Science and Technology Group

Our Most Recent Meeting

Our last meeting was with Prof Martyn Thomas who will give a talk on the 15th February entitled Cybersecurity: the scale of the threat and why we have made almost no progress towards a solution. This was a fascinating talk which had several of us wanting to throw away our smart phones, and tape over our webcams. He offered a compelling argument that until software developers are held strictly liable for failures of security of the applications they sell, to banks for example, the problem will remain. Currently, the indemnity insurance provided against losses by customers of financial institutions removes the incentives to force providers of mission critical software to protect the public.

We were told that a low power transmitter, operating on the right frequency, suspended from a balloon somewhere over London, could switch off ever GPS device across the capital. We heard that Russia were able to disable the power grid, and the telephone system, in Ukraine, purely by via cyber attacks. I think several members who attended decided to abandon use of their smart phones, and return to the old style dumb mobile phones, because of all the ways in which our behaviour can be monitored via our modern phones!

Read more about the meeting here.

Next Meeting: Joint Meeting With Cryptos: 27 February 2017

We invite you to a joint meeting with Cryptos, the Reform society 'Devoted to Military History and Intelligence'.

The meeting will take place on Monday 27 February 2017, at 18:30 for 18:45.

Charlie Hall, MA, BA, of the University of Kent will give a talk entitled British Exploitation of German Science and the Start of the Cold War.

Mr Hall is an Assistant Lecturer. School of History , Rutherford College; University of Kent. He is now in his second year of study for PhD, under the supervision of Professor Ulf Schmidt and Dr Stefan Goebel. His research area is the British exploitation of science and technology in Occupied Germany after the Second World War.

Mr Hall has won first prize in the inaugural Cryptos essay competition. He won the prize an essay on the subject of Science and Conflict in the 20th Century. Mr Hall's research field is the history of science and technology in the twentieth century. He is studying the use of technology by the military and intelligenc communities. He has also examined the policy implications of this work.

Please note the that for this meeting we will follow the Cryptos meeting format. The start time is 6.15 for 6.45pm, with the talk preceding an optional buffet supper. See the next section for details.

Reserving tickets for the Joint Meeting

Please note the that we will follow the Cryptos meeting format. and not the normal Science Group one. The start time is 6.15 FOR 6.45pm, with the talk preceding an optional buffet supper.

Tickets may be reserved via the calendar in the members’ section of the website or by contacting:[email protected] or by telephoning 020 7747 4603.

Cryptos tickets are available for £15.00 per person. (this includes a reception drink on arrival). For convenience, please copy your e-mail to [email protected] and to [email protected].

A buffet supper at 8.00 p.m. is available at an additional cost of £33.00 which includes a drink. Please note this must be booked in advance along with any notice of any special dietary requirements no later than noon the day before the event.

Additional drinks may be purchased during the buffet. Digestifs are served in the Smoking Room after dinner.

Note that prices are subject to revision by the Club.

March Meeting: Anil Seth, Machine Consciousness

March 15, Strangers Room.

Consciousness is, for each of us, the presence of a world. Without consciousness there is no world, no self: there is nothing at all. But we do not know much about the material and biological basis of this most central feature of our lives. How do rich multisensory experiences, the senses of self and body, and volition, agency, and ‘will’ emerge from the joint activity of billions of neurons locked inside a bony skull? Once the province just of philosophy and theology, the neuroscience of consciousness has emerged as a one of the great scientific challenges for this century. In this talk I will sketch the state-of-the-art in the new science of consciousness. I will distinguish between conscious level (how conscious we are), conscious content (what we are conscious of), and conscious self (the ‘I’ behind the eyes), describing in each case how new experiments are shedding light on the underlying neural mechanisms, in normal life and in neurological and psychiatric conditions. Throughout, I will emphasize phenomenology – the way things seem – as the target for any satisfying explanation of how the brain, in conjunction with the body and the environment, gives rise to and shapes conscious experience.

Read More...

2017 Programme

Dates for 2017 are as follows (all meeting are on Wednesdays, usually the 3rd one of each month):

Month	Day of Month	Speaker	Title
February	15th	Prof Martyn Thomas	Cybersecurity
March	15th	Prof Anil Seth	Machine Consciousness
April	19th	Prof Peter Wilson	Anti-Microbial Resistance.
May	either 16th, 17th,	Giles Yeo	Are your genes to blame if your jeans don't fit?
June	21st	To Be Confirmed	Ideally, something about the technological singularity.
September	20th	Dr Paolo Tasca	Bitcoins and the Blockchain
October	18th	Prof J A Madrigal	Stem cell therapies.
November	15th	To Be Confirmed	To Be Confirmed

For more information, please visit our Meetings page.