Retell Lecture – British Policy

The development of a free and vibrant press is a key aspect of modern society, and its roots are often tied to foundational government policies. A prime example of this can be seen in the British experience. The British press is sophisticated and highly developed. To understand how this came to be, we need to look back to its origins. It came into being in the 18th century. This period was crucial because freedom of speech has been encouraged by the British policy since then. It actively fostered a new culture of public debate and information sharing. The new policy empowered ordinary citizens. People could talk about anything in public places, such as in coffee houses or on streets. There they read newspapers and talked about politics, government policies and military matters. This was revolutionary. The fact that everyday people could openly critique the government and debate national issues in a public forum is a great sign of public freedom.

Retell Lecture – Purpose of Museums

I’ve been asked to speak today about the purpose of museums and I think that’s something we often take for granted, that we have museums and we need museums. But with so much information available now online, people have access to whatever it is they want to know so I think we need to consider carefully just what it is that we expect of our museums today. What makes them relevant in the information age. Clearly, we’ve got to move beyond the early twentieth century concept of a warehouse full of old, remarkable, untouchable objects. This warehouse idea does very little to inspire people. What museum professionals need to do – what they should be doing, is make their collections and programs work towards the purpose of education. So whether that means having more hands-on exhibits, becoming involved with other community organisations, they should be doing whatever it takes to think about their visitors, to engage people, to educate them. And in that way, they can be instruments of social change. If they have knowledge and understanding of the people who visit, and the people they want to come and visit, they can take this as a starting point for providing exhibitions and services that are relevant to people’s lives.

Retell Lecture – Pavlov’s Experiement

During this time my goals are going to be to talk about the phenomenon that we may share impart with other animals, and our language and that is emotion. And also talk about some new technology, brain imagining, functional magnetic imagining. And we try to answer some very old questions about how’s does motivation and emotion work. I’m going to put you with the scenario first and some of you may be familiar with. This was developed by Pavlov over a century years ago. And in this scenario the dog presented with the sound, the dog waits, and then feeds food powder and this happened repeatedly, things starts to happen in the middle of the experiment there. Interesting things start to happen here. Pavlov’s study was salivation the dog, the salivation increases more time to paralyzes. But other things happened here, too. You have a dog move around here more, all kinds of things are going on here. What we trying to capture was the experiment I’m going on to describe today is what is going on in the brain to generate that state which we called it competitive state. But you can also think about state in terms of how the dogs’ feeling layer, how you feeling about eating lunch today.

Retell Lecture – Animal Behavior (Version 2)

Why should we bother studying animal behavior? Well, first and foremost, because we are interested in understanding why animals do what they do. There are lots of other reasons for studying animal behavior. Conservation biologists need to know what animals do if they’re going to save them. Are those animals social or solitary? How much space do they need and how many mates do they have? Sometimes you can’t predict the outcome of the research. Fernando Nottebohm started out being interested in how birds know what to sing. Yet his research eventually led to a complete overhaul of the entire field of neurobiology, a totally unanticipated yet utterly monumental effect. And this is the course textbook by John Alcock the fact that this is in its ninth edition tells you how fast an afield animal behavior is. There are lots of new developments.

Retell Lecture – Venus

There is a picture, sort of artist’s impression, before the space age of what Venus might be like on its surface and so this was looking at the planet Venus, it was science fiction and science fact all the way up to 56 before the start of the space age but it wasn’t completely disproved, this idea of a really sort of lush environment on Venus until 1967, which is when the first measurements in detail were done at Venus. So Mariner four and Mariner five confirmed the feeling from an earlier space mission that in fact the surface of Venus was not like this at all, but extremely hot and, and also that the clouds were made of sulfuric acid so there wasn’t a nice water cycle like is going on in this picture and so, that it had to wait for these in situ measurements by space craft to actually do that and so Venus turned out not to be quite as Earth like as we thought and I’ll sort of tell you about some of the latest results from Venus Express, which, which they actually there are some Earth like features, but to a large extent, it’s not like the Earth. Okay, so a brief comparison between.

