̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Centre for Science and Policy

UK budget rules hand green economy to China

plc32 — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 07:58:37 +0000

A new report by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) argues the UK government should invest in green infrastructure now or watch productivity lag behind China, the United States and other countries already running away with the benefits.

Cairngorms to Classrooms

plc32 — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 13:27:10 +0000

Cambridge Zero has welcomed 17 students onto its 2024 Future Leaders Programme to support climate and sustainability initiatives at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and beyond, to gain green skills and valuable research and professional experiences.

'Threatening' faces and beefy bodies do not bias criminal suspect identification, study finds

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 14:15:46 +0000

We’re all familiar with the classic “look” of a movie bad guy: peering through narrowing eyes with a sinister sneer (like countless James Bond villains, including Christopher Walken’s memorable Max Zorin in A View to a Kill) or pumped up to cartoon-like dimensions (like the Soviet boxer Drago who growls “I must break you” to Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV).

Yet a detailed new study of identifying criminal suspects finds, to the authors’ surprise, no bias toward selecting people with threatening facial characteristics or muscular bodies. ̽��ֱ��study does find, however, that suspects with highly muscled, “threatening” bodies are most accurately identified by eyewitnesses in line-ups.

‘No systematic bias’

“These findings suggest that while no systematic bias exists in the recall of criminal bodies, the nature of the body itself and the context in which it is presented can significantly impact identification accuracy,” says the research published in the journal Memory & Cognition. “Participant identification accuracy was highest for the most threatening body stimuli high in musculature.”

Eyewitness testimony and the identification of suspects lies at the heart of the criminal justice system. In the absence of incriminating physical evidence, an eyewitness can be crucial in convincing a court of the defendant’s guilt. Previous studies have revealed identification errors may be due to people finding it hard to recognise unfamiliar faces, as well as height and weight frequently being underestimated.

Computer-generated images varying in levels of threat

“Misidentification of innocent defendants plays a significant role in most cases of prisoners later exonerated through DNA evidence,” says study co-author Magda Osman, Head of Research and Analysis at the Centre for Science and Policy, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, which is affiliated with Cambridge Judge Business School.

“Having a stereotypically ‘criminal’ or threatening appearance has long been established to be a disadvantage in the judicial system, both in terms of the likelihood of initially being arrested and in terms of courtroom sentencing,” adds co-author Terence J. McElvaney of the Department of Biological and Experimental sychology, Queen Mary ̽��ֱ�� of London. “What we wanted to establish through this new research was whether some people are also more likely to be falsely identified as a criminal because they naturally have a more threatening appearance – and, contrary to our expectations, we found that this was not the case.

In three separate experiments, participants were first presented with either the outline of a violent crime, neutral information, or no background information. They were then shown a realistic computer-generated image of the male suspect (target) and asked to identify him from a selection of images (foils) that varied in facial threat or body muscle.

“Although this does not match the procedural experience of real eyewitnesses, this allowed us to explore the potential biasing effects of criminal context while maintaining tight control over the stimuli,” the study explains. In some experiments a delay between witnessing the crime and trying to identify the suspect was simulated. All faces in the dataset were Caucasian and converted to greyscale.

Three experiments form basis of study

Around 200 hundred adults living in the UK took part in each of the three experiments:

Experiment 1

Participants were divided into two teams, with one group told the person they were about to see was involved in an armed robbery. ̽��ֱ��other group was told the aim of the experiment was to see how accurately they could identify unfamiliar people. ̽��ֱ��groups completed 20 trials in total, identifying a different suspect each time from a selection of faces and body shapes with blurred heads. In each case, the target image was shown for one second, followed by a blank screen for one second, followed by the line-up.

Experiment 2

This experiment introduced a distractor task adding a five-minute delay between participants seeing the target image for 30 seconds and trying to identify it. Contributors were divided into three categories. In the crime and neutral groups, they were presented with background information such as a shop robbery resulting in a murder, or someone purchasing a winning lottery ticket. ̽��ֱ��final group was told to study the person for later identification. Fixation dots and a random noise mark were also added to the start of each trial to break concentration. This time, faces or bodies were shown individually with those taking part responding Yes or No to the question: “Did that face/body EXACTLY match the one you previously studied?”

