Oxford University released documents this week showing it believes its investment in the arms trade is ‘socially responsible’.

The University Socially Responsible Investment Review Committee said that potentially providing arms to illegal regimes is not a “sufficiently compelling” reason to cease investment in weapons.

It also said that giving cash to arms companies was not “inconsistent with the objectives of the University”.
Minutes of the Review Committee’s February meeting, which relate these findings, have only been released this week.
The Review Committee was set up in March 2008 to “review the University’s policy on socially responsible investment”.

The board has therefore taken two years to make a decision about investment in the arms trade.

The Review Board did set some limits on investment in weapons. In the meeting on February 4th 2010, the Committee agreed to recommend, “Divestment from any company engaged in the manufacturer [sic] of arms that were banned by UN conventions (e.g. landmines, cluster bombs)”.

However, following the Investment Committee’s advice, the Review Committee agreed that a decision to divest from companies engaging in arms manufacturing would have an adverse effect on the University’s financial return.
The minutes stated, “Total divestment from companies engaging in arms manufacturers should not be recommended.”

The University currently invests over £6 million in UK and US arms companies, according to figures obtained by the Campaign Against Arms Trade in June 2008 under the Freedom of Information Act. This comprises about 1% of the University’s total investment, and is significantly lower than the £713m misreported in The Oxford Student yesterday.

A spokesperson from CAAT, from whom The OxStu also obtained their numbers, confirmed that the £713m referred to total investments, not to investments in arms.

The figure quoted by the paper is therefore almost three quarters of a billion pounds off CAAT’s actual estimate.

However, a spokesperson from the Press Office said the £6m figure could not be confirmed as the information is “confidential”. This figure includes investments in corporations such as BAE Systems, VT Group and Lockheed Martin.

It remains unclear how the Committee’s recommendations are likely to affect the University’s existing investments. According to figures supplied by CAAT, the University currently invests around £1.7 million in BAE Systems.

A spokesperson from CAAT stated, “While 1% of the University’s budget doesn’t sound like very much, it amounts to more than £5 million which could be invested in much more ethical businesses…This is outrageous.”

Despite the level of student opposition to investment in the arms trade, there is only one student representative on the Review Committee, Eorann Lean, OUSU VP for Charities.
Campaigners against University Arms Investment in Oxford remain “undeterred” by the Review Committee’s decision.

Amy Gilligan, Co-Chair of Oxford Anti War Action, told Cherwell that the campaigners “will be calling for even larger protests” than those organised by activists last November.

Decisions made in the follow-up meeting on March 4th will not be made public until mid-May.

Oxford Anti-War Action has voiced concerns regarding how slowly the Review Committee reports back.

The society complained, “That the [latest] decision has only come to light over two months after it was made is indicative of the impenetrable nature, and the secrecy that such committees operate under.”

Oxford University start-up Plink Search Ltd has is the first UK Company to be purchased by Google Inc.

Mark Cummins and James Philbin, Information Engineering graduate students at the Department of Engineering Science, founded the firm in 2009.

PlinkArt, available as a mobile app on the Google Android Market, enables users identify works of art by photographing them with their phone.
The company applies technology developed during the pair’s doctoral research to create a search engine based on visual art, rather than text. 

Cummins explained, “We started by talking to the university about licensing the IP from our PhD work – that was almost two years ago.

“We’d been taking steps towards it for a year or two before that, though.”
Plink won a $100,000 prize from Google last December after winning a public vote for the best reference app on Android. The company was also a finalist at Seedcamp, a London-based event offering advice for European start-ups.

Following the public launch of the company, over 50,000 users downloaded the app in just four weeks.

The Mona Lisa is the picture most searched for by PlinkArt’s users, with Leonardo da Vinci and Claude Monet the most frequently snapped artists.

Plink’s founders are both members of Oxford Entrepreneurs and hired subsidised office space in the OE Incubation Centre on St. Giles to set up the company whilst studying at the university.

Google’s acquisition of Plink reflects its continuing focus on the mobile platform as it competes with Apple’s iPhone for dominance in the fast-growing smartphone market.

In a blog post announcing the deal, Cummins and Philbin wrote, “We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works for everything you see around you.

