Matthew Taylor has produced a new RSA Short to accompany the current drive to embrace creativity across society. See it below…
Matthew draws from his recent RSA Chief Executive’s lecture.
The message, that we should all embrace our creativity, is a telling one. Rigid thinking can bring with it the warm comfort of supposed ‘certainty’. However, to the creative mind ‘…every individual has the freedom and opportunity to develop their unique capabilities to the full’.
Oliver Reichardt, the RSA Director of Fellowship states that ‘…this concept will be central to our work(The RSA) in the future’. We warm to the sentiment at conversationsEast.
Mind Change
Leading neuroscientist Susan Greenfield considers the implications of the vast range of technologies that are creating a new environment around us all. How can we ensure these powerful forces bring out the best in us, and allow us to lead more meaningful, more creative lives?
Followed by an informal discussion.
(Baroness Greenfield is Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University. From 2005 to 2012, she was Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. From 1998 to 2010, she was director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In September 2013, she co-founded the biotech company Neuro-bio Ltd, where she is Chief Scientific Officer….Ed).
All Fellows and guests welcome.
For more details and directions jodurning@btopenworld.com
We wrote recently about how glorious was the summer of 1914 and how those balmy days before the Great War seemed to reach on into the Autumn. (Revisit the article here…). We were lucky enough to be at the 1st World War commemoration event at Hylands House, sponsored by Essex County Council, on the weekend of the 14th September 2014.
The machinery of war in Hylands Park…
The fields of the estate provided a glorious backdrop for families and groups to enjoy the late sunshine, to listen to martial music from a band on the terrace and to enjoy the military re-enactments and be-uniformed attendants, at a variety of regimental stalls scattered like a canvas billet around the great house.
The inside of Hylands House afforded visitors the chance to meet and greet a variety of historically textured projects from the Essex area. Enjoying views of the landscaped gardens and lawns from the restored windows, of the horse-drawn charabanc and the 574 acre landscape designed by Humphry Repton. Read more about the history of this lovely house here, on the web pages of Chelmsford City Council.
Drawn through the grounds in some style…
On the first floor of Hylands House that sunny morning were members of project called Chelmsford Remembers.
The Heritage Lottery Fund project, led by Fellows of the RSA, is a history project designed to capture ‘…the history and of Chelmsford and its people during The First World War’.
Below you can see what we discovered, at conversationsEAST, about this great project…
Chelmsford Remembers
The project will have a major exhibition in place, generously supported by High Chelmer Shopping Centre, that will feature the work of project volunteers and to enable residents to see the findings of the research…as well as contribute information about their own family members, we hope.
With kind thanks to Freddy Slater of the project…
It is intended to to transform the central square of the Centre into a replica trench, with artefacts and displays of Great War material relevant to the area.
The display at the High Chelmer Shopping Centre has a particularly poignant centrepiece. A large Memorial Plaquette, or ‘Dead Man’s Penny’, which was issued to the families of all those service personnel killed as a result of the war.
Tragically, some 1,355,000 placquettes were distributed, consuming some 450 tonnes of bronze in their manufacture. We were lucky to meet with members of the project who gave us permission to use an image of their precious artefact. We thank them.
Would you like to get involved in the Chelmsford Remembers Project? You can.
Buy this book on Amazon.co.uk
All successful applicants to the project will get a free copy of Dr. Paul Rusiecki’s The Impact of Catastrophe, a book detailing his research into the people of Essex and the impact of war from 1914 to 1920.
You can join the team by making contact with Chelmsford Remembers.
chelmsfordremembers@gmail.com
The project is looking for ten volunteer researchers who are passionate about uncovering the past of Chelmsford. The project provides free training and support and will also be involved in the forthcoming Ideas Festival.
Talks were given…
In the Pavilion, adjacent to the main house, the day was spent in listening and watching a variety of talks from researchers and authors on the theme of the war in Essex. The event was sponsored by the Essex Records Office and was chaired and the business of the day guided by Malcolm Noble FRSA. (Malcolm is the Chair of the Eastern Region RSA Fellowship).
Malcolm Noble FRSA making a point during the opening talk…
We illustrate below two quick samples of the talks, which were well received by the respective audiences. Providing attendees in the Pavilion with access to new information and insights into the The Great War in Essex.
Stylistically different, the programme afforded the interested listener with a wealth of data, images and reflection on this momentous time in the County.
The Lights Go Out in Essex: August 1914
Dr. Paul Rusiecki delivered a short paper to the morning audience around the emergence of war into the summer sunshine of summer 1914.
