The new Cambridge Festival will take place from 26 March to 4 April 2021, with a series of free online events and activities for everyone that will include the authors of Drought, Flood, Fire, The Seven Deadly Economic Sins, Creating Equality at Home, and All the Sonnets of Shakespeare.
The Cambridge University Press Bookshop will also have recorded presentations premiering throughout the Festival on our Academic YouTube page here, including events with There is No Planet B author Mike Berners-Lee, The Body Image Book for Girls author Charlotte Markey, Bread, Cement, Cactus author Annie Zaidi and more. Find out more here.
See a full list and registration links for upcoming digital Press events at the Cambridge Festival below.
Drought, Flood, Fire with Chris C. Funk Mar 26, 2021 6:00 PM GMT
Every year, droughts, floods, and fires impact hundreds of millions of people and cause massive economic losses. Climate change is making these catastrophes more dangerous. Now. Not in the future: NOW. It is a verb (climate changing) not a noun. This talk discusses how and why climate change is already fomenting dire consequences, and will certainly make climate disasters worse in the near future. But if we understand and face these hazards, we can often predict near-term weather extremes, and act to save lives and livelihoods. With up-to-date examples from the front lines of humanitarian Earth Science, Dr. Funk describes how early warning systems, based on satellites and climate models, can send detailed information into remote corners of the world, empowering the global south to respond. Accepting ‘climate changing’ opens the door to adaptation. There is a lot that we can do to help each other through the tough times ahead.
Register for the Zoom link here.
Two of the Seven Deadly Economic Sins by James Otteson Mar 28, 2021 06:00 PM GMT
You have heard of the Seven Deadly Sins—envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth, and wrath. But there are several deadly economic sins as well—mistakes in economic reasoning that we make routinely, and almost instinctively, but that have deleterious effects not only in our personal lives but also when they find their way into public policy. Otteson's new book Seven Deadly Economic Sins explores seven of these mistakes that are widely committed and yet lead to cost, loss, and forgone prosperity. Each of them can be described without technical apparatus, and in each case, exorcizing them from our economic reasoning can lead both to personal benefit and better policy. In this brief presentation, he will focus on two deadly economic sins, drawn from the book’s first two chapters: the Wealth is Zero-Sum fallacy, and the Good Is Good Enough fallacy.
Register for the Zoom link here.
Imaging and Vision in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Anders Hansen - Mar 29, 2021 06:00 PM
How does the brain process the visual information from an image, and how do we recognise a cat or a dog? Can this process be done equally well by a computer, and if so, could for example a doctor be replaced by an artificial intelligence (AI) device that could give you a diagnosis? These questions may seem science fiction like, however, they are not. The automated doctor is already here. The US Food and Drug Agency (FDA) has already approved AI for automated diagnosis in medicine without any interference with a human clinician. By letting a computer see images of a particular body part of the patient, the AI decides the diagnosis. We will discuss these fascinating new developments and demonstrate how AI systems designed to replace human vision and decision processes can behave very non-human like, and make decisions that are nonsensical and, so far, inexplicable. This raises many fundamental questions in the sciences, but also initiates an ethical and philosophical debate.
Register for the Zoom link here.
More Light than Heat – Using Data to Gain Insight into Disease Transmission by Christl Donnelly Mar 30, 2021 06:00 PM
For all of us, 2020 was a year of numbers and charts while at the same time it was a year of uncertainty. Here we take a long view of using data visualisation and analysis to inform policymakers and ourselves about how diseases spread, how control measures are working (or not working) and who is at greatest risk.
Register for the Zoom link here.
Creating Equality at Home with Francine Deutsch Apr 2, 2021 6:00 PM GMT
Couples exist around the world today who defy the ubiquitous social norms that women do a disproportionate share of housework and childcare. Our work examines 25 case studies of equally sharing couples from 22 countries as diverse as Iceland and Indonesia, Brazil and Bhutan. These nonconformists possess the self-confidence to weather social criticism. The women go beyond endorsing equality; they feel entitled to it. Both husbands and wives reject essentialist views that women have a superior capacity for nurturance. Some couples are shaped by egalitarian parental models, but others emphatically reject the conventional parental models they witnessed. Most put family at the center of their lives. Equality is created by the undoing of gender. Men undo gender by unmooring their identities from paid work and embracing the caregiving parts of themselves. Equally sharing women undo gender when they treat their careers as seriously as their husbands do, and make room in their families for men to share parenting.
Register for the Zoom link here.
All the Sonnets of Shakespeare with Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells Apr 3, 2021 11:00 AM GMT
How can we look afresh at Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets? What new light might they shed on his career, personality, and sexuality? Shakespeare wrote sonnets for at least thirty years, not only for himself, for professional reasons, and for those he loved, but also in his plays, as prologues, as epilogues, and as part of their poetic texture. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells' ground-breaking book assembles all of Shakespeare's sonnets in their probable order of composition. An inspiring introduction debunks long-established biographical myths about Shakespeare's sonnets and proposes new insights about how and why he wrote them. Hear the editors speak on this collection and more.
Register for the Zoom link here.