“There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

OE President, Jordan Poulton, congratulated the pair’s success, “It has been an absolute pleasure having them in the OE Incubation Centre, and it will be a shame to lose them to Silicon Valley”.

For other potential student entrepreneurs, he added, “OE are launching a new programme this summer – Kick Start – offering up to £15,000 cash investment as well as mentoring, support and advice to startups in the web/tech space.”

Café Rouge in Jericho was forced to close temporarily due to poor standards in hygiene.

The restaurant was reported to the City Council after a customer spotted a mouse running around the restaurant. The business was issued with a hygiene emergency prohibition notice following an inspection by the Council.
Ian Wright, Health Development Service Manager at Oxford City Council, said that, “We were left with no option but to close the place down.”

On Friday, Oxford’s magistrate court heard the reasons for the closure. These included mice droppings in a bag of red onions, a dead mouse in external areas of the premises next to the kitchen, and live adult cockroaches in the restaurant area and in a walk-in chiller where ready-to-eat food is stored.
Andy Forbes, who lead the investigation for Oxford City Council, said to the Oxford Mail, “conditions had deteriorated to a level where we considered there to be an imminent risk to health”.

The restaurant reopened last Tuesday after an inspector deemed sufficient work had been carried out to make the premises safe.

A spokesperson for the restaurant said, “We can confirm that our Café Rouge Oxford restaurant is open for business. We strive to ensure the highest standards of food safety and service are undertaken”.

Ian Wright explained that the management had carried out the necessary action very quickly. He said, “To be fair to Cafe Rouge, they did carry out quite a lot of the works that we expected. We would hope that they’ve learnt a lesson.”

Café Rouge is one of four food businesses in Oxford to have been forced to close by the food safety team in the past 12 months.

The Oisi Master Sushi Bar in St Clements, J.M. Halal on the Cowley Road and the Al-Shami restaurant in Jericho were all closed by Environmental Health Officers.

Fears were raised at LMH recently as pranksters circulated a mass email warning that the LMH Arcadia Ball was also called off.

Following the cancellation of Balliol Ball during the vacation, many were concerned that Lady Margaret’s would meet a similarly disappointing fate.

 The prank came about after the Ball Committee sent an email to all those who had bought non-dining tickets, but did not hide the list of email recipients. 317 people received the prank message, sent at 1.30am last Sunday morning.

Thankfully for the 650 ball-goers who have already bought tickets, the story is not true.

“Please do not refund your dresses in panic, and be assured that this will not be taken lightly by the Ball Committee”, said Ball Secretary Emily Roberts, in a follow-up email headed ‘Damage Control’.

The prank certainly ruffled some feathers among LMH members, who had paid £130 for dining tickets, or £90 for non-dining. The spoof message “regretted to announce the cancellation of the LMH Ball” and assured students that they were “trying to organise refunds”.

 The message was particularly surprising for first-year History student at LMH, Ewan Short. The email was sent from [email protected] – an email address that has nothing to do with him.

“At first I thought I might have sent the prank email”, Short told Cherwell, “because I remembered being quite drunk that night. But then I quickly realised it wasn’t from me. I think it was probably some third years who set up the account and sent the emails.”

Short thought it unlikely that the joke caused any serious distress. “I don’t think anyone in LMH would have attached any credibility to the email, because to be honest, I don’t have any credibility. But some recipients at other colleges may have thought it was serious.”
 
The real senders of the email have since come forward and apologised to the Ball Committee for the confusion.
 
Presidents of the Ball Committee, Charles Streeten and Emily Stott, were happy to accept the apology. “It’s water under the bridge now, and both College and the Ball Committee are satisfied it has been dealt with satisfactorily,” they said.
 
College authorities, JCR representatives and the Ball Committee were keen to play down the prank. Roberts said, “I could count on the fingers of two hands the number of people who thought it was serious”.

JCR President, Genevieve Clark, added “it wasn’t funny for the people involved, but everyone felt very quickly reassured that the ball will still be happening”.
 
This prank cancellation email is reminiscent of the apologetic online message from the Balliol Ball Committee, who actually did have to cancel the Balliol Ball last week, due to “underwhelming ticket sales”.
Balliol The Ball Secretary said “we were unable to sell enough tickets to even approach breaking even.”
It is reported that the Balliol Ball Committee spent a large proportion of its budget securing DJ Yoda as a headline act.

