Name a city in the Midlands.  Birmingham.  Well done.  Now name another one.  Err… Having trouble?  You’re probably not the only one.  A friend of mine certainly did when I asked him to think beyond Birmingham, and he lives with two Midlanders.  He wrinkled his brow and said I should give him time to think, so I left the room to make some coffee.  His brow was still wrinkled when I came back in and he was staring at a fixed point in deep concentration.  I drank my coffee.  “Nottingham?”  He eventually ventured.  Finally! It was a bit of a shame that it took him so long when one of his housemates actually lives in Nottingham I thought, but then I realised that he hadn’t finished yet.  I waited expectantly.  “Isn’t Nottingham really in the North though?” he asked.  

Sigh.  Why do people find it so difficult to accept that there is such a place as the Midlands?  Ok, they find it pretty hard to ignore Birmingham – it is England’s second city after all, so most people can vaguely point to it on a map.  But, Brummies aside, the rest of us have to jostle for position in the varying arguments about where the north/south divide is and try and plead that we are most definitely on one side or the other. 

I’m not just blaming people from outside the Midlands for this.  In fact, the worst culprits are those of us who actually live there and still pretend that it doesn’t exist.  I’ll admit it: I was one of the offenders when I first came to Oxford.  I came from Derbyshire and I thought that made me northern.  I liked brown sauce, I expected gravy with my chips and I was certain that the word ‘bath’ didn’t have an ‘r’ in it.  As a scared first year surrounded by so many Londoners, I felt it safest to ally myself with the northerners.  They seemed cool. 

But where was the gang of friendly Midlanders?  Why couldn’t I stand there during the inevitable North vs. South debate and say, hang on, the Midlands is clearly the best place to live?  Why was I so sure that if I said that, no-one would be on my side?  

Maybe it’s because that ruins the whole point of the debate.  If there isn’t a definite line between North and South, if it is possible to be something ‘in the middle’, then things become much more ambiguous.  In the southerner’s imagination, ‘bloody northerners’ live practically at the north pole, not just a couple of miles away in the next county.  And for northerners, the south is practically France.  It’s an alien nation, not t’other side o’ hill.  

Someone from the middle is left to feel a bit like a pariah.  We complicate matters and thus are ignored.  The worst thing though, is that we don’t have our own identity.  I was keen to be one of the northerners because they are seen as being down to earth, tougher than southern ‘pansies’ and good for a laugh, but what are Midlanders?  Well, we’ve got Robin Hood, the birthplace of rugby, lots of ex-coal fields and the Peak District.  I’m not seeing a unifying theme here.  Maybe it is false to look for one, but, dammit, our region is just as good as any other! 

Until more of us Midlanders start thinking like this though, we might as well not exist.  We can’t expect northerners or southerners to do it for us.  Sticking up for the Midlands would be the first step on the slippery slope to admitting that the north/south divide isn’t such a big deal.  So we have to start doing it for ourselves. 

Picture: Birmingham Bull Ring

http://www.flickr.com/photos/59303791@N00/465924531/

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In a series of further crackdowns on illegal cyclists in Oxford, police have been issuing fines to any rider caught without lights on their bicycle.During a road safety campaign, 55 cyclists were caught without lights on High Street and were issued with £30 fixed penalties.The road safety campaign, which earlier this month saw cyclists being fined for ignoring bans on riding down Cornmarket and Queen's Street, is part of a month-long awareness scheme run by Oxfordshire County Council.

A giant 25ft effigy is being created for Bonfire Night in a bid to raise money for charity.The wooden Guy Fawkes is being made by Dan Barton and his friends from Southmoor in the hope that they will be able to auction off the statue and raise money for the Poppy's Appeal charity, which hopes to raise £250000 to build a new building for Southmoor pre-school.For those looking for organised Bonfire Night events, South Park's annual Round Table charity fireworks display will take place on Saturday, November 3rd, with gates opening from 5pm, with the fireworks display at 6.30pm, followed by a bonfire (tickets £5).If you're willing to travel further afield, the largest fireworks display in the county will take place in Abingdon, with £6000 worth invested in the show.

I recommend this story from The Times. It'll have you, er, rolling with laughter.
 