Paul’s principal thesis was that ‘…war crept up by stealth on the people of Essex’. He cited Dedham Church Choir, so oblivious to the impending storm, that on the day preceding the announcement of hostilities, ‘…the singers took an overnight visit to Cambridge’.
As further evidence of civil society behaving as normal, there was reflection given during the paper to a strike in the County by agricultural harvest workers. There was significant unrest during August of 1914, with police marshalled and shots fired to suppress the protest. This dispute rapidly came to an end as wages were able to rise as a result of war measures to secure food production, we were informed. Ferment was also current in August 1914 with regard to the Irish Home Rule Bill, with all the consequent fears of uprising.
Dr. Rusiecki informs his audience…
The local Essex press made no mention of the assassination in Sarajevo, but by the end of August 1914 ‘…the cold hand of realism had fallen on Essex’. The air of unreality had dissipated, we were told. The early battles at Mons had led to an increase in the call for conscription in England.
By May 1915, Dr.Rusiecki enlightened us, attitudes to German and Austrians resident in the County had hardened. A shift in mindset driven by the sinking of the Lusitania, air raids over Southend and the publication of the Bryce Report, which detailed atrocities committed in Belgium during the early stages of the war.
A wonderfully lucid and well paced delivery, we thought.
Mobilisation and Land Defences in Essex
Clive Potter, a local county based historian, gave his audience a delightful visual and data festooned presentation. We were offered a variety of county maps, which showed us both the disposition of troops before hostilities and the numerous training grounds across the Essex landscape.
Strong visual presentation from Clive Potter, local historian…
Similarly, Clive was able to reveal the likely landing places for small detachments of ‘enemy’ troops on the Essex coast. These visual elements were supported by notes and the detail from the 1914 UK battle plan, ‘The Land Defense of the United Kingdom (Eastern Region), which gave us detailed exposition on how our defense would be undertaken in the event of invasion.
Detailed maps were offered of inland defenses in the county, including a significant amount of trench works for troops to block advancing enemy forces. This was very enlightening, as we had always, as a ‘lay ‘audience, assumed that trench warfare was the sole remit of mainland European combatants.
Clive completed his image selection with a very interesting range of contemporary images from 1914 of troops in their billets. A strong section was presented on quartering troops under way in Witham and the various early training exercises undertaken in the hinterland of the town.
A refreshing story was told, that made the war in Europe a very local affair. We enjoyed it immensely.
In summary:
The band played on…a perfect backdrop to the activities…
This was a well planned and executed commemorative event for the people of Chelmsford and the county as a whole.
For the projects presented in Hylands House, the talks organised in the Pavilion, as well as the activities in the Park – all created some interest for every visitor.
We understand that nearly a thousand people entered Hylands House to engage with projects and that sixty visitors stayed on for the final talk of the day from Ivor Dallinger on the Stowe Maries Great War Aerodrome.
A great day in the last, lingering days of summer. Thank you.
Images by conversationsEAST, alternative sources as shown
We recently published details of the work of Fellows in Essex and their appearance at the Essex at War event at Hylands House. Their project, Chelmsford Remembers, will be part of this exciting day on Sunday, 14th September. (Revisit it here…)
Below are programme details for the event in full. Displays, re-enactments and research help will be delivered during the day. There will be an impressive range of talks across the day taking place in The Pavilion from 10.30am. (Our RSA Regional Chair, Malcolm Noble, will be officiating we understand…Ed).
Importantly, don’t forget to visit the Chelmsford Remembers RSA team, who will be available all day in the Hanbury Suite of Hylands House.
conversationsEAST will be there on the day, camera and notepad at the ready, so look out for a future, feature length article about the event and Fellow involvement in it.
We do hope you will come along and support the Fellow led project at Hylands House. This is a glorious setting for such a wide-ranging event. There’s a lot of history in Essex, some of it researched and supported by Fellows of The RSA.
Joanna Massie of The RSA recently created a location ‘heat map’, helping visualise the locations of Fellows in the East of England. Some interesting patterns, some densely populated areas and a few empty landscapes emerged.
(Joanna is our Regional Manager in the East of England, and we offer our thanks for her permission to publish the images here on conversationsEAST).
The visual display shows some interesting, even expected distributions. The Norwich Fellows Group gives the region a bold standing in central Norfolk.
There is a strong A12 ‘corridor’ of Fellows from North East London up to, and including Ipswich. Cambridge offers the region a high density of Fellows in residence, as to be expected.
