• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

Behavioural Ecology, the study of the adaptive significance of animal behaviour, has empowered zoologists to tackle some of the fundamental issues of evolutionary biology.  Insects, although not always easy to study as individuals in the field, have provided excellent model systems for this area of research. 

In this talk, I will outline some of the research done by myself and colleagues on the behavioural ecology of insects. I will discuss what marine water-striders can tell us about selfish group behaviour; what the mating behaviour of tiny aphids on poplar bark tells us about the evolution of the sex ratio; what the behaviour of gall-living aphids reveals about the altruism of housework, house-maintenance, and the slaughter of intruders; and how extended parental care by solitary digger wasps shows us the  first faltering steps along the route to highly complex social behaviour. Along the way we will visit a saltmarsh in North Norfolk, a mangrove swamp in the Galapagos, the playing fields of Cambridge, a Hill Station in Malaya, and a heathland near Godalming. And we will learn about The Trafalgar Effect, The Constant Male Hypothesis, and the menopausal aphid glue-bomb.

• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

We have many forms of identity, whether socially constructed (kinship, personas, relationships), or issued via organisations (employers, banks, clubs, government). These identities can be partly stored as a digital twin (e.g. by recording biometric information plus some identifier/number, and then possibly linked to other information credentials or entitlements - e.g. citizenship, age, health, finance, educational records and so on).

These digital ecosystems can be designed to allow us to control (access to) such data, or they can be part of state and commercial surveillance. The trustworthiness of such ecosystems is highly questionable. I'll walk through alternative designs and give examples of benefits and disadvantages, including threats (fake id, denial of service etc).

In this talk, I'll also outline challenges, including future problems like the mutability of allegedly unique and persistent biometrics like iris or even DNA, and speculate about the possibility of reflecting social structures properly in designs to create more fair and resilient systems that might be more acceptable than many deployed or proposed today. 
 

• 18:00 - 19:00
• Bristol-Myers Squibb Lecture Theatre, Cambridge

Refereeing is a form of peer review that is now familiar at many points in academic life: the opinions of referees are sought on articles submitted for publication, on grant proposals, and on tenure and promotion applications, among other things. But refereeing has not always been so central to academic reputations; nor has it always functioned the way it does now. This paper will drawing upon my team’s research in the archives of the Royal Society of London to explore how the practices of evaluating papers and their authors have changed over the last two centuries. The Royal Society was one of the first institutions to develop written refereeing processes, which have been used at its journal (the Philosophical Transactions) since the 1830s. The Society’s unrivalled archives include referee reports, correspondence and committee minutes that shed light on the way decisions were made, and by whom. The story told here must be set against the backdrop of the increasing professionalisation of academic life in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which a list of published papers came to acquire great significance. The growth and changing social composition of the scientific community has also posed challenges for an evaluation practice that developed in the context of a closed, gentlemanly community.