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If you share my jealousy of Peter Capaldi and his new guise as the Doctor, then read on to discover how you could become the next Time Lord with a fondness for Earth. However, be warned: you can’t just pick up Matt Smith’s bow-tie from the floor, don Tom Baker’s scarf, and expect to save planet Earth every Saturday at peak viewing time. You’re going to need training. This is where Oxford’s online products can help you. Think of us as your very own Companion guiding you through the dimensions of time, only with a bit more sass. So jump aboard (yes it’s bigger on the inside), press that button over there, pull that lever thingy, and let’s journey through the five things you need to know to become the Doctor.
(1) Regeneration
Being called two-faced may not initially appeal to you. How about twelve-faced? No wait, don’t leave, come back! Part of the appeal of the Doctor is his ability to regenerate and assume many faces. Perhaps the most striking example of regeneration we have on our planet is the Hydra fish which is able to completely re-grow a severed head. Even more striking is its ability to grow more than one head if a small incision is made on its body. I don’t think it’s likely the BBC will commission a Doctor with two heads though so best to not go down that route. Another example of an animal capable of regeneration is Porifera, the sponges commonly seen on rocks under water. These sponge-type creatures are able to regenerate an entire limb which is certainly impressive but are not quite as attractive as The David Tenants or Matt Smiths of this world.
Sea sponges, by Dimitris Siskopoulos. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.
(2) Fighting aliens
Although alien invasion narratives only crossed over to mainstream fiction after World War II, the Doctor has been fighting off alien invasions since the Dalek War and the subsequent destruction of Gallifrey. Alien invasion narratives are tied together by one salient issue: conquer or be conquered. Whether you are battling Weeping Angels or Cybermen, you must first make sure what you are battling is indeed an alien. Yes, that lady you meet every day at the bus-stop with the strange smell may appear to be from another dimension but it’s always better to be sure before you whip out your sonic screwdriver.
(3) Visiting unknown galaxies
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field telescope captures a patch of sky that represents one thirteen-millionth of the area of the whole sky we see from Earth, and this tiny patch of the Universe contains over 10,000 galaxies. One thirteen-millionth of the sky is the equivalent to holding a grain of sand at arm’s length whilst looking up at the sky. When we look at a galaxy ten billion light years away, we are actually only seeing it by the light that left it ten billion years ago. Therefore, telescopes are akin to time machines.
The sheer vastness and mystery of the universe has baffled us for centuries. Doctor Who acts as a gatekeeper to the unknown, helping us imagine fantastical creatures such as the Daleks, all from the comfort of our living rooms.
The majority of time-travel narratives avoid the use of a physical time-machine. However, the Tardis, a blue police telephone box, journeys through time dimensions and is as important to the plot of Doctor Who as upgrades are to Cybermen. Although it looks like a plain old police telephone box, it has been known to withstand meteorite bombardment, shield itself from laser gun fire and traverse the time vortex all in one episode. The Tardis’s most striking characteristic, that it is “much bigger on the inside”, is explained by the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, by using the analogy of the tesseract.
(5) Looking good
It’s all very well saving the Universe every week but what use is that without a signature look? Tom Baker had the scarf, Peter Davison had the pin-stripes, John Hurt even had the brooding frown, so what will your dress-sense say about you? Perhaps you could be the Doctor with a cravat or the time-traveller with a toupee? Whatever your choice, I’m sure you’ll pull it off, you handsome devil you.
Don’t forget a good sense of humour to compliment your dashing visage. When Doctor Who was created by Donald Wilson and C.E. Webber in November 1963, the target audience of the show was eight-to-thirteen-year-olds watching as part of a family group on Saturday afternoons. In 2014, it has a worldwide general audience of all ages, claiming over 77 million viewers in the UK, Australia, and the United States. This is largely due to the Doctor’s quick quips and mix of adult and childish humour.
You’ve done it! You’ve conquered the cybermen, exterminated the daleks, and saved Earth (we’re eternally grateful of course). Why not take the Tardis for another spin and adventure through more of Oxford’s online products?
Image credit: Doctor Who poster, by Doctor Who Spoilers. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.
The earth is filled with many types of worms, and the term “planarian” can represent a variety of worms within this diverse bunch of organisms. The slideshow below highlights fun facts about planarians from Oné Pagán’s book, The First Brain: The Neuroscience of Planarians, and provides a glimpse of why scientists like Pagán study these fascinating creatures.
In taxonomic terms, planarians belong to a large class of organisms called Vermes, the Latin term for “worm.” Platyhelminthes, or “flatworms,” represent a phylum within the class of Vermes, though the Platyhelminthes are broken down into four additional categories. One of these categories includes the Turbellarians—flatworms that are free-living and non-parasitic. Turbellarians are then arbitrarily distinguished based on their size, creating two further divisions: the microturbellarians (worms that are shorter than 1 mm) and macroturbellarians (worms that are longer than 1 mm). There are two types of macroturbellarians, the triclads and polyclads. Though “planarian” is a general term used to describe many types of flatworms, it is most often used in reference to triclads.
Triclads are small worms. They do not typically exceed one inch in length, but many of these worms are even smaller than that. Though these planarians can usually be seen with the naked eye, they are often studied under a microscope for closer observation. The two distinctive bumps that you can see on both sides of a planarian’s head, even without a microscope, are called auricles. Though they are commonly mistaken for ears, auricles do not pick up sounds in the environment, and instead contain many chemoreceptors that help planarians sense both nourishing and toxic substances in their surrounding environment.
Planarians are an ancient species. But like other invertebrates, it’s hard for planarians to fossilize because their bodies lack hard bones. Planarians’ tendency to autolyze—or dissolve head first—when they die makes the process of fossilization even more difficult. Though the fossil record for these organisms is a bit scarce, scientists have identified a fully intact turbellarian fossil from the Eocene period about 40 million years ago. Scientists have also found what they interpret as fossilized flatworm tracks from the Permian period (300 million years ago).
Planarians possess the incredible capability to regenerate cells that are damaged or removed. Though the scope of regeneration varies from species to species, many planarians are capable of full regeneration. This means that if you chop up a planarian into several pieces—the current record is 279 sections—each piece can regenerate into a full grown worm, assuming that this piece of the worm is placed in an environment with adequate nourishment. Even the isolated tip of a tail from a planarian can develop into a full grown worm that possesses a brain and central nervous system.
In the early 20th century, scientists began looking for organisms with which they could test the principles of Mendelian genetics. Most people are aware that fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) became a common test subject because of their short lifespans and ability to produce large quantities of offspring in a short period of time. However, planarians also became a great model organism for scientists to use. Though the planarian nervous system is simple, these flatworms display an immense array of complex behaviors—making planarians an ideal candidate with which scientists can study how the brains of more complex organisms, such as humans, function.
Planarians are not only test subjects for scientists to study. These are also creatures of popular culture, making appearances in several movies and TV shows. For example, in an episode of Fringe, Dr. Bishop offers Agent Dunham a smoothie with chopped pieces of planarians—a gesture meant to pay homage to the memory transfer experiments conducted by McConnell. Planarians have also appeared in the first movie of the Twilight saga, in addition to episodes of The Big Bang Theory and Dr. Who.
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Images: The first five photos in this slideshow have been used courtesy of Dr. Masaharu Kawakatsu. Photo six is copyrighted (2003) by the National Academy of Sciences, USA and has been used with permission.
The riots coincided with the end of an era of British urban policy when various community-centred regeneration programmes introduced by the previous New Labour Government, were being wound down. One of its flagship initiatives was the New Deal for Communities (NDC), a ten year programme which invested £50 million in each of thirty deprived areas including Tottenham. More recently, David Cameron has promoted the idea of the Big Society with an accompanying rhetoric that blames big government for enfeebling the civic sphere.
Two of the three analyses of the Tottenham riots that we examined shared this perspective. North London Citizens emphasised the need to create new community leaders; the Riots Communities and Victims Panel emphasised an on-going failure of services to engage with communities and vaguely endorses an agenda of neighbourhood-level community empowerment. Cameron’s Big Society agenda envisioned communities and neighbourhoods becoming empowered to take local decisions and solve local problems taking over the running of services and facilities where appropriate. None of the three reports make such recommendations for Tottenham. Rather, they restate in minor key the need for greater responsiveness to communities with no clear ideas about how this might be achieved.
All three reports emphasised a deficit in community cohesion. All three identified inadequate engagement by local service providers with residents as part of the problem. But Tottenham has been here before. The aftermath of the 1985 riot saw considerable effort to improve, foster and build community cohesion in Tottenham. Many of the buildings that were looted and burned in 2011 had been the focus of regeneration efforts.
We had just completed research on the efficacy of such policies when the riots occurred. Our 2011 book Lessons for the Big Society: planning, regeneration and the politics of community participation (Ashgate, 2011) examined a long history of failed efforts by the local authority to secure such participation. There were many reasons for this. Labour held a political monopoly in Tottenham. Community activism not sponsored by the party was often ignored. The institutional culture of the local authority councillors and officials was often hostile to community participation in decision-making even if official rhetoric claimed otherwise. Well-to-do parts of the borough had articulate well-organised groups capable of putting pressure on officials and councillors. Community groups in Tottenham lacked the skills and cultural capital that worked to win responsiveness from institutional actors.
The kind of community capacity that regeneration programmes in Tottenham sought to introduce appeared feeble compared to the on-going capacity for unsolicited activism found in well-to-do areas – expressed through single issue campaigns, the establishment of long-standing amenity groups and well-organised networks able to compel responsiveness from Council officials and councillors. The New Labour diagnosis was that areas like Tottenham lacked the necessary social capital. But the regeneration programmes it put in place engendered only a limited form of community capacity, and this depended on the life-support of funding that has since ended.
What then for Cameron’s Big Society? Even after decades of community-focused urban renewal in Tottenham, both community-institutional relationships and community cohesion remain weak. However, this does not justify the withdrawal of state support or bucolic expectations that civil society can fill the resulting void with minimal support.The very localities that need community empowerment also need state support the most.
We argue that what might work for Tottenham is an approach that seriously interrogates why past regeneration efforts were unable to empower local communities but at the same time accepts that such empowerment cannot be realised without significant state funding. It would take seriously the scepticism-bordering-on-hostility of the Big Society to local authority officialdom. But what Tottenham needs for the foreseeable future is big government willing to learn from past mistakes.
Since 1966 the leading international journal in its field, Community Development Journal covers a wide range of topics, reviewing significant developments and providing a forum for cutting-edge debates about theory and practice. It adopts a broad definition of community development to include policy, planning and action as they impact on the life of communities. It publishes critically focused articles which challenge received wisdom, report and discuss innovative practices, and relate issues of community development to questions of social justice, diversity and environmental sustainability.
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Subscribe to only current affairs articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS. Image credit: After the Riot – View from near Scotland Green. Photo by Alan Stanton, 2011. Creative Commons Licence. (via Wikimedia Commons)
Twenty by Jenny is home to some of the most thoughtful reviews of books written for children and teens—anywhere. That is because Jenny Brown, its creator, has cared about youth literature for all of her adult life—as a teacher sharing stories, as an editor producing them, and as a critic and enthusiast writing for countless publications, including Shelf Awareness. Jenny Brown trails golden light.
But I did not know, until late last night, that Jenny Brown, who had written the exquisite Shelf Awarenessreview of Small Damages, had also taken the time to reflect on Small Damages in Twenty by Jenny. Her essay is called "Regeneration." It is, in every way, stunning. It taught me about my own book, made me step back with new understanding. This kind of reflection is built of love. And I am so grateful, Jenny Brown. I am.
I am so grateful, too, to the ever-vigilant Serena Agusto-Cox, for letting me know.
2 Comments on Small Damages is returned to me, in such new ways, by Jenny Brown of Twenty by Jenny, last added: 9/8/2012
It is a pleasure to see this book making such lasting impressions on other readers...
I look forward to reading the essay!