Hertfordshire and the North West corner of London offer up a surprising density of Fellows too. With, we suspect, the ‘London effect’ coming into play.
Despite the region’s strong showing in Norwich, the west of the county, and the centre, offer a paucity of Fellows. Likewise, the North Norfolk coast has little ‘heat’ on the map.
When thinking about the blank spots, is it that potential Fellowship members exist in these cooler areas? Are they prime areas for some gentle Fellowship activity to stir up interest in membership of the Society?
Joanna used, we believe, discrete and secure postcode analysis to generate the map. It would be interesting to do the exercise again and overlay the original source data with specialisation of interest, for example. Where do the philosophers live, where are the concentrations of technologists and coders, and whither the historians, for example?
Creating heat maps from data?
There are a variety of free on-line tools to help you create ‘heat’ for your project or membership database. Try, for example…
OpenHeatMap – see http://www.openheatmap.com/ Not the most sophisticated web site, but useful as a tool and advice source.
Target Map – see http://www.targetmap.com/ A more complex set of tools, from the free to subscription model.
The author of this article has a daughter, who at sixteen years of age, declared that her life would be over when she was thirty. This is as painful to write now, as a it was to listen to all those years ago. She feels differently now.
John Charles Fields FRS, FRSC was born in Canada in 1863 and created the Fields Medal to honour contributions to mathematics, achieved by those in the field who are under forty years of age. ( icon-globeExplore Fields life on Wikipedia here…)
Awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, this age restriction has meant that some very prestigious mathematicians have missed being recipients of the medal because their greatest achievements came later in life.
Fields intended the medal to be a spur to young minds, to create a potentiality in mathematics that would drive the young mathematician to pursue even more stratospheric and interesting goals in their discipline in later life.
2014 has been a red letter year for the Fields Medal. Awarded for the first time to a woman and to a mathematician from South America.
Now that emerging economies and a crack in the gender imbalance of the awards has been achieved, lets hope that this fracture continues to widen and that female mathematicians and great analytical thinkers from other previously unrepresented countries, of both genders, continue to honour their academies and pursue the medal.
Winners this year…
Maryam Mirzakhani…
an Iranian mathematician and the first female recipient, was awarded the Fields Medal for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.
“Maryam Mirzakhani has made stunning advances in the theory of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, and led the way to new frontiers in this area. Her insights have integrated methods from diverse fields, such as algebraic geometry, topology and probability theory.
In hyperbolic geometry, Mirzakhani established asymptotic formulas and statistics for the number of simple closed geodesics on a Riemann surface of genus g. She next used these results to give a new and completely unexpected proof of Witten’s conjecture, a formula for characteristic classes for the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces with marked points”.
Artur Avila…
from Brazil, was awarded a Fields Medal for his profound contributions to dynamical systems theory, which have changed the face of the field, using the powerful idea of renormalization as a unifying principle.
“Avila leads and shapes the field of dynamical systems. With his collaborators, he has made essential progress in many areas, including real and complex one-dimensional dynamics, spectral theory of the one-frequency Schrodinger operator, flat billiards and partially hyperbolic dynamics.
Avila’s work on real one-dimensional dynamics brought completion to the subject, with full understanding of the probabilistic point of view, accompanied by a complete renormalization theory. His work in complex dynamics led to a thorough understanding of the fractal geometry of Feigenbaum Julia sets“.
Manjul Bhargava…
was awarded a Fields Medal for developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves.
“Bhargava’s thesis provided a reformulation of Gauss’s law for the composition of two binary quadratic forms. He showed that the orbits of the group SL(2, Z)3 on the tensor product of three copies of the standard integral representation correspond to quadratic rings (rings of rank 2 over Z) together with three ideal classes whose product is trivial.
This recovers Gauss’s composition law in an original and computationally effective manner. He then studied orbits in more complicated integral representations, which correspond to cubic, quartic, and quintic rings, and counted the number of such rings with bounded discriminant”.
Martin Hairer…
was awarded a Fields Medal for his outstanding contributions to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations, and in particular for the creation of a theory of regularity structures for such equations.
“A mathematical problem that is important throughout science is to understand the influence of noise on differential equations, and on the long time behavior of the solutions. This problem was solved for ordinary differential equations by Ito in the 1940s. For partial differential equations, a comprehensive theory has proved to be more elusive, and only particular cases (linear equations, tame nonlinearities, etc.) had been treated satisfactorily.