Students at Oxford are more likely to convert to evangelical Christianity than those at less prestigious universities, according to new research.

This is due to the high pressure and stressful environment at Oxford, and the fact that Oxford students are inherently more creative than average.

The hypothesis was put forward by Dr Edward Dutton, a researcher for the Finnish Lutheran Church. Dutton claims that “students from state schools where [sic] over-represented amongst those who became Christians while at Oxford”. He attributes this to the mind-broadening effects of gap years on private school students.

Ellen Harvey, a Magdalen undergraduate involved in the Christian community, attacked Dr Dutton’s hypothesis. “The fundamental flaw with his argument is that it excludes God, assuming that someone becomes a Christian because of solely human factors, the influence of other Christians, psychological impulses… It is astonishing that in an extensive bibliography the Bible has not been referenced”.

To this claim, Dr Dutton responded, “This is a piece of social scientific research which draws upon the empirical method at the heart of science. The existence of the Christian god – by its very nature – cannot be proven empirically or, entirely, disproven. It is a doctrine of faith you can take or leave, something which stands in contrast to the scientific position.”

Dr Dutton himself was careful to downplay his findings. “Obviously, at this stage, and as I stress in the paper, there is a degree to which the intelligence research is speculative. But it is, I think, a plausible observation in light of the evidence so far accrued by myself and others”.
Other Oxford academics are skeptical about the conclusions that Dr Dutton has drawnfrom his research.

Dr Justin Barratt, an Oxford experimental psychologist working on cognitive science of religion, said, “I applaud the attempt to bring social, cognitive, neuro-, and evolutionary sciences together, but I don’t find the result compelling in this case …The paper reads more like an intelligent speculation based on some preliminary findings than a rigorous and compelling scientific study.”

Dr Dutton conceded that his results should not be taken too seriously. He insisted “I entirely agree that the case is not proven yet…[but]there is a strong tradition of ‘intelligent speculation’ in the sciences, justified because it provokes debate and may take us closer to the truth. To really prove it – or disprove it – we would, of course, need to conduct a major survey of student religious experiences, intelligence and creativity.”

The paper was published in the Romanian online “Journal for Interdisciplinary Research on Religion and Science”. It draws on interviews conducted by Dr Dutton with 25 members of OUICCU, the university-wide Christian union, as well as similar interviews at three other universities.

The return of students and staff to Oxford this week was severely disrupted as volcanic ash forced the cancellation of flights in and out of the UK.
The flight ban caused problems for those finalists who were due to sit official University examinations in 0th week. Other Universities, including Cambridge, postponed examinations till later in the term.

However, Oxford stated that the exams would proceed as planned.
A spokesperson for the Faculty of Ancient and Modern Languages commented that “All those unable to attend [their examinations] have been referred to the proctors”.

Despite the flight ban being lifted on Tuesday night, many international students were unable to return in time for their collections on Friday and Saturday.
There were complaints from affected students that the University had not handled the situation well.

One student said that they had “no idea what will happen with my collections, or whether my college will charge me for this week’s residence.
“Generally, I think that both the University and College could be a bit more helpful, because clearly I’m not the only one who has this kind of problem”.
Other students were more upbeat about the situation.

Second-year Somerville student Matt Waksman, who was stranded in Jerusalem, said, “I’ll just have to catch up on collections and work when I’m back, there’s nothing I can do and I haven’t received any official advice from Oxford.

“At the moment I’m planning on getting to Rome next week and hoping to get home from there. More promising is Brown’s announcement that they will fly UK Citizens stranded outside of Europe to Spain, where they will be picked up by the British Navy.”

The disruption is not just affecting students and tutors.
There were worries that former Bond actor Sir Roger Moore’s appearance at the Oxford Union might have to be cancelled. However, the Union assuaged member’s fears, stating that the talk will still go ahead this week, as he was able to reschedule his flight from Paris.

The Bodleian Library’s copy of the Magna Carta had also fallen victim to the ash cloud, becoming stranded in New York after an Oxford Alumni event in the city’s Waldorf Astoria hotel.

Due to the unexpected delay in travelling, the 1217 copy of the Magna Carta has been put on public display in The Morgan Library in New York from the 21st of April to the 30th of May.

Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, who is accompanying Magna Carta in New York, commented, “We realised that a public exhibition was the silver lining to this particular ash cloud.”
The 800-year-old document had never left the country before.

India Lenon, stuck in Hong Kong

I was on a family holiday in Hong Kong which was meant to end on Friday 16th April, but our flight was the very first to be cancelled. This wasn’t so much of a problem for me, with the start of term almost a week away, but my sister’s term started the next day and she’s sitting her A-levels in a few weeks.

We had to decide whether to stick it out in Hong Kong or to try to get back by other means – but getting trains or boats would have taken weeks, and all the flights to anywhere near Britain were fully booked until June.
We spent five extra days in Hong Kong, at a cost of about £1,000 per day, which was less than fantastic.

On Wednesday we were woken at 4am by a phone call from Air New Zealand, who had put us on the first flight back out because we had been waiting so long. They said that we should get to the airport as quickly as possible, so unwashed and barely awake we bundled into a taxi.

The airline had clearly decided to prioritise families and old people, so we were lucky to get onto the flight.
When we finally landed in Heathrow all the passengers cheered, which was fairly cringeworthy but proof of the relief everyone felt. Arrivals was full of news crews filming us all arriving, but due to our unwashed state we hurried on past.

Mark Damazer will leave the BBC in October to take up the position of Principal of St. Peter’s College. The position has been vacant since the departure of Professor Bernard Silverman at the end of 2009.

The position, which has been renamed from Master to Principal, comes with a reported £90,000 salary, house and free meals.

Mr Damazer’s arrival follows a recent trend of colleges shunning dons in favour of civil servants, journalists and other figures. St Hilda’s, Corpus Christi and Trinity have all appointed non-academics to helm them in the last four years.
The recruitment process began after Professor Silverman’s surprise resignation letter in February 2009 Professor Silverman is now Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office.

Speaking to Cherwell, Mr Damazer explained how the time seemed right to leave broadcasting. “It was not at all planned until I applied for this job. It got to year 6 [at Radio 4] and I hadn’t looked at anything else. Academic life fascinated me…when I sat down and thought about it, [being Principal] was what I wanted to do.”

A JCR delegation first met with head-hunters Russell Reynolds early in Michaelmas term 2009 to outline the qualities they wanted in their new Principal.

Late in Hilary term 2010, the JCR President, Vice-President and President-Elect met each of the six shortlisted candidates and provided feedback to a member of the selection committee.

JCR President, Daniel Stone, said “I wanted someone who could understand things from the point of view of students, someone who was good at communicating and who could bring the college even closer together… after meeting Mark, I am confident that he has these characteristics and more.”
This level of JCR consultation on senior appointments is gaining ground in Oxford.

Mark Damazer has been in charge of the BBC’s speech network for nearly six years, and is seen by those close to him as an intellectual tiger with a donnish temperament.

Speaking to BBC Oxford, Mr Damazer put it another way. “I have this idea that knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge is an insatiable human need, a lust” he said. “I like the idea of working in the public sector for the public good. Both [the BBC and St Peter’s] are world class institutions.”

Mr Damazer has been careful not to second guess his role at St Peter’s. He commented, “Most of the wisdom and answers lie within the existing body of fellows…I’m not a chief executive – I’m the public face to the University and the outside world.”

Although it is too early for Mr Damazer to lay out his strategy for St Peter’s, he has expressed a wish “to bring aspects of political, cultural and artistic life that I’ve been exposed to in my career into the college”.

The Vice-Master of St Peter’s, Professor Stephen Hasselbo, said in a written statement, “Mark is a multitalented person who has had a very distinguished career within the BBC. All members of College are greatly looking forward to working with him.”

Mr Damazer was an undergraduate at Cambridge where he attained a double-starred first in History. He was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard and is married with two children.

Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC and a friend of Mr Damazer, is also thought to be considering a move to academia. .

Posh Nosh, Hasan’s, Ahmed’s and many, many more – for most students, these celebrated Oxford institutions need no introduction.