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by Benjamin LeongUglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit falls unashamedly into the category of Books To Be Read On The Toilet, to fit behind the loo paper next to Crap Towns and Where’s Wally. Dr Robert Vanderplank has sifted through over forty languages in the hunt to find the planet’s most colourful insults, and compiled the best ones for our enjoyment. From the delightful “You’ll eat a turd before I will” of Ancient Greece to Japanese children’s favourite “Your mother’s navel is an outie!”, one is astounded at the extraordinarily diverse and expressive ways in which the various peoples of the world have found to insult one another.

Blasphemy is taken to the limit with the Catalan curse “I shit on God, on the cross, on the carpenter who made it and the son of a whore who planted the pine”, while the Igbo communties of West Africa opt for the amusingly specific “May you die of uncontrollable running stomach”. What insults and curses tell us about a culture is undoubtedly a wide ranging and fascinating question, but one which Vanderplank does not answer in sufficient depth. The most interesting bits of the book are where the author gives analysis of the culture behind a language’s insults. Who could fail to be captivated by the knowledge that in the topsy-turvy world of Italian politics, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was frequently derided as ‘Premier Pinochio’ for his lies and outsized nose? Or that in Spain, while the equivalents of ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ are not particularly offensive, a mere joke about someone’s mother might spark off a brawl? Unfortunately these sections are all too brief. The dictionary-style entries which make up most of the book can too often be mundane. Learning how to say ‘bastard’ and ‘fuck’ in other languages may have been fun in Year 9, but it fails to excite now. We also get the sensation of an academic uncomfortable about writing in an informal, chatty style. When Vanderplank quotes NWA’s ‘Fuck Tha Police’, for example, it is impossible not to feel a twinge of embarrassment. It’s like your tutor turning up in Converse and skinny jeans. However, despite these drawbacks, it will provide a pleasant diversion for those spare five minutes and will equip you with an arsenal for insulting your mates in new and ingenious ways.

Oxford scientists have challenged the value of studies that try to calculate the effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide on the climate.
In this week’s ‘Science’ magazine, Dr Myles Allen and Dr Dave Frame argue that placing an upper limit on climate sensitivity is difficult and less relevant to environmental policy-making than is often assumed.
“No one denies that quantifying climate system feedbacks is a crucial part of our attempts to understand the climate change problem,” said Dr Myles Allen of Oxford University's Department of Physics, “but putting an upper bound on climate sensitivity has become something of a Holy Grail for climate researchers. What we are suggesting is that this may not be possible or very helpful.”
Drs Allen and Frame suggest that the biggest mistake would be to place a fixed limit on carbon dioxide levels too early on, without leaving room for adapting to new research. Dr Allen said, “Providing our descendants have the good sense to adapt their policies to the emerging climate change signal they probably won't care about how sensitive our climate is because they will have been smart enough to limit the damage.”

 Tool-use in animals is often equated with intelligence. But Maja Choma wonders that if even pigeons can learn to use them, what does it say about our high opinion of ourselves?

 “Tool use is the external employment of an unattached environmental object to alter more efficiently the form, position or condition of another object, organism or the user itself when the user holds or carries the tool during or just prior to use and is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool”
(p10 Animal tool behavior by B. Beck. (1980)

Imagine getting up in the morning and not using a single tool all day long. No spoon or even a bowl for your cereal. No coffee from a machine on the way to lectures, no pen and paper for your notes. No phone calls, no iPod, no internet. Just nothing. 

It’s not until you imagine a world without tools that you realise how dependent we’ve become on them in every aspect of our lives. The influence of technology can be seen everywhere in modern society, but throughout evolution, tool-use has been our characteristic skill. We like using tools; a baby will play with them from a very early age, even if it just means banging one thing against another to make a fun noise.

It’s something we take pride in, imagining it requires a lot of intelligence and understanding, as something that sets us apart from other animals, something that helped us survive and become such a dominant species.  Being an extremely self-centred species, therefore, we find animals using tools fascinating. We’ve always thought that being able to use tools is a sign of some special ability, a human-like intelligence or logic. But is it? 

A crow can make a hook out of a twig and use it to extract snacks from holes. A chimpanzee can use a box to stand on or a stick to reach a banana. Even a snail can use small stones to shift its own balance in order to turn the right way up (yes, someone made an experiment to see what happens when you put a snail up side down on its shell.) Are these instances demonstrating special cognitive abilities? Why should tool manufacture and use be a good indicator of having them? Just because humans are smart (we tell ourselves) and use tools doesn’t mean that animals who use tools are smart. In fact to say so would be very naïve – if not plain stupid.