Hairer’s work addresses two central aspects of the theory. Together with Mattingly he employed the Malliavin calculus along with new methods to establish the ergodicity of the two-dimensional stochastic Navier-Stokes equation”.
If you are reading this on the top of a Clapham omnibus on your mobile phone, then some of the content may seem a bit esoteric, if you are disengaged from maths as a subject. If you are a young woman with an interest in number, don’t you dare give up by the age of thirty…Go get that medal, girrrl.
A group of Cambridge Fellows is developing an initiative to improve educational outcomes for young people in the City’s deprived areas.
Although, overall, Cambridge is one of the UK’s – and the world’s – most successful cities, it has pockets of deprivation and the educational performance of some of its schools is below the national average. Children who are eligible for free school meals and who have special needs or other challenges, including looked after children and young carers, are at the highest risk of underachieving.
We have been talking to Council officers and plan to meet Headteachers in the autumn term. The emerging features of our initiative are
A place in Cambridge where deprivation is accompanied by underachievement. Arbury meets these criteria.
A group of RSA fellows prepared to commit time to a targeted intervention to raise achievement, working with the local community and voluntary organisations
Alignment with Council priorities
Developed by listening to head teachers, young people, the local community/ voluntary organisations
Time limited
Replicable
We would welcome contributions from other Fellows.
If you live in the Cambridge area, you are very welcome to join our group. Or if elsewhere, please share your ideas and experience.
Contact Sam Weller: samandmary_weller@hotmail.com; or Jo Durning: jodurning@btinternet.com
We are living longer, even despite social and economic disparities in society. We are retiring later and some individuals are not seeking to retire at all. A trend to longer, healthier lives means that there is more experience and energy that older people can offer than ever before. (You can see an Office of National Statistics report on retirement age from 2012 here…Ed.)
As a society do we value the mature contributor? Do we capitalise on the learning and earning capacity of this age cohort? Jonathan Collie thinks not. He is looking to raise enough funds to hold a conference on ‘The Age of No Retirement‘ on the 1st to the 6th October, 2014.
‘…‘The Age of No Retirement?’ is Britain’s first ever national conference to debate & revalue our opportunities in retirement. Gathering experts, policy makers, key stakeholders and the public we will explore retirement and the opportunities we can provide in an ageing, technological and engaged society’.
It is planned that the first two days of the proposed conference will look at, debate and construct visual outputs and nascent policy proposals around some key themes…
Work & employment
Ageism & prejudice
Health & well-being
Technology & communication
The plus-50 consumer
Self, family & society
Knowledge & education
After a closed day of consolidation and publication there will be a public, three day open event for the review of, and a wider consultative approach to, the work and its outcomes.
The Collie manifesto on ageing has it’s own practical outcome too. Jonathan founded, and has gained wide support for, a new social business called Trading Times.
The project connects local employers with mature workers who are often retired, single parents or carers. They may not need a full-time job, but can offer a wide range of skills to interested employers.
We think this is an important debate. Not only because the conversationsEAST office is a ‘no-retirement’ zone, but because the potential contribution of this section of society is untapped. Trading Times is not the only player in town, but could provide an economic model that works well for the mature employed.
Why not a Trading Times hub in every RSA region? (It’s not immediately obvious from the web site, but we suspect that TT is a London centric initiative at present…Ed.)
In conclusion, the Age of No Retirement constitutes a move to an important new social shift. Support it, whatever your age, as the outcomes may condition the whole life contribution you can make. Wherever you are on your journey now.
Heading away from the Eastern Region over the summer period? Spending some time on the South Coast? A great event with some inspiring and refreshing RSA talks will be taking place at Camp Bestival 2014.
‘The sister festival of the Isle of Wight’s Bestival, in its first year Camp Bestival was awarded ‘Best New Festival’ at the UK Festival Awards and has since won Best Family Festival three times at the awards in 2009, 2010 & 2013.
With a host of thrilling activities from soft play and circus skills to go-carts and glitter, there’s plenty of excitement for kids of all ages. Plus, there are kids’ shows and performances on the Castle Stage and in the Big Top, daring antics to be had at the Freesports Park, and fairytale escapism in the Dingly Dell’.
The RSA Team will be boarding their summer holiday charabanc and leaving the metropolis for the Dorset countryside. With tents, wellies and a relaxed mind, ready to be entertained themselves and to have the children beguiled too.