Experiment 3

Participants were again provided with a criminal context, neutral context, or no additional information. They were given 30 seconds to study the target, then following a distractor task lasting ten minutes, were asked to identify him from a line-up of bodies only, from which the perpetrator was missing.

Impact of stereotypes on memory

̽��ֱ��authors expected that if no background context was provided, participants would not show any bias in recalling a body or a face. They hypothesised that more threatening faces and larger bodies would be selected when the perpetrator was presented in a criminal context, rather than in a neutral context, but this did not turn up in the findings.

Previous research suggests associating someone with a crime can distort their appearance in memory by automatically activating racial stereotypes linked to the crime being committed, such as a Caucasian stereotype being activated for crimes such as identity theft or embezzlement.

This new research found giving criminal background information about the suspects did not significantly influence participants’ memory. “Participants viewing images of alleged violent criminals were no more likely to overestimate the facial threat or musculature of the target stimuli than those who studied the targets in empty or neutral contexts,” the study says.

“These results suggest that, although errors of eyewitness identification can or do occur, they may not be driven by systematic biases related to how threatening a criminal is later recalled.”

̽��ֱ��authors identified several limitations in their study. These included the use of computer-generated still images rather than video footage. Although a delay was introduced in the process, it does not reflect the days or weeks experienced by real eyewitnesses, or difficulties presented by lighting or distance.

Crucially, due to the images used, all the conclusions are restricted to Caucasian defendants.

“Although it’s possible participants didn’t perceive the images to be of a particular race because they’re computer generated, further research could use morphing software to produce photo-realistic facial images of different races that vary in perceived threat”, says co-author Isabelle Mareschal, also of the Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary ̽��ֱ�� of London.

̽��ֱ��study in Memory & Cognition – entitled “Identifying criminals: No biasing effect of criminal context on recalled threat” – is co-authored by Terence J. McElvaney and Isabelle Mareschal, both of the Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary ̽��ֱ�� of London; and Magda Osman of the Centre of Science and Policy, Cambridge Judge Business School.

Research shows that there is no bias toward selecting people with muscular bodies or facial characteristics perceived as threatening when identifying criminal suspects in line-ups.

Misidentification of innocent defendants plays a significant role in most cases of prisoners later exonerated through DNA evidence

Magda Osman

Various levels of musculature in Experiment 1. Left-to-right: 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%. Target stimulus (e.g., 50% musculature) shown in the centre.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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̽��ֱ��Cambridge networker

skbf2 — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 10:11:22 +0000

'Enterprising mind', David Cleevely, one of the architects of Cambridge's world-leading innovation ecosystem, on the secrets of entrepreneurial success and why Cambridge is a great place to start a new venture.

Tackling COVID-19: Professor James Wood

jg533 — Thu, 28 May 2020 08:15:12 +0000

This article is part of a series in which we speak to some of the many Cambridge researchers tackling COVID-19. For other articles about our latest COVID-19-related research, click here.

Before COVID-19, I split my time between my Vet School office and endless meetings in the central ̽��ֱ�� and in London, including at Defra and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. Now I’m based in my conservatory at home, which oscillates between freezing cold and too hot! I seem to have even more meetings now, by Webex, Zoom, Skype and Teams. Talking to people on the telephone is a great release from the two dimensional world many of us now live in.

I’m organising the Vet School’s research and policy responses to the epidemic, and working with colleagues in Cambridge Infectious Diseases, one of the ̽��ֱ��’s Interdisciplinary Research Centres, to do the same. I’m also supporting a total revision of the veterinary course examination and assessment - whilst trying to continue with my own multidisciplinary research in infection dynamics and disease control. And I’m providing a weekly hour-long ‘phone-an-expert’ service on the Jeremy Sallis Show on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.

I study zoonotic diseases, which are infections that spread from animals to humans. My research is mostly based in sub-Saharan Africa and India. In Ethiopia and India I’ve been working on bovine tuberculosis, and in Ghana I’m studying viruses that come from bats - like COVID-19 probably did - in order to reduce the chances of spread to human populations.

There is an almost total lack of necessary health infrastructure in low and middle-income countries. This may result in massive mortality from COVID-19 in these places, and it is certainly likely to further emphasise health and wealth inequalities. I think this is a really major challenge in addressing the pandemic globally.

I suspect that the pandemic will further raise interest in zoonotic infections and help us to do more about them. We need far larger structural programmes to address the global challenges from these diseases. This has been a colossally neglected area. I hope that future epidemics like this can be averted through better preparation and policies based on scientific evidence. We’ve been saying this for the 15 years or so that we’ve been working on zoonotic bat viruses. Hopefully more people will listen now.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge research community has stepped up to this challenge in so many ways. Vaccination work has been a focus of studies within the Veterinary School. Amazing amounts of PPE were provided to Addenbrooke’s Hospital from Cambridge’s science departments. A new rapid COVID-19 test came from a Cambridge spinout. Colleagues in the Department of Engineering have been working to improve access to ventilators, and infection researchers have been supporting laboratory setups across sub-Saharan Africa with support from the Cambridge-Africa programme.

There’s a huge ongoing contribution from Cambridge’s infectious diseases community. I’m Co-Chair of Cambridge Infectious Diseases, which has been supporting researchers with new COVID-19 research projects and establishing joint interdisciplinary seminar programmes across the ̽��ֱ��. We’ve also helped the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) develop its ‘Cambridge on call’ programme, which connects selected ‘Policy Fellows’ to Cambridge experts for support in developing policy responses to the crisis. And we’re working with partners to produce guidelines, for many different bodies, to reduce the risk of pandemic spread through trade in live animals.

When this is over I’m looking forward to a holiday away from home with the family, and seeing my isolated mother. It would also be great to reinstate plans to bike across the Alps from Annecy to Nice with a friend, although I’m not quite sure how that’s all going to happen any time soon!

James Wood is Alborada Professor of Equine and Farm Animal Science, and Head of Department of Veterinary Medicine. Listen to his overview of infectious disease modelling on Cambridge's Centre for Science and Policy podcast: Science, Policy & Pandemics Episode One.

How you can support Cambridge’s COVID-19 research

“Cambridge’s infectious diseases community is making a huge contribution to tackling the pandemic,” says Professor James Wood. He leads several large-scale programmes at the ̽��ֱ�� that rely on his research expertise: infectious diseases that jump from animals to humans. This is, he says, a research area that was ‘colossally neglected’ before COVID-19 emerged.

James Wood enjoying amazing freshly roasted Ethiopian coffee in a traditional coffee house in Sebeta, during a field trip prior to the COVID-19 pandemic

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Young leaders from UK and Latin America tackle future at Shaping Horizons

plc32 — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 12:18:09 +0000

They will explore how emerging technologies like those underpinning genomics, artificial intelligence, clean energy, and smart cities can be used and regulated to create a more equitable and sustainable global community as well as how to encourage sustainable leadership across disciplines and move beyond traditional diplomacy to address global challenges like climate change and social inequalities.

Shaping Horizons 2019 is a Summit and Action Programme rooted in science, policy, and innovation and will strengthen ties and build relationships between young Future Leaders and Senior Leaders from the UK and Latin America. ̽��ֱ��delegates have been selected from across academia, industry, and government.

Professor David Cardwell, FREng, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Strategy and Planning at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, welcomed delegates at the start of the Summit on behalf of the ̽��ֱ��.

“On every front, the ̽��ֱ�� has been and continues to be engaged with Latin America, including the pleasure of hosting this fantastic summit, Shaping Horizons, where the mission is to empower and promote youth, create networks and to drive change,” Cardwell said.

̽��ֱ��week will culminate with the Future Leaders pitching for prize money to support their own innovative social impact projects they have developed through mentorship and learning during the Summit.

Winners will be supported in further developing and launching their projects through the Action Programme which will follow on from the Summit.

Nigel Baker, OBE MVO, Head of the Latin America Department at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office told delegates that all their ideas would help shape the future.

“Shaping Horizons is absolutely driven by the sense of entrepreneurship, innovation, and ideas of the young people involved. It is going to be fascinating to see the proposals that are coming out,” Baker said.

“There are 24 different teams and there are going to be some spectacular proposals and ideas. Some will win prizes, some will not, but I suspect that all of those ideas are going to be applicable in the future.”

Shaping Horizons is a non-profit initiative organised at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge with the support of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, and the Cambridge Hub of Global Shapers Community, which is an initiative of the World Economic Forum.

Shaping Horizons was founded by Dr Matias Acosta, a UK-Canada Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy, and Theo Lundberg, a NanoDTC PhD Student in the Department of Physics.

