Birdsong, BBC One (Photo: BBC)

up together. The cynic in all of us would highlight the fact that the trenches looked bleak, unpopulated and trite, whilst the rose-tinted flashbacks to rural French played out like a wartime, Laura Ashley pastiche. However, this is unfair. The scenes in the trenches are both moving and tragic and Stephen’s life in France is passionately served up to the viewer in both a believable and warming manner.
Although I occasionally got confused as to where the war horse was going to trot in, the first episode, at least, was wholly consuming and a prime example of pure escapism. The second episode, possibly due to its focus on his relationship’s breakdown opposed to its formation, lacked something the first revelled in. In Episode 1 the focus is very much the two lovers’ whirlwind romance framed by Stephen Wraysford’s wartime duty. However, such was the graphic nature of his thoughts it felt, at times, like every raunchy flashback should end with him flushing a dutifully discharged Kleenex. Birdsong is a tremendous piece of television which, at it’s worst was quaint and at it’s best was utterly moving – praise be to the BBC.

Another televisual treat, Call the Midwife, has recently cycled onto schedules forceps and warm towels at the ready. Starring Jessica Raine as the new girl midwife in post-war East End London, the 10 part series on BBC One gives a dramatic insight into the life of the midwife. The series is funny, moving and more graphic than I would have liked on a Sunday afternoon while having dinner – never have steak whilst watching a programme which deals heavily in placenta! Miranda Hart, as expected, is very entertaining as the bumblingly and clumsily posh Camilla Cholomondely-Browne or ‘Chummy’ to friends. Based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, the series charts the lives of the midwives, their patients and the various problems they encounter. Tragically, Worth died before the series aired.

Call the Midwife, BBC One (photo: BBC)

Although a lot of flailing limbs and screaming women, the series brilliants evokes thrilling tension in the birth scenes with complication a plenty. I feel I could now be a midwife, such is my new encyclopaedic knowledge of breaching, umbilical cords and enemas! Each episode’s drama is primarily based around the plight of a new pregnant person – obviously we’ve already had the pregnant prostitute and the surprise black baby. But the delicacy of childbirth and the peril that can occur from any small complication, as is the case with anything both medical and critical, create immediate, thrilling tension. Anything like ‘the baby is upside down’ has you immediately on the edge of your seat. The series has already been recommissioned for 8 more episodes – due later in the year.

Luke Jones
(KCL)

@lukejones03

As of 4.40pm today (Tuesday February 7), there have been 640 votes cast in the most popular election category. London Student understands this is the Vice-Presidential election. Following Ian Drummond’s resignation, there are three candidates remaining in this category: Abs Hassanali, Daniel Cooper and Ross Speer.

The low turnout means candidates are engaged in a hard battle for the votes that are there and is likely to result in close election results, particularly in the Vice-Presidential election and that for London Student editor, where there are five candidates.

You can read all the candidates’ manifestos and cast your vote here.

I loved maths since I was a kid, and the idea of being able to write equations that could predict reality really appealed. Then I discovered that computers could do maths better than I could!
I started off writing simple computer games, with simple built in physics equations using a Sinclair ZX81. My ideas became real on the screen. Later, I advanced to writing simulation programmes for magnets, and optics.
Computers gave me the opportunity to create new ways of exploring, as my career progressed I became more interested in understanding the human brain. After degrees in psychology and medical physics I’m now in a computer science department trying to understand how our brains work mathematically, and using these insights to build smarter technologies, like robots.

What is your research focus?

I coordinate a big EU robotics project, building socially aware companion robots. We use ideas from biology all the time – the biological world has had millions of years of evolution to come up with really good solutions to hard problems – and we should use these where we can.
In the past I’ve been able to use maths to predict new types of optical illusions – nature’s magic tricks – and as a hobby magician I loved that. I also spend a lot of my time trying to inspire school children about the excitement of research in science maths and computing, through my projects like computer science for fun and the magic based illusioneering project.

How do you think ICT should be taught?

Computing is a relatively new subject, so it’s not surprising we are having some teaching troubles… I’ve been involved in [the curriculum review] behind the scenes; the problem with some ICT classes is that they can make computing dull – it’s about using existing tools rather than the wonderful creative skills of being able to build new and better software.

We should be allowing our next generation the chance to meet those moments in their lives where they too can discover how to create something new. The reality is far more complex, where will the teachers come from with the skills to do this? How do we ensure the best and important parts of ICT are not lost?

What advances do you imagine in computer science in the next ten years?

Computer science will continue to be the main driving force in new products and underpin advances in science and medicine, it will also allow the creation of new forms of art and entertainment. The importance of understanding the human user’s experience, rather than just writing good code, will become more important.

The next 100 years?

Always hard to predict, my best shot will be that we will see more computing devices built into our homes, cars, clothes, and even our bodies. Humanity will link and then blend with artificial intelligence. In the same way as we look back on history and wonder how we lived without glasses, penicillin, telephones and the printing press, in 100 years we will wonder how we lived without personally customised medicines, smart clothes with built in sensors, and adaptive smart buildings to minimise energy use.

The story of Mr (or Ms?) Ed Dante caught my attention in the press. This writer tells the story of how he makes his living writing custom essays for sociology, business, psychology, administration, accounting, you name it. He calls himself ‘a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary’, and he probably is. He attended three dozen online universities, completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more, all in different subjects and all for someone else. This guy (let’s assume he is a guy) contacted the Chronicles of Higher Education in order to share his story with the hope to draw the attention to the massive industry of cheating and start a discussion about custom papers and their consequences. In his confession story, Ed Dante highlights three main groups who comprise his clientele: lazy and wealthy students from very posh families, English-As-A-Second-Language students, and some hopelessly dumb students. While for the first group education is simply another thing to buy, for the latter two having a degree may have a very big difference on the outcome of their lives. Some may suggest that this problem affects only the high-ranking universities because of the demand they put on students. I would say that cases of custom essay submission could be found everywhere and this is worrying if one considers the consequences of this hardly-detectable plagiarism.

These consequences are easy to see: the faked admission essays close the routes for those who are genuinely suitable for the course (as the number of places is limited); after graduation those who cheated would either do nothing relevant to their diploma or the worst scenario takes place and a student with fake diploma gets hired in the relevant field. What comes next may be a real disaster: patients get the wrong medication (nursing students), clients are unknowingly sent into the land of tax fraud (business students), and on and on… What can be done to detect the cases of such plagiarism? Letting students work on their papers during class, giving very specific assignments as well as seeing and grading the work in stages. This may make it harder for the students to submit the work of others. So why don’t just make all writing assignments in-class? Students get a pencil and paper. Tutors watch them. That’s it. Unfortunately, it is not that simple: exams and papers measure two different things. There is a need for independent work outside of classroom, a need for brainstorming, deep thinking, and personal growth and development. Another suggestion: how about asking students to summarize the work that they’ve “written”? Inability to explain oneself may then give a signal for more careful consideration of one’s work. But how about Computer Science students, who sometimes simply cannot explain how their code works? For those who lack some skills in language use or critical thinking, some courses may be a good idea. Such courses would help them to get the basics of grammar and style and have a sufficient grasp of the language of instruction to understand the material, whatever their field. Even if sometimes such courses are often viewed as little more than necessary evils, they may lead to a reduced demand for the custom essay services. The detection of the plagiarism of this kind is very hard because most professors do not “know” their own students well enough. The class sizes do not allow for personal communication and enforces that ‘mere acquaintance’ relationship. As a result, tutors do not know one’s distinct writing style and cannot detect a paid essay. Were professor to truly know his/her students, cheating of this nature would be much easier detected, and eliminated.

Finally, the problem also lies in the distorted perception of education in some students. Education now is turned into economic pursuit and job-getting tool instead of what it is supposed to be: learning, growth and development. This chasing for a diploma creates the demand for the ‘paid essay writers’ who enter this thankless road with bitter consequences, followed by genuine disappointment in the HE system in general. What we need is to reconsider what having a diploma really means for students, and more attention, involvement and personal help from tutors. Otherwise, the highly-valued ethics in Academia is just a series of lies.

Speaker: Prof Roderick MacDonald Law faculties have been under increasing pressure nowadays. Might the study of law reclaim the central role that it played in the University a millennium ago?

Time: February 7, 6.30-8pm

Place: New Theatre, LSE

King’s Greek Play

The King’s Greek Play has been an annual tradition since 1953 and it is the only production in the country to be performed every year in the original Greek. The 2012 Greek Play will be Euripides’ Hecuba directed by Roseanna Long, as part of the annual University of London Festival of Greek Drama.

Time: February 8, 9,10, 7pm

Place: The Greenwood Theatre, King’s College London

Tickets: Standard: £8.00, students: £5.00

While some find their Academic experiences fascinating and truly enjoyable, others face annoying obstacles on their way, which may in the end create a bitter-tasting flavour of not-so-smooth academic episodes in one’s life. Usually, bitter experiences come not directly from Academic institutions themselves, but from those rules and pressures, which one have to follow to the letter. Here is a short reflection of a student, who shared her story, just to illustrate that:

“It was my first year at university and everything was new and exciting, including the International Exchange Programme, which after a simple personal statement I was accepted onto. But it was all downhill from there. After passing QM’s requirements, a potential 2:1 in first year, you then had to apply to the university you wanted to go to, for them to decide if you were a suitable candidate. I had chosen California as my destination; we had to pick up to three campuses to apply to, each differing in expense and demand for places. I had set my heart on the Santa Barbara campus, which was approximately the same cost as living in London and thus affordable, ignoring those such as LA because of expense and Berkley because of demand.