Fellows, and the assembled audience, will be able to enjoy The RSA Hour events on Saturday and Sunday of the weekend…
Saturday 2 August at 10am. Psychologist Dr Ben Ambridge’s innovative interactive investigation of intelligence.
‘What is intelligence? Where does it come from, and why does it even matter? How much do you know and understand about what makes you tick? And how good are you at predicting other people’s behavior…or even your own?
What’s the link between intelligence and curly fries? Are atheists cleverer than religious people? What about men vs women, or right- vs left handers? Does listening to heavy metal or Mozart make you smarter? What do different shapes taste like? Are you stupider than a monkey?’
Sunday 3 August at 1pm. Dr. Kevin Fong – our fascination with the final frontier.
‘Of the men who once walked on the Moon, only a handful now remain. The space shuttle, the most remarkable space craft ever built, is gone. Our ambitions appear to be failing almost as fast as the Government funds available for space exploration.
Variously described as ‘TV’s face of science’ and the ‘Brian Cox of medicine’, self-confessed space junkie Dr. Kevin Fong asks – have we come to the end of our fascination with the frontier of space? What social and scientific value did our curiosity about space really add, back here on Earth? Perhaps in the future we will look back upon the endeavour of human space flight as we do the building of the pyramids…’
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is a professional association for human resource management professionals. It is headquartered in Wimbledon, London, England. The organisation was founded in 1913 and has over 130,000 members internationally working across private, public and voluntary sectors.
Bedfordshire Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recently worked with the University of Bedfordshire (pictured) on the CIPD Challenge.
The University of Bedfordshire is based in Bedford and Luton, the two largest towns in Bedfordshire. A campus in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire is for students studying Nursing and Midwifery. A further campus in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, teaches business studies, electronic engineering, and telecommunications.
It has approximately 24,000 students. Nearly 3,000 international students study with the university. The university was created by the merger of the University of Luton and the Bedford campus of De Montfort University in August 2006 following approval by the Privy Council. In 2012 it achieved FairTrade status.
CIPD Bedfordshire Group Committee members, Paula Grayson, Sandra Brown and Letitia Winston worked with Sarah Jones from the University of Bedfordshire on the CIPD Challenge in the practice week for undergraduates on the BA Hons. in HRM.
On 3 March 2014, students were briefed on four “Consolidating Culture” challenges to provide good practice HR processes. The guiding principle was to design a process which should assist in consolidating and reinforcing the culture of the organisation.
(Over time the CIPD have developed a comprehensive, effective and wide range of resources for HR professionals. One aspect of the work is the creation of a CIPD Profession Map. Integral to this is the Courage to Challenge Model, which is part of a sequence of themes that look at behaviours around curiosity, decisive thinking, collaboration and being a winning influencer. All skills that the Bedfordshire students would have needed to deploy, in order to complete their assignment….ED).
They needed to use good practice guidance from the CIPD and other sources, remembering organisations are operating in difficult economic times. All additional costs needed to be justified in terms of improving productivity, increasing employee engagement or reducing an existing employee cost pressure. Each team was asked to choose one challenge from:
• designing a new induction process for a large successful retail organisation to induct and socialise recruits, remembering to embed the strong values as soon as possible, while ensuring health and safety together with all legal requirements were fulfilled from day one
• using social media in recruitment and selection for a small and relatively unknown web design company needing a web designer who could work within a performance driven culture with tight deadlines to meet client needs. They had to improve the poor job description and person specification written by the Managing Director, including taking out illegal elements, then outline their campaign and process, especially how social media could be used in the short-listing stage
• improving motivation at a recruitment agency providing education professionals to the local authority and individual schools where the staff are partly paid on commission. They needed to address the low staff retention rate and high absence rate through appropriate non-financial rewards to recognise and provide incentives to staff
Students formed their teams, chose their challenges and got to work.
On 6 March, Sarah, Paula, Sandra and Letitia judged their proposals, selecting a runner-up team and a winning team. The presentations were all excellent, offering thoughtful, appropriate and legal advice to their organisations.
Their professionalism demonstrated how much they had learned during their course, not only about Human Resources but also how to write and present practical solutions to employment issues using good practice. The runners-up were given University of Bedfordshire conference folders.
The five students in the winning team will each have two days of work shadowing with CIPD Bedfordshire Group committee members.
Article contributed by Sarah Jones and Paula Grayson
(If the University has an image of the Challenge Teams, or the winners ceremony, email it to the editor and we will add it to this narrative…ED.)
University image by Kriscollins at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons
