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Royal Institute Christmas Lectures
category9 writes "One of the best xmas tv highlights for us chaps in the UK is the RI Christmas Letures. Once broadcast by the BBC, Channel4 now have the helm. Past lecturers include the world renowed cybernetics engineer, Prof. Kevin Warwick. This year Sir John Sulston, of Human Genome Project fame, will be talking about genetics and the building blocks of life over 5 lectures. This is a must see for anyone interested in artificial intelligence. The lectures are presented in a format which allows technical detail, but in a way very accessible to those outside the particilar scientific fields. The website has transcripts for anyone not able to receive Channel4, perhaps with streams coming at a later date (lobby Channel4 if you must)."
You clearly don't read The Register. Warwick is a joke in the Artificial Intelligence community, regarded by most as little more than a publicity hound. He used to go around saying that we would all be human slaves in a robot nation by the year 2000. At the time he came to my university to debate some of the professors in our Artificial Intelligence department, and they mopped the floor with him.
Having milked the world of Artificial Intelligence for all the publicity it was worth, he then installed one of those chips they use for tracking dogs in his arm and started claiming that he was the first Cyborg...
Do a search for "Captain Cyborg" at The Register to learn more about this guy, he gives science a bad name.
RI is a quaint, somewhat ruritanian institution. Most of the membership are rather stuffy and insist on wearing formal evening dress to the discourses, and there is a tradition that no questions are taken from the floor (you have to buttonhole the speaker afterwards). The staff and the Director, on the other hand. are very unfussy and very helpful. The Director is Susan Greenfield, who is known as a broadcaster on neurology. They do have a lovely old building in Albemarle Street, however, with an absolutely excellent Faraday museum. Research into inorganic chemistry is still carried out in the basement where Faraday had his original labs.