The application form in itself was very complicated and you had to pick classes from a system totally different to the UK’s. But then there was my stumbling block, you had to PROVE 9 months before you were planning on leaving that you could afford to live there for a year. That was where my dream ended. I could have afforded it, student loans, and a summer job, birthdays, Christmas…but I couldn’t prove it then. Don’t get me wrong, I encourage people to go for it, but go in realistically, there was no way my family could have provided bank statements to allow me to pass through the application system.”

Sometimes rules may be unfair, or too strict. Nobody is immune to them, and big disappointments may follow unless you stick to every letter. The only way to avoid such consequences is to be knowledgeable about what you are about to take up, be sure there are no pitfalls, hidden compulsory requirements or commitments; always bear in mind the idea that Socrates expressed in his famous quote captured in the title of the article.

Starting from the current issue, London Student is going to represent students’ personal experiences as well as academics’ reflections on their lives inside Academia. The idea is to tell the story of your personal growth, changes and transformations on your path through Academia. The voices of those who feel that their university degree has changed their perception of the world will provide an meaningful insight on one’s own “person – academia” interplay for everybody to think about and learn. In this issue, Elizabeth Kaplunov, UCL Masters student, shares her personal reflection on the experiences that changed her life once she decided to go down the Academia route.

I finished a Psychology BSc from UCL last year and am doing a part-time Masters course. I found the time spent at UCL challenging at times, but mostly highly enjoyable and inspiring. UCL was the first university to admit people regardless of their gender and religion. There are currently 21 Nobel Prize winners among UCL alumni, as well as current and former staff. These are some of the reasons why I wanted to go to UCL in the first place – it is prestigious, academically esteemed and also fair to students from different walks of life. I would like to take this opportunity to write about how during my time at this university my academic preferences, language abilities, research skills and social life have changed.

Firstly, my academic preferences have changed significantly during my time at UCL. During my A-levels, my favourite topic was ‘Social Psychology’. I was attracted to the drama of Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s highly shocking and unethical experiments, which provide a lot of possibilities for debate. However, studying social psychology in the first year, I realised that most of the theories were based around common sense. Instead, I became more interested in memory, which was a far more concrete topic to study, as well as being one with a stronger and more established evidence base. I suppose that because memory has been studied for longer (from 1930s, with the famous Stroop test) and with tools, which produce highly accurate results (brain scanning) rather than behavioural tests, I find the theories proposed to be more believable.

Another reason I am interested in memory is that I enjoy studying the problems faced, such as memory decline in the aging population. Currently, there is a rapidly increasing aging population. In order to relieve the financial burden on the NHS, as well as helping these people to live more comfortably, it is important to study cognitive decline in conditions such as dementia and Parkinson’s disorder and to prove interventions.

The dramatic change during my time at UCL occurred to my language abilities. I am bilingual Russian-English and I also speak German. My native language is Russian, but since coming to university I have had less contact with my family and more with English speakers. This has caused a slight decrease in my Russian vocabulary. Also, it has negatively affected my grammatical abilities. When I try to write a Russian passage, I make lots of spelling errors and write using an English sentence structure. Lastly, I am also forgetting complex words in Russian but (thankfully) retaining simple words I have known since childhood. My research skills have also changed during my time at UCL. When I first started at UCL, I had completed a brief gender stereotype coursework, which needed a rather limited amount of research skills. In the first year of my degree, I learnt how to write up experiments. In second year, I had to run my experiments, the outlines for which were given to me, then collect data for a questionnaire and run my own mini project. I also learnt how to analyse data that year by volunteering in an alcohol reduction project and how to prepare for an experiment during an internship for the Wellcome Trust. In my third year, I did a dissertation on smoking cessation, during which I learnt to code date and to transcribe. However, I didn’t learn about attracting subjects for a research study, as I didn’t need them for my project. I would like to mention how my social life has changed during my time at UCL. When I came to UCL, I was rather a wallflower, well-behaved, well-raised, highly strung. 3 years later, I like to think that I am still a ‘goody-two shoes’ but with a bit of a twist. I have learnt a lot about dealing with boys, finding new friends, going out and dealing with tough life situations. Whilst London can be a great place to be young and free, it is also a challenging one, forcing completely different people together in one large melting pot.

I have found my time at UCL hard at times, but I believe that most of the changes I have undergone have been positive and have helped me to grow up in more ways than one. Feeling like sharing your story? Contact the Academia Editor at academia@london-student.net