. Documents lodged with the city council by Magdalen College say, “The works will sensitively reinstate and stabilise the bank and ensure these grounds continue to remain in use.
Owing to the seriousness of the bank erosion – much of which is caused by burrowing crayfish and high flows over slumped clay – the professional advice received is that proposals put forward represent the only viable options.”
The American species of crayfish, Pacifastacus leniusculus, has invaded many British rivers and has been identified as a threat to the ecosystem of UK waterways by the Environment Agency and the Great British Non-Native Species Secretariat (NNSS). Pacifastacus Ieniusculus, also known as Signal Crayfish, were introduced to Britain in the 1970s after disease decimated the native population.
However, they have been identified as problematic due to their predatory behaviour and rapid breeding. Although a spokesperson from the Environment Agency said that cases of structural damage caused by the fish are rare, they have been known to burrow deep into river banks in order to hibernate during winter.
Attempts to reduce the population of Signal Crayfish by marketing them as a health food are yet to be successful.
Physicists at the Oxford Clarendon Laboratory have developed a highly precise quantum ‘Fredkin gate’, a building-block required to make a quantum computer, bringing us closer to making this theoretical super-computer a reality.
A quantum computer is a hypothesised, incredibly powerful machine capable of performing many large calculations simultaneously, in contrast to the desktops we are familiar with which compute far fewer at a time. It would make use of ‘qubits’, the quantum analogue of the digital bits we use today.
In traditional computing, ‘bits’ are units of information which can take the value 0 (‘off’) or 1 (‘on’) and which can be strung together to encode ‘words’. Performing a calculation involves electrical signals passing through ‘logic gates’ which change bits from 1 to 0 and from 0 to 1, acting as ‘on-off’ switches. With a quantum computer, however, the qubits make use of the quantum states of sub-atomic particles to store information. The strange quantum behaviour of such particles means that, as well as taking the value 0 and 1, the qubit can also exist in a third, superposed state – effectively existing as both 0 and 1.
The Oxford researchers have increased the precision of a quantum version of a three-bit logic gate known as a Fredkin gate to 99.9%, exceeding the theoretical threshold required for the manufacture of a quantum computer. The work makes use of a quantum-phenomenon known as ‘entanglement’: if something happens to one of a pair of entangled particles, the other particle is instantaneously and simultaneously affected, no matter how far away it is. Einstein called this intertwining of fates ‘spooky action at a distance’.
There remains much work to be done before quantum computers become a genuine possibility, but the viability of this crucial building-block is an encouraging step.
“To put this in context,”, comments co-author Prof David Lucas, “Quantum theory says that – as far as anyone has found so far – you simply can’t build a quantum computer at all if the precision drops below about 99%. At the 99.9% level you can build a quantum computer in theory, but in practice it could very difficult and thus enormously expensive. If, in the future, a precision of 99.99% can be attained, the prospects look a lot more favourable.”
Nonetheless this achievement is “another important milestone on the road to developing a quantum computer.”
Research paper: High Fidelity Quantum Logic Gates Using Trapped-Ion Hyperfine Qubits, C. J. Ballance, T. P. Harty, N. M. Linke, M. A. Sepiol, and D. M. Lucas, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 060504, 4 August 2016
For more science content, please see Cherwell’s sister publication Bang!, at http://www.bangscience.org
Representatives from student unions across the UK, including the Oxford University Students’ Union (OUSU), have written an open letter to the vice-chancellors of British universities asking them to oppose the government’s proposed Teaching Excellence Framework. The letter, published in the Guardian on Wednesday, criticises the ‘questionable metrics’ that TEF will be based on and the divisions that it will cause between higher education providers.
TEF was first proposed in a government green paper in November 2015. Although a final proposal has not been released, it has already been described as a radical shake-up of the British higher education system. It aims to make comparison between higher education providers easier for prospective students, but has also been linked to an increase in the number of institutions able to award degrees and the increase of tuition fees at top universities.
The letter criticising TEF was signed by OUSU president Jack Hampton as well as five of the organisation’s vice-presidents. They appeared on the list of signatories along with representatives from 49 other university student unions, including the Cambridge University Students’ Union, the University College London Students’ Union and the University of Bristol Students’ Union. The controversial president of the NUS, Malia Bouattia, signed the letter with twelve NUS vice-presidents and senior officers.
TEF will group higher education providers into three bands based on their performance in three ‘metrics’. These metrics are student satisfaction, retention (the number of students who complete their courses at the institution within the prescribed timeframe) and graduate employment. All of these metrics have come under a degree of criticism from universities and student groups as likely to be effected by factors other than teaching quality. It has also been suggested that measuring retention rates may lead to universities making their courses easier whilst graduate employment rates may discourage universities from offering niche or highly academic degrees.
In response to these criticisms, government advisors have proposed measuring these metrics qualitatively, via a team of experts, rather than quantitatively. Alternatively replacing the metrics with a measure of ‘value added’ or ‘learning gain’ has been discussed. If adopted, this may involve a test taken by students at the beginning of their course and repeated at the end, but there are currently no published details about how this would be implemented.
In the green paper ‘The Teaching Excellence Framework: Assessing quality in Higher Education’, published in February 2016, government advisors asked universities to engage in ‘speedy establishment of potentially viable metrics relating to learning gain’.
In its official response to the paper, Oxford University expressed concern about the division that TEF may place between teaching and research.
In a statement to Cherwell, OUSU commented, “We don’t believe that the TEF will have a positive impact on Oxford University, or on UK Higher Education as a whole. In its currently proposed form, the TEF is a broad-brush exercise that doesn’t account for differences in teaching across the sector, and given that undergraduate study at Oxford is based on the tutorial system and differs considerably from other institutions, we do not think that the TEF will account for this adequately.
“According to modelling conducted by the Times Higher Education based on the proposed metrics, Oxford ranked 4th on raw data, and 28th once benchmarking had taken place. This would put us in the Outstanding category, which means the University will be able to raise fees by the level of inflation. This has disastrous implications for access. Debt aversion is a known deterrent to prospective students; if the University is able to raise fees year on year, an Oxford education will become less and less accessible to many students from less advantaged backgrounds, making our community less diverse and impeding our ability to attract the best students regardless of background.
“The metrics that are currently being proposed are the results of the NSS and DLHE surveys. We believe that neither student satisfaction rankings nor employment and salary data of leavers six months after graduation are reliable or robust indicators of the quality of teaching in an institution. DLHE data in particular has been shown to reflect the background and demographics of the student population more than the quality of the education they received. Attempting to shoehorn teaching excellence into a narrow definition based on these criteria is not only reductive, it is also damaging to UK Higher Education as a whole.
“As general principles, we welcome increased transparency and accountability of academic provision within HE – it is important to make sure that universities are providing excellent quality teaching to their students. However, there are ulterior motives at play in the reforms heralded by the government’s White Paper and HE Bill. There is an underlying assumption to the TEF, demonstrated by the link to fee increases, that a better education should cost more. This will result in a differentiated fee system across HE, creating a hierarchy within the sector that will lead prospective students to choose where to study based on cost, rather than quality.
“We are fully committed to an Oxford that is as accessible and inclusive as possible. We oppose the TEF because we believe that it will have a catastrophic effect on access. Raising fees in the way proposed through TEF puts the burden on the student, rather than the government, to cover the costs of a university education. Oxford is already an expensive place to live and study; if fees consistently increase at the rate of inflation, an Oxford degree will become exponentially more unaffordable for many prospective students.”