“Shaping Horizons was founded to promote sustainability using global, cross-disciplinary cooperation as our driving force,” Acosta said.

“We are a team of 40 undergraduates and academics from across more than 20 departments from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge bringing this initiative forward. Our goal is to build a shared and sustainable future between Latin America and the UK.

"We will be providing more than £30,000 in support for cooperative bilateral projects and also have designed a continuous mentorship programme to maximize the chance of success of each of the ideas.”

More than 100 future leaders from the UK and Latin America have gathered at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge to discuss the future of work and education in an increasingly global digital era at this year’s Shaping Horizons summit.

Shaping Horizons was founded to promote sustainability using global, cross-disciplinary cooperation as our driving force.

Shaping Horizons founder Dr Matias Acosta

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'Extreme sleepover #19' – Living beside Uruguay’s ‘Mother Dump’

jeh98 — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 08:30:55 +0000

Returning to Uruguay’s largest landfill (cantera), ‘Felipe Cardoso’ in Montevideo, to conduct fieldwork for my PhD, I was delighted when local social worker and missionary Jorge told me that I could live at his home, in a housing cooperative overlooking the landfill.

I had worked as a labourer in the construction of the cooperative in 2010 and knew that most of the occupants were relocated residents of an infamous shantytown built on top of an old landfill.

I could use the house as a base for exploring Montevideo’s formal and informal waste trade, since many neighbours were urban recyclers, known locally as clasificadores or classifiers. I’d be able to accompany them as they left in the morning to recover value from the trash at sites nearby, often returning in the afternoon on motorbikes, trucks or horse-drawn carts laden with an impressive array of plastics, metals and cardboard, as well as food, clothing and electronics for domestic consumption or neighbourhood sale.

Waiting to move in and impatient to start fieldwork, I had eagerly accepted when one neighbour offered to host me temporarily in his yard. As it transpired, I lived for a week in the most densely populated accommodation I have ever experienced, sharing a shack with his teenage son and the flapping wings and loose bowels of 22 birds. Now, though, Jorge’s house would be my home for the following year. Initially a concrete block lacking windows and doors, I set about making it habitable, mostly using materials scavenged from the landfill.

Of course I could do nothing about the sights, sounds and smells of the landfill itself. It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist.

Each day, some 60 trucks roll into the compound filled with urban rubbish. At the last count (in 2008, and likely to be an underestimate), around 5,000 waste-picking families make a living from Montevideo’s trash, attempting to recover all that is valuable, usable or edible. Their role in a city where waste management has reached crisis points in the past has been lauded as a lesson to society: they help to reduce the environmental and financial cost of landfill and find value in something that might be surplus to some but not others.

Like my interlocutors who recovered materials from there, I had ambivalent feelings about the cantera which, because of its reliable provision, was nicknamed “the mother”. On the one hand, it was an intriguing site for fieldwork where, under the supervision of Dr Sian Lazar, I focused on processes of labour formalisation, the socio-cultural dynamics of the waste and recycling work, and the history of waste infrastructure and aesthetics. On the other hand, it was also a place of hazard, police violence and a smell that lingered on clothes and skin, getting into hair and under fingernails.

I never slept at the dump but this was previously a common practice: clasificadores would camp there for days or weeks at a time, always at the mercy of the feared mounted police who would set tents alight, showing little tolerance for intruders.

̽��ֱ��closest I came to the apparently boisterous atmosphere of these encampments was joining clasificadores of the Felipe Cardoso recycling cooperative as they spent the last nights in a building the municipality had ceded them for facilities but which some had appropriated as a residence. With the exception of veteran clasificador Coco, who lived there permanently, the space seemed to function as a temporary refuge for male clasificadores who had been kicked out by their wives! On the night of my visit, we sat and played cards, listened to cumbia music, drank into my supplies of Scotch, and discussed the impending closure of the site and the workers’ relocation to a formal sector recycling plant.

With the municipal government’s attempted formalisation of Montevideo’s recycling trade, it is possible that the days of such precarious, autonomous, clasificador spaces are numbered, to be replaced by hygienic and technologically provisioned infrastructures. Yet at the end of my research trip, many of my neighbours were still making their way to the cantera to classify the tons of waste dumped there daily.

Uruguayan priest Padre Cacho once described clasificadores as “ecological prophets” and I can see what he meant – they have long functioned as ‘prospectors’, mining the urban waste stream for valuable materials that consumers have been happy to discard, and municipal governments to landfill or incinerate.

