Oxford Looks To The Future Of Energy

Many people would like to live more sustainable lives whilst also reducing their energy bills. Now researchers at the University of Oxford may have found a way to make both possible.

This week saw the launch of the METER project, which explores how changing patterns of energy use could make our energy system less expensive, more secure and more sustainable. The project is part of a five year programme investigating ways of relieving peak demands on the UK’s electricity grid as this is currently posing an increasing challenge to the UK’s electricity system. The research is being led by the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Members of the public are being invited to take part in an online survey at www.energy-use.org.  Those taking part will receive an electricity recorder to install in their home, logging their use of electricity activities for one day. The data will feed into the research project and participants will also have the opportunity to have their names entered into a draw to win a year’s free electricity.

Geography and Economics applicants should consider how the government and education sector work together to bring about social and environmental changes.

Maths and Physics applicants should think about data that will be collated on such a project and how this will inform changes to the national grid.

Two mathematicians have mapped out the relationships of characters in popular book and TV series Game of Thrones, in an attempt to work out who the main character is. The series is renowned for regularly killing off the major players, often with very little warning and to the shock (and horror) of readers and viewers alike.

Andrew J. Beveridge, associate professor of Mathematics at Macalester College, and one of his students used network science, a branch of graph theory that draws on economics, sociology and computer science, to reveal the ‘true hero’ of the story, through the connections they have with other characters.   Characters were connected any time they ‘interacted’ the book (defined as appearing within 15 words of each other), and the links were weighted depending on how often the two characters appeared in close proximity. Even though the mathematicians didn’t tell the network what the various communities were, the system produced a very accurate portrayal of the geographical and familial communities and connections.

After the characters had been connected, they ranked the characters by different measures, including by how many others they’re connected with (degree centrality) and another which gives characters higher ranking if they are connected with other ‘important’ people within the network (PageRank).

The result showed Tyrion Lannister as the most highly ranked in most areas, followed by Jon Snow and, somewhat surprisingly for fans of the book, Sansa Stark, who ranks above her popular sister, Arya.

Students applying for Maths, Economics, Computer Science or HSPS should look into the concepts of network science, which has more serious applications such as studying terrorist networks.  English Literature applicants should consider the wider implications of this project – can maths really give insight into a writer’s plan for certain characters, and if they can is that significant? How important is the element of surprise and unpredictability as a feature of literature?

An artwork entitled ‘The Next Rembrandt’  has recently been unveiled in Amsterdam. The painting depicts a 17^th-century thirty-something man in a black hat and white collar that creator Bas Korsten hopes looks ‘unmistakably like a Rembrandt’.

The painting is in fact created by data analysts and computers, and is the result of an 18 month project that asks whether new technology and data can bring back to life a great and innovative painter.

Data scientists, developers, engineers and art historians have all been involved in the project which produced a final 3D printed painting consisting of more than 148 million pixels based on 168,263 Rembrandt painting fragments. The project included designing a software system that could understand Rembrandt based on his use of geometry, composition and painting materials, then use a facial recognition algorithm to identify and classify the most typical geometric patterns used to paint human features.

Korsten stressed that the aim of the project was not to replicate Rembrandt’s work, or to create a new Rembrandt, but to create ‘something new from his work. Only Rembrandt could create a Rembrandt.’

Maths and Fine Art applicants should consider the role that patterns and maths play in the creation of art and in ideas of beauty. Computer Scientists should look more into the technology used and consider how algorithms can be used to produce something that seems so centred on individual creativity. History of Art students should research Rembrandt and his techniques, and how this might be transferred into computer based paintings, as well as the implications of this.

Students interested in Anthropology might consider questions about technology and artwork and how they interlink in contemporary society. Korsten himself asks ‘If you look at how music has embraced the computer, why doesn’t that happen in visual arts?’

This week has seen significant advance in artificial intelligence, as Google’s DeepMind computer program beat Go world champion Lee Sedol in their third consecutive game.

‘Go’, an ancient Chinese board game, was considered by DeepMind’s CEO to be ‘the only game left above chess’, which computers conquered in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the world champion. The game seems simple, but there are trillions of possible moves, which makes it difficult to follow a particular strategy. Mastering the game means using intuition to react to the twists and turns that appear.

Many had believed that it would be at least another decade before artificial intelligence developed enough to conquer ‘Go’, but AlphaGo has proven them wrong. Its mastery of the game is so significant to AI development because of the reliance the top players have on intuition as they play the game. DeepMind built ‘reinforcement learning’ into the programme, which measnt hat the machine plays against itself and adjusted its own neural networks based on trial and error. The program is capable of narrowing down the search space for the next move from the near-infinite and of anticipating the long-results of each move.

Computer Science applicants should look more into AI and the programming used on Alpha Go that has led to its victory, while Mathematics students should investigate the mathematical side of the board game, and how a computer can better calculate the best possible move than the human mind.

In a shock turn of events, Lee Sedol finally beat AlphaGo in their fourth match against each other. Those watching, including the CEO of DeepMind, believe that the computer did make some mistakes, prompting the question of whether AI will ever truly outsmart the human mind, or whether this loss will only help the program to grow stronger. Students applying for Anthropology or HSPS should consider the wider implications of the development of AI, and how this may affect the society we live in.

A recent Mathematics study has argued that prime numbers might not be as random as once thought.

The study, titled Unexpected biases in the distribution of consecutive primes, analyses the first one billion prime numbers to find patterns in their distribution. This study is significant as it suggests there might be a pattern or bias to prime numbers, and prime numbers are famously known for appearing randomly and thus are good to use in encryption. As Computer Science applicants might be aware, every online purchase with a credit card uses the RSA algorithm, which encrypts your credit card number into a large prime number using the credit card numbers as factors. Prime numbers are famously hard to factorise – it took researchers two years to factor a 232-digit number.

The study suggests the bias must exist because of the frequency of the ending digit of numbers up to a billion. Aside from 2 and 5, all prime numbers end in one of four digits: 1, 3, 7 or 9. From this, we can say that is a prime numbers were truly random, a prime number ending with a 1 should be followed by another prime number ending with a 1 25% of the time, as there are four options available. Researches instead found that the occurrence was true only 18% of the time, and a prime number ending with 1 was likely to be followed by a number ending in 3 or 7 30% of the time, and 9 22% of the time.

While this ‘anti-sameness’ bias does not yet concretely change the way our encryption services work, it is a big step towards understanding the prime number phenomenon.

Halloween is nigh and, appropriately, the world has been overrun with Zombies. We’re safe in the UK…for now. However, Dr Adam Kucharski of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has come up with a terrifying model of the spread this infectious disease that we need your help with.

Economics, Mathematics, Medicine and Natural Sciences students should all try their hands at solving the problem of how quickly the spread of infectious disease can occur. They should consider the factors that can influence how infectious disease moves through populations, and what similarities it may bear to other macroeconomic models.

History and English students are also welcome to tackle the problem, but the less mathematically minded might want to consider the cultural role of Zombies, and Zombie-like creatures, in the history of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction and film. George A. Romero’s classic Dawn of the Deadwas both a Zombie flick and critique of post-war American capitalism and consumerist culture. In a similar vein, John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos can be read as a haunting and disturbing allegory for the infiltration of communism and communist ideologies in 1950s British society.

Scientific discoveries into regulations of the body’s natural clock may have resulted in an end to jet lag.

Writing in Molecular Cell, scientists from Singapore have shed light on how the body’s circadian rhythms (which regulate sleep) work and are controlled. It has been revealed that a protein called Period2, or PER2 (which can be seen as a natural ‘switch’ for turning sleep on and off), responds to heat as well as light and the rising and setting of the sun, resulting in an adjustment of the body clock. This discovery is significant as it could lead to the development of drugs which maintain the circadian clock’s natural speed, allowing the body to avoid lost sleep because of jet lag or shift work. The study also provides insight to one of the biggest mysteries of the circadian clock in the last 60 years and has helped to explain some of the basic mechanisms that govern the timing of the body clock.

The research used both biochemical analysis and mathematical modelling, including a mathematical model that predicts the behaviour of the clock under different circumstances.

Biochemistry applicants may want to explore the role biochemical analysis plays in the development of new drugs, whilst Maths applicants could further explore the link between mathematical modelling and drug development. 

In the post-2008 crash era, the potential for market crashes to wreak havoc is well known. Economics applicants should have noted the news late this summer reporting the woes on global indices, such as the FTSE 100 losing almost 4.5% of its value in half a day’s trading in response to poor Chinese data.

While the UK and other western economies have had something of a hard time of it since Lehman Brothers’ collapse, most would probably assume that stock market volatility is not the primary cause of concern for less developed countries.  

However, recent research from Lloyds of London and the University of Cambridge has highlighted the damage that market crashes could cause in African states. Geographers will be interested to note that more than 50% of Africans will live in cities by 2030. With this urbanisation, the research group found that threats facing African societies, such as droughts, pandemics and tectonic events, may start to subside. Market instability instead looks set to become the major cause of concern for urban populations, with Johannesburg at risk of losing 35% of annual GDP output in the event of a serious crash.

Mathematicians will see that the dataset for the statistical analysis has been split into an ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ population. With clear difficulties in deciding who counts as being part which, it may be useful to think about the wider applicability of uncertainty in such analysis, and possible solutions which are strictly mathematical. PPE applicants should also think about the purely economic slant on the study, with GDP the only metric used.

What does randomness and order mean to you? This is the question that has been posed to four Oxford Professors as part of a ‘Research in conversation’ series.

The inspiration for the series grew out of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) conference ‘Randomness and Order’, at which academics in the fields of quantum physics, music, probability and medieval history discussed what randomness meant in their different disciplines.

To many, randomness and order are often seen as diametrically opposed concepts, with each being relevant either to the arts or sciences. However, insights from these Oxford Professors have shown that the concepts have cross-discipline applications. For example, Professor Alison Etheridge discusses the role of randomness in mathematical experiments, whilst Professor Jonathan Cross reflects on how music can embrace randomness; in its creation, performance or understanding.

Maths applicants may want to explore the role randomness plays when using stochastic models, such as in population research, and are encouraged to follow the links given on the series’ webpage. Physics applicants should consider whether randomness makes things intrinsically unknowable, as discussed in quantam mechanics theory. History applicants could look into how randomness influences the order of archives and their subsequent interpretation. Music applicants can conduct further research into how composers used computers to generate musical randomly, bringing into question the nature of what music is, how it is created and how it can speak.

Researchers from leading universities, including Harvard and Columbia, have proven that sarcasm is good for us. Their findings were recently published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

A series of experiments were run among more than 300 men and women to see how using and receiving sarcastic comments affected their creativity and ability to think laterally. The results found that sarcastic exchanges made participants three times more creative than their straight-playing counterparts when tackling psychological tests.

This is because making and understanding sarcastic comments forces us to think more abstractly, which stimulates creativity, openness and the generation of new ideas and problem-solving skills.

75% of those who had been the victim of sarcastic comments beforehand came up with the right solution to problems, compared with 25% who had been exposed to sincere comments.

Experimental Psychology and Natural Sciences applicants should read further into theory development about human cognition, judgment, and decision-making. Human Science and HSPS applicants may want to explore the value of empirical research in explaining human behaviour. Maths applicants may also want to look at how meta-analysis has contributed to methodological advancements in psychological research.