The local kebab van is just as integral a part of the University experience as formal halls and essay crises. When it’s late, cold, and you’re feeling a little bit worse for wear, food which would barely pass as edible in the cold light of day suddenly becomes irresistible.

But do students really know what goes into the polystyrene trays that the jolly kebab van proprietors dish up to their clientele?

Most shocking is the customers’ ignorance of just how many calories they are consuming.

A survey conducted by Cherwell showed that 60% of students chose the falafel kebab as the “healthy option”, over chips and the meat kebab.

In fact, we can reveal this dish averaged out at a whopping 1338 calories per portion, over half of the recommended daily allowance for women, and almost the same proportion for men.

The option which is actually the least calorific of the trio, the kebab, was not identified as the healthiest option by any of the respondents.

The average student woefully underestimates how many calories are in a kebab or a portion of chips by up to 50%. When asked to estimate how many calories were in a portion of chips, the average student answered 440 calories.

When the same question was put to kebab lovers, the answer came out at 610 calories.

An investigation conducted by Cherwell reveals the nutritional content of some of the most popular kebab van selections in all their calorific glory.

The results are little short of horrifying.

The average doner kebab at Ahmed’s contained 987 calories, with those sold at Hussein’s not much better, at 930 calories. However, the really surprising result came from that most innocuous of snacks – the chip. Just a single portion of chips at Hussein’s is laden with 1079 calories. A portion of Ahmed’s chips, often seen as the ‘healthier’ choice, has a ‘mere’ 1041.

The vendors of one van estimate that they sell at least 100 portions of chips on a busy night. That’s 107,900 calories that Oxonians attending just a single kebab van are eating every single evening.

And that’s all without sauces.

Bearing in mind that the recommended daily allowance is 2000 calories for a woman and 2500 for men, these figures are quite gruesome.

The level of fat in chips from both vans (averaging out at 70g) was 108% of the recommended daily allowance for a woman, and 88% for a man. Kebabs once more proved their slightly less dubious health credentials, containing 59g of fat (91% RDA for women, and 74% for men).

Despite containing the lowest number of calories out of the three foods tested, the nutritional content of the doner kebabs contained less obvious health risks. Both kebabs contained very high levels of protein – Hussein’s came in at 77g, Ahmed’s at 67g – both of which are well above those recommended for a healthy diet. The average adult male requires 56g per day and the average adult female just 45g.

The issues associated with over-consumption of the types of foods that are sold at kebab vans, include increased risks of coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some forms of cancer.

The analysis of a selection of food from local kebab vans Hussein’s and Ahmed’s was performed by Dr Neil Heppell and Professor Jeya Henry of the Functional Food Centre at Oxford Brookes University. The lab tested portions of Hussein’s chips, doner kebabs and falafel kebabs and Ahmed’s chips and doner kebabs.

However, national studies suggest that Oxford students may have escaped relatively lightly. A study, which sampled 494 kebabs across 76 councils, was published by the Local Authority Coordinators of Regulatory Services in January 2009, revealed that our city traders are by no means offering the unhealthiest fare.

The average kebab in the north-west was 1101 calories, compared to 1084 calories in Scotland, 1055 calories in Wales and 1066 calories in the south-east. By contrast, our local average of 959 calories seems marginally better, and even more so when held up against the button-popping 1990 calories hidden in the nation’s worst offenders.

Natalie Newton, an undergraduate at Christ Church, commented on the results, “This will definitely make me think twice before buying anything from a kebab van again.”

However, for some, it seems that the risk of an expanding waistline will not be enough to deter them from stopping by their local. As one chemistry undergraduate said, “Obviously kebabs aren’t the healthiest thing, but the way I see it, the protein goodness of the doner meat coupled with the carbohydrate of the pitta encompass all that’s needed for a wholesome and balanced diet. Knowing exactly how many calories is in every bite is really not going to stop me from eating them.”

Despite Government attempts to increase public awareness on health issues, it certainly looks like business is booming for kebab vans. Research published by the Food Standards Agency in 2006 found that 18.5% of doner takeaways posed a “significant” threat to public health, and 0.8% posed a threat alarmingly termed as “imminent”. Most definitely food for thought.