Now back in Cambridge as an intern at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), I am helping to organise a workshop on the ‘circular economy’ to explore the ways that government and industry are increasingly reconceptualising waste as recoverable resource. At a global level, it is important that shifts in policy benefit rather than dispossess informal sector recyclers, the long-time ‘artisanal miners’ of the waste stream.

Just before leaving Montevideo, the annual landfill clasificador Christmas social afforded me an enduring image of slumber amidst the scraps: an old, intoxicated and weary recycler lying on a recovered floral mattress, his sweated brow resting on a large folded rubbish bag, surrounded by thousands of pesos worth of scrap metal.

Patrick’s policy internship at CSaP is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Cambridge Doctoral Training Centre.

In a new podcast, Patrick O’Hare describes his time with the clasificadores – the families who scavenge Montevideo’s pungent ‘wastescape’ to recover and classify anything that is valuable, usable or edible.

It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist

Patrick O'Hare

Patrick working with the clasificadores in Montevideo

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Twenty top tips for interpreting scientific claims

sj387 — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 07:58:54 +0000

Scientists from the UK and Australia, concerned with the lack of scientific knowledge amongst key decision makers, have created 20 concepts to help those who interact regularly with science and scientists.

Recent issues such as nuclear power, bee declines, and the role of badgers in bovine tuberculosis have seen fierce debates and policy decisions being made without the support of the scientific community, something Professors William Sutherland, David Spiegelhalter and Mark Burgman have set out to change.

These scientists want to help people grasp the “imperfect nature of science” and enable policy-makers to interrogate their advisers and experts instead of simply accepting information as it is given. Though change will take time, it is their belief that “a wider understanding of these 20 concepts by society would be a marked step forward”, and could only lead to a better-informed future.

Professor Spiegelhalter said “These tips could be used as a checklist when confronted with scientific claims. Science is not just a body of facts – it’s important to have a grasp of the process by which conclusions are drawn, and the possible pitfalls on that path”

There is an obvious need to make sure that scientific policy is based on a sound understanding of science; this means making sure that policy-makers know the right things to ask, and how to interpret the answers they get. There have been many suggestions of how to increase the level of scientific knowledge in the political community, from encouraging more scientists to become politicians, to expanding the role of chief scientific advisors. However, none of these solutions fully address the fundamental issue of widespread “scientific ignorance” amongst those who have the ability to vote in parliament.

̽��ֱ��homogeneity of policy makers’ backgrounds shows just how far-reaching this problem is. No member of the current British cabinet has a scientific degree – the closest is Vince Cable, who initially read Natural Sciences at Cambridge before switching to Economics. Six cabinet members read Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Oxford, including Ed Davey MP, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate change. Of Britain’s 650 members of parliament, only Cambridgeshire MP Julian Huppert is a scientist; David Willets MP, the Minister of State for Universities and Science, read PPE.

This list of concepts will teach skills closely related to those that politicians already have, and will help people “understand the quality, limitations and biases of evidence”. This will, in turn, allow better interrogation of those communicating scientific information. By explaining the scientific process, these academics have helped to demystify science and make it accessible to those creating the country’s scientific policy. It is not a question of turning every policy-maker into a scientist, but of arming them with the tools to understand and question the scientific information they receive.

Some of the concepts seem common sense (“Scientists are human”), others less so (“Regression to the mean can mislead”, “Beware the base rate fallacy”). All contain practical advice and recommendations that, if followed, should help policy-makers better interact with science and scientists and understand the limitations of evidence. Though the authors acknowledge that improvements in policy will not happen instantaneously, and that uncertainty is inherent in the scientific method, they nonetheless feel that these concepts are the first step to take if we are to more closely integrate science into political decision-making.

Click here to read the Nature article in full

Aiming to improve policy-makers’ understanding of the imperfect nature of science, academics from the Universities of Cambridge and Melbourne have created a list of concepts that they believe should be part of the education of civil servants, politicians, policy advisers and journalists

Science is not just a body of facts – it’s important to have a grasp of the process by which conclusions are drawn, and the possible pitfalls on that path

Professor David Spiegelhalter

Sir Cam/ ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Dr Pete Wothers giving a chemistry demonstration to an audience at the Cambridge Science Festival including David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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