Oxford University 33-15 Cambridge University | Varsity match report

Oxford University’s scrum-half Sam Egerton gets to be the very first player to be sent off in a Varsity match. Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Photos

Oxford’s fourth successive victory in the Varsity match was marred by the first sending off in the fixture’s 141-yr history.

The Dark Blues dispatched Cambridge 33-15 at Twickenham but had to play most of the 2nd half with 14 males right after the scrum-half Sam Egerton was sent off for an incident at a ruck involving the flanker Nick Viljoen.

The referee, Matt Carley, dismissed Egerton in the 51st minute on the advice of the television match official shortly following the half-back had scored a try.

Even when down to 14 guys Oxford had been below minor risk as they eased to a record-equalling fourth consecutive win in the 132nd meeting between the rivals.

John Carter, Henry Lamont and Nicholas Gardner also crossed for the Dark Blues although John Hudson kicked three penalties and two conversions.

Oxford University 33-15 Cambridge University | Varsity match report

They call it Silicon Fen. So what is the special draw of Cambridge?

Innovation is like motherhood and apple pie, in that everyone’s in favour of it. Specifically governments. They all want more of it. The only issue is that they haven’t the faintest concept of how to make it come about and so are suckers for any person with a Huge Thought about it.

A handful of many years in the past, an economist named Richard Florida found himself the beneficiary of this syndrome. He published a guide with the beguiling title of The Rise of the Innovative Class and the even much more beguiling subtitle “… and how it’s transforming work, leisure, local community, and daily existence”. Florida’s argument was that, as our economies are becoming transformed into understanding economies, creativity is to our century what accessibility to organic assets was to the 18th. Innovative occupations – an occupational class comprising knowledge-workers, intellectuals and artists – were growing to the stage exactly where virtually a third of the US workforce could be regarded as “innovative” and businesses, cities and regions have been bending over backwards to entice them.

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As soon as, the fate of wonderful industrial centres was established by geography – their proximity to normal sources, navigable rivers, harbours, and so forth. But the “sources” of the new economic climate are footloose. The message of Florida’s book for urban planners and municipal authorities, consequently, was that if cities want to do well they have to attract the imaginative kinds. In order to do so, they should cherish the 3 “Ts” – talent (a extremely educated population), tolerance (cultural and sexual diversity) and engineering (the infrastructure necessary to sustain an entrepreneurial culture). In other words, they need to seem a bit like San Francisco.

As it happens, some of Florida’s insights were truly just modern articulations of the suggestions of ancient economists. Alfred Marshall observed numerous years ago that staff in experienced occupations have a tendency to cluster in locations exactly where their peers live and perform. But why did people individuals select to settle there in the very first area?

Which brings us to Cambridge, Marshall’s alma mater and the nearest issue Europe has to Silicon Valley. Inevitably, it has