Retell Lecture – Stress Reactivity

So the way a mother rat takes care of its pups is by licking and grooming, nipple switching an arch back nursing. So the rats that do a lot of licking and grooming and their last rats that rule very little. But most rats are in between. So that resembles a human human behavious as well, right, you have mothers that are highly mothering and mothers that couldn’t care less and most mothers are somewhere in between. So if you look at these rats. So all you do you observe them and put them in separate cages. So you put the high lickers in one cage not the mothers, but the offspring and the low lickers in another cage and then you let them grow and they’re adults now, their mothers are long buried and you look in the brain and you see that those who had high licking mothers express a lot of glucocorticoid receptor, gene and though so our lawmakers express know that reflects a number of factors and that results in a different stress response, but this is not the only difference. We found later on there are hundreds of genes that are differently expressed. So if you get in a mutation, you know polymorphism once in a million. Here, just the motherly lauching just hundreds of genes in one shot and it changes them in a very stable way that you can look at the old rat and you can say whether it was licked or not. But you can also save by behavior. So if you walk to the cages to the room the rats that were poorly lit are highly anxious, hard to handle, aggressive, and , and the rats that were very well handled as as off as little pups. They are much more relaxed much easier to handle. So you know, like every technician in the lab knows looking at the adult rat how it was licked when it was a little tough any question , of course, mechanism , how does this work?

Retell Lecture – Creativity

Here are three important factors in creativity: people, process and product. The most important one is the process. First you have to create the right person through education with a creative mind. Second, you have to create the right process to have people engaged in innovation process. Third, you need to find the right problem to work on. Human beings can survive and prosper largely depending on the creativity they have. If you identify and assess the creativity of a finished product, it is taken as a proxy for the creativity of the person who produced such a product. Therefore, a creative product should be surprising, original, beautiful and useful. People should have factors necessary for genius, ability, and right mindset. You should improve to imitate and change insight look from new perspectives, innovatively create something with imagination to expand conceptual spaces.

Retell Lecture – Universal Philosophy

Okay. So this is the this is the big benefit of a universal philosophy. It says it applies to everybody. Well, looks that doesn’t, you know, 205 or 206 countries in the world. And you’ve got something that applies to everybody. That’s a bit strange, isn’t it? No, says liberal theory. There are same value structures that apply to all of us. You couldn’t have the United Nations without it. It couldn’t tell you that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without this idea of values that apply to all of us just because we are humans. Now, the idea is to test that as well. Why is sport universal? Why does everybody play football? It’s because the values are specified at a very thin level at the top. There are these rules and we all have to abide by just these rules. But there are lots of things about football that aren’t rules specified. So Brazilian football is different from Italian football, from British football, from German football, from Spanish football. It’s culturally specific, but acknowledges that there are these universal general rules to apply to everybody.

Retell Lecture – Good Idea

To be a successful entrepreneur, you should have good ideas, but the definition of a good idea varies depending on whom you ask. A great idea should have several features. Firstly, the great idea should be various and novel. Secondly, the great idea should be unique, which means no one has thought about it. Thirdly, it is essential for great ideas to be transformative and productive. All ideas are essentially a combination of other smaller ideas, but this doesn’t mean they can’t be unique. Merely copying doesn’t make anything idiosyncratic, it’s the individuality that one puts in which makes a concept stand out. Constant innovation leaves no room for stagnation and thus, adds on to the basic idea, effectively making it unique. Unique ideas are inspired by basic things, they are simply extensions of pre-existing notions. And, an idea or a concept is unique only when it transcends its predecessor and serves its purpose in a better and more precise way.

Retell Lecture – Facial Recognition

Last week we talked about how people recognize objects and really how well people recognize objects, given how difficult the problem is, given how objects can be seen in all different sorts of illumination, in different positions, in different angles. And yet we are able to extract that information, we are able to take the visual stuff out there, interpret it in a way that allows us to recognize all the different things that we can see in our environment. Today we’re gonna kind of carry on looking at that, but we gonna look at what’s really a special class of objects. That’s the human face. So we gonna look at how we recognize human faces and how we do it quite as well as we do. We’re really expert at recognizing faces. So again we can think about how do we take that visual information and how do we transform it into a form which allows us to put a name to a face, and to do all the other clever things that we can do with faces. So I’m gonna start off again by just pointing out that it’s a hard problem. Face recognition is a hard problem, and it’s a clever thing we do. If you think about all the different types of faces you can recognize, and all the different types of information you can get from the face, you kind of start to appreciate how well we can do face recognition.