In 1917, Wolfgang Köhler reported some interesting instances of impressive problem-solving behaviour in a number of chimpanzees; a bunch of bananas was placed in a room, high enough to be out of easy reach of the 7 chimps present, and a small wooden box was placed in a far corner. All the chimps tried to obtain the food by jumping, but when it failed, they paced for some time when suddenly one individual ran to the box, pushed it under the bunch, climbed and reached the bananas. Köhler called this behaviour insightful, causing a great controversy. The problem-solving didn’t require trial-error learning or special training, yet the chimp did it; no-one taught the animal to push objects or to get on top of them in order to reach others, yet it did so in one smooth, error free way, straight to the success of eating the banana.

Other experiments include chimps using a series of gradually longer sticks to reach for other sticks, the final one being of the correct length to reach a reward. Again, no trial or error learning was present: the chimp simply sat for a while, contemplated, and then solved the problem smoothly and with minimal error.  Insightful indeed. But surely such flashes are only present in primates? Not true. Almost 70 years latter, a group of psychologists from Harvard University decided to have a closer look at this “special ability” – with pigeons. 

Epstein and colleagues trained 11 adult pigeons; some were trained to just push a small box around their cages towards a green spot, others were trained to climb a fixed box and peck on a picture of a banana (and not fly or jump towards it), still others were taught separately both of the actions. In their experiment, they placed a picture of a bout of reach, and a box away from it, than put a bird into the cage and observed and filmed its actions.

First three birds, all of which has been trained in both actions separately, behaved very similarly: each subject was at first “confused” –looked around, gazed back and forth at banana and box, but after a while and rather suddenly each one would go to the box and start pushing it towards the banana, then on reaching the right spot, climb the box and peck the picture. The birds that were taught only one part of the solution never volunteered the whole sequence, nor did the birds that were taught both actions but weren’t trained in pushing box in one direction – they pushed the box aimlessly for 14 minutes at a time without stopping. They seemed quite happy with their lot. 

Nevertheless, viewers of the resulting video were impressed and astounded by the pigeons’ apparent problem-solving abilities.  What can we conclude then? Epstein thought his study showed how easy it was to read too much into simple algorithms of behaviour. Humans are prone to project our own emotions and thoughts onto other creatures which show a similar behaviour pattern to our own, ascribing insight, logic, and reasoning to simple actions which may be nothing of the sort. The idea of ‘insight’ and any other special abilities could no longer be reliably derived from tool-related behaviour.  

But what does that say about ourselves and our infinitely complex tools? Do we really have flashes of insight, or are we just enacting aspects of conditioned behaviour in what appears to be a complicated and sophisticated way?

Or maybe, just maybe, we aren’t as clever as we think….

by Alexandra Paynter
 

The first Vertigo this term had been dogged by misfortune; acts had backed out and new bands had to be found and sorted out at the last minute. Luckily this disaster wasn’t evident and didn’t spoil the evening.

Jack Harris, an Imsoc regular, was the first to step up with his folk tune offerings. His songs dealt with topics ranging from bears to mountains to the flowers around him. They reminded one of stories heard as a child and soon he had a small group sitting around his feet, listening intently. Realising this he offered the rest of the cellar a chance to sit down, adding “Don’t just obey me; that’s fascism!” Much of his performance was of this rather surreal, delightful nature. His style was that of a storyteller and his soulful voice was comparable to the passion in David Gray’s “Babylon.” He kept the laughs going until he was ushered off stage for the next act.

Dave House was an earnest, likeable South Londoner with the ghetto-complex of Jamie T and the lyrics of Lily Allen. He also has much in common with Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly, to whose label he is signed. They both sing in American accents for no good reason – indeed, House’s voice is reminiscent more of Death Cab For Cutie‘s Ben Gibbard than Lily Allen‘s mockney gurnings. He was certainly fun, and very enjoyable, but his work is hardly groundbreaking. Many artists in London sing in exactly the same style and about the same things and House doesn’t exactly stand out from them. He certainly isn‘t bad, but he will need to step up his game if he is to be at the forefront of this new movement.

Francois and the Atlas Mountains, however, were exceptional. In the vein of Architecture in Helsinki they used a variety of different instruments to produce a very funky folk sound. Headed by the ridiculously good looking Francois, possessor of a wonderfully soft French accent, the songs instantly sounded beautiful on an almost mystical level, without bothering with silly things like lyrics. However, they held the audience’s attention best during their most energetic songs, which brought out their eccentric, fun side, whereas their slower tracks work best on record. If you get a chance to see them, this band is a must and they may just become an instant favourite in your record collection.

