The UCL Policy Commission on the Communication of Climate Science, chaired by Professor Chris Rap... more The UCL Policy Commission on the Communication of Climate Science, chaired by Professor Chris Rapley comprises a cross-disciplinary project group of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, science and technology studies, earth sciences and energy research. The Commission examined the challenges faced in communicating climate science effectively to policy-makers and the public, and the role of climate scientists in communication. / The Commission explored the role of climate scientists in contributing to public and policy discourse and decision-making on climate change, including how highly complex scientific research which deals with high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability can be effectively engaged with public and policy dialogue. The Commission also examined the insights that scientific research and professional practice provide into how people process and assimilate information and how such knowledge offers pathways for climate scientists to achieve more effective enga...
The concept of partial evaluation of ¯tness functions, together with mechanisms manipulating the ... more The concept of partial evaluation of ¯tness functions, together with mechanisms manipulating the resource allocation of population based search methods, are presented in the context of Stochastic Diffusion Search, a novel swarm intelligence metaheuristic that has many similarities with ant and evolutionary algorithms. It is demonstrated that the stochastic process ensuing from these algorithmic concepts has properties that allow the algorithm to optimise noisy fitness functions, to track moving optima, and to redistribute the population after quantitative changes in the fitness function. Empirical results are used to validate theoretical arguments.
An analysis of historical cost trends of energy technologies shows that the decades-long increase... more An analysis of historical cost trends of energy technologies shows that the decades-long increase in the deployment of renewable energy technologies has consistently coincided with steep declines in their costs. For example, the cost of solar photovoltaics has declined by three orders of magnitude over the last 50 years. Similar trends are to be found with wind, energy storage, and electrolysers (hydrogen-based energy). Such declines are set to continue and will take several of these renewable technologies well below the cost base for current fossil fuel energy generation. Most major climate mitigation models produced for the IPCC and the International Energy Agency have continually underestimated such trends despite their being quite consistent and predictable. By incorporating such trends into a simple, transparent energy system model we produce new climate mitigation scenarios that provide a contrasting perspective to those of the standard models. These new scenarios provide an opportunity to shift the common narrative that a Paris-compliant emissions pathway will be expensive, will require reduced energy services or economic growth, and will need to rely on technologies that are currently expensive or unproven as scale. This research provides encouraging evidence for governments that are looking for greater ambition on decarbonising their economies while providing economic growth opportunities and affordable energy
Climate change risk assessments act as a bridge between climate science research and climate poli... more Climate change risk assessments act as a bridge between climate science research and climate policy. The UCL Policy Commission for Communicating Climate Science brought together 30 policy makers, climate scientists and research funders in a workshop to explore how climate change risk assessments can be made more effective drivers of climate change mitigation policy. The Report summarises the outcomes of the event including barriers and opportunities for progress.
The Justice Syndicate (TJS) is an interactive performance, featuring an audience who become juror... more The Justice Syndicate (TJS) is an interactive performance, featuring an audience who become jurors considering a difficult case. Via iPads, participants receive evidence, witness testimonies and prompts to vote and discuss the case. We compare TJS to other theatre performances in which audiences are juries, arguing it is unique in only having twelve audience members, with no additional spectators. We compare TJS to experiments researching jury decision-making. In its novel use of technology, it offers a scalable method to research group decision-making in jury-style settings, or to give legal practitioners and prospective jurors an experience of the psychological factors affecting jury deliberation. We discuss how different juries can be presented with identical evidence and come to opposing verdicts. We argue that these wildly different outcomes are linked to how the participants – individually and as a group – resolve the tension between what is legal and what is just.
Global environmental change is one of the most pressing issues facing future generations. Equippi... more Global environmental change is one of the most pressing issues facing future generations. Equipping schoolchildren with a clear understanding of physical geography is therefore a key educational pr...
The Role of Feedback in the Determination of Figure and Ground: A Combined Behavioral & Modeling ... more The Role of Feedback in the Determination of Figure and Ground: A Combined Behavioral & Modeling Study Lawrence A. Watling (l.watling@psychology.bbk.ac.uk) Centre for Brain & Cognitive Development, School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, London, U.K. Michael W. Spratling (michael.spratling@kcl.ac.uk) Division of Engineering, King's College London, U.K. Kris De Meyer (kris.de_meyer@ kcl.ac.uk) Division of Engineering, King's College London, U.K. Mark H. Johnson (mark.johnson@bbk.ac.uk) Centre for Brain & Cognitive Development, School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, London, U.K. Abstract Object knowledge can exert on important influence on even the earliest stages of visual processing. This study demonstrates how a familiarity bias, acquired only briefly before testing, can affect the subsequent segmentation of an otherwise ambiguous figure-ground array, in favor of perceiving the familiar shape as figure. The behavioral data are then replicated using a biologically plausible...
The UCL Policy Commission on the Communication of Climate Science, chaired by Professor Chris Rap... more The UCL Policy Commission on the Communication of Climate Science, chaired by Professor Chris Rapley comprises a cross-disciplinary project group of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, science and technology studies, earth sciences and energy research. The Commission examined the challenges faced in communicating climate science effectively to policy-makers and the public, and the role of climate scientists in communication. / The Commission explored the role of climate scientists in contributing to public and policy discourse and decision-making on climate change, including how highly complex scientific research which deals with high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability can be effectively engaged with public and policy dialogue. The Commission also examined the insights that scientific research and professional practice provide into how people process and assimilate information and how such knowledge offers pathways for climate scientists to achieve more effective enga...
The concept of partial evaluation of ¯tness functions, together with mechanisms manipulating the ... more The concept of partial evaluation of ¯tness functions, together with mechanisms manipulating the resource allocation of population based search methods, are presented in the context of Stochastic Diffusion Search, a novel swarm intelligence metaheuristic that has many similarities with ant and evolutionary algorithms. It is demonstrated that the stochastic process ensuing from these algorithmic concepts has properties that allow the algorithm to optimise noisy fitness functions, to track moving optima, and to redistribute the population after quantitative changes in the fitness function. Empirical results are used to validate theoretical arguments.
An analysis of historical cost trends of energy technologies shows that the decades-long increase... more An analysis of historical cost trends of energy technologies shows that the decades-long increase in the deployment of renewable energy technologies has consistently coincided with steep declines in their costs. For example, the cost of solar photovoltaics has declined by three orders of magnitude over the last 50 years. Similar trends are to be found with wind, energy storage, and electrolysers (hydrogen-based energy). Such declines are set to continue and will take several of these renewable technologies well below the cost base for current fossil fuel energy generation. Most major climate mitigation models produced for the IPCC and the International Energy Agency have continually underestimated such trends despite their being quite consistent and predictable. By incorporating such trends into a simple, transparent energy system model we produce new climate mitigation scenarios that provide a contrasting perspective to those of the standard models. These new scenarios provide an opportunity to shift the common narrative that a Paris-compliant emissions pathway will be expensive, will require reduced energy services or economic growth, and will need to rely on technologies that are currently expensive or unproven as scale. This research provides encouraging evidence for governments that are looking for greater ambition on decarbonising their economies while providing economic growth opportunities and affordable energy
Climate change risk assessments act as a bridge between climate science research and climate poli... more Climate change risk assessments act as a bridge between climate science research and climate policy. The UCL Policy Commission for Communicating Climate Science brought together 30 policy makers, climate scientists and research funders in a workshop to explore how climate change risk assessments can be made more effective drivers of climate change mitigation policy. The Report summarises the outcomes of the event including barriers and opportunities for progress.
The Justice Syndicate (TJS) is an interactive performance, featuring an audience who become juror... more The Justice Syndicate (TJS) is an interactive performance, featuring an audience who become jurors considering a difficult case. Via iPads, participants receive evidence, witness testimonies and prompts to vote and discuss the case. We compare TJS to other theatre performances in which audiences are juries, arguing it is unique in only having twelve audience members, with no additional spectators. We compare TJS to experiments researching jury decision-making. In its novel use of technology, it offers a scalable method to research group decision-making in jury-style settings, or to give legal practitioners and prospective jurors an experience of the psychological factors affecting jury deliberation. We discuss how different juries can be presented with identical evidence and come to opposing verdicts. We argue that these wildly different outcomes are linked to how the participants – individually and as a group – resolve the tension between what is legal and what is just.
Global environmental change is one of the most pressing issues facing future generations. Equippi... more Global environmental change is one of the most pressing issues facing future generations. Equipping schoolchildren with a clear understanding of physical geography is therefore a key educational pr...
The Role of Feedback in the Determination of Figure and Ground: A Combined Behavioral & Modeling ... more The Role of Feedback in the Determination of Figure and Ground: A Combined Behavioral & Modeling Study Lawrence A. Watling (l.watling@psychology.bbk.ac.uk) Centre for Brain & Cognitive Development, School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, London, U.K. Michael W. Spratling (michael.spratling@kcl.ac.uk) Division of Engineering, King's College London, U.K. Kris De Meyer (kris.de_meyer@ kcl.ac.uk) Division of Engineering, King's College London, U.K. Mark H. Johnson (mark.johnson@bbk.ac.uk) Centre for Brain & Cognitive Development, School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, London, U.K. Abstract Object knowledge can exert on important influence on even the earliest stages of visual processing. This study demonstrates how a familiarity bias, acquired only briefly before testing, can affect the subsequent segmentation of an otherwise ambiguous figure-ground array, in favor of perceiving the familiar shape as figure. The behavioral data are then replicated using a biologically plausible...
Climate change risk assessments act as a bridge between climate science research and climate poli... more Climate change risk assessments act as a bridge between climate science research and climate policy. The UCL Policy Commission for Communicating Climate Science brought together 30 policy makers, climate scientists and research funders in a workshop to explore how climate change risk assessments can be made more effective drivers of climate change mitigation policy. The Report summarises the outcomes of the event including barriers and opportunities for progress.
Sustainability: new questions, new answers. Ed Rosie Robison, Chapter 6, pp35-38, Nov 2015
As a neuroscientist, I study how our brains impose order and meaning on the information coming fr... more As a neuroscientist, I study how our brains impose order and meaning on the information coming from the world around us. As a citizen, I follow important public debates and have become puzzled by how people can look at the same events and come to hold radically different views, which then lead them to denigrate those who disagree with them. Over time, these two interests have come together, and I now look at societal disagreements about important issues from the perspective of how our brains and minds work. As an example of such societal disagreement, the public debate about sustainability and climate change has become fractious and polarised. At either end of the spectrum of public opinion are groups of people with strongly-held convictions about the reality of climate change, what its impact will be, and what we should do about it. Because of such deep disagreements, people often feel distrust about the motivations of those on the 'other side', which reinforces the negative tone of the debate. As several other articles in this book attest to, this is not the only problem for how we engage with issues of sustainability. But in this article I will explore a particular question that follows from my research work: can scientific insights into how we come to hold convictions and judge other people help us deal more constructively with fundamental disagreements about sustainability?
There is a gap between the current role of the climate science community and the needs of society... more There is a gap between the current role of the climate science community and the needs of society. Closing this gap represents a necessary but insufficient step towards improved public discourse and more constructive policy formulation on climate change.
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