Photo of Francois and the Atlas Mountains by Alexandra Paynter. 

A ‘women’s magazine’ for students in Oxford is currently being developed, but the project has been met with mixed reactions. Is there a need for such a magazine? Who would read it?  What should it include? It isn’t immediately obvious.  A survey of forty-two female students found no significant agreement on whether there was a need or even a general want for such a magazine, but a significant majority of respondents felt that they would read such a magazine if available. It is difficult to know exactly what these responses can tell us, since the terms used in the questionnaire are, sadly, somewhat ambiguous. Should we take the term ‘women’s magazine’ to mean glossy copies of Eve and Cosmo or a hardline feminist journal without pictures?  

Any type of media with ‘woman’ in either the title or tagline can be scary. It creates the impression of being exclusively for a female reader or listener or viewer, and isn’t exclusivity exactly what the 21^st century hopes to leave behind? Take Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 for example.  Sally Feldman, one-time editor of the programme argues that the title is a reference to its contents and style, and not its audience. But what does this mean? How can the term ‘woman’ be applied to such things as content and style?  

Sally Feldman explained it in terms of ‘the twin peaks’. Firstly, she argued that women’s media involves encouraging a ‘female’ perspective on all issues. It isn’t hard to achieve, you simply need female editors, female reporters and female voices. Secondly, it should focus on topics that are thought to be of special interest to women. More than tampons, eyeliner and needlework, this applies to all areas of life in which women’s experiences can be seen as separate and different to those of men. The separation and difference are, of course, matters of opinion. But when has objectivity ever been a golden rule for the media? 

The areas of life that remain different for men and women are constantly changing. It would be naive to suggest that such differences don’t exist. But what if by focusing on them, we simply prolong and exaggerate them? Perhaps we should be striving for a public sphere such as that envisioned by the great philosopher and sociologist, Jurgen Habermas. He developed the idea of having a place for unified rational discussion between all individuals. A place in which one’s argument means more than one’s identity. He suggested that the modern media would be the best way for this ideal to be brought to life. 

However, isn’t Habermas’ concept of the public sphere a bit naïve? Is it possible that such a sphere could ever be equally open to all members of society? His vision of so-called ‘identityless interaction’ was, after all, based on the coffee house discussions of an eighteenth century French elite. Do we not need to realise that there are ‘informal impediments’ to participation in the public sphere which can easily persist even if everyone is formally included?  For example it is well known that research has shown that women are more likely to be interrupted in formal settings such as academic meetings, than men are.  How therefore, can a single public sphere ever allow individuals to be ‘identityless’?  

In order to remove these ‘informal impediments’, some people have therefore argued for a multiplicity of public spheres – a range of discursive arenas geared towards different groups. Ideally, these arenas would allow each group to find its ‘voice’ and the confidence required for successful interaction in the unified public sphere. This is where women’s media comes into play. A female only space gives women the opportunity to have their say on issues that matter to them, something which is more difficult in the public sphere than is always recognised. 

These conclusions suggest that research into the consequences of a women’s magazine in Oxford needs to be more imaginative. Rather than asking participants directly about the want or need for such a magazine, perhaps we need to look at the how female students in Oxford feel about their interaction within the wider student body. If most women feel that they are impeded in such involvement, then maybe a separate sphere for women’s media in Oxford is a good idea.

By Mona Sakr

One of the largest nightclubs in Oxford, Park End, is about the undergo a redesign.Over the next month, Park End will be transformed into a Lava Ignite club in a massive £500 000 redesign.The popular student venue is being taken over by Lava Ignite, who have bases across the country. Regular club nights won't be affected during the revamp, as the dance rooms will be decorated one by one. The new venue will maintain its 1200 person capacity, but organiers hope that the changes will improve the clubbing experiences of the locals.The £500 000 revamp, which will be completed by November 30th, will see a new decor for the club, as well as new flooring and exterior, and special VIP areas which will be available for hire. In addition to this, the range of music played will be widened to cater for all musical tastes.With threats from new student nights on the increase, Park End has had to take some drastic steps to capture the attention of clubbers. Manager Ken Getgood said: "The club has been known as the Park End for over 15 years and is one of Oxford's longest-running nightclubs. Once complete, however, the re-fit is certain to attract every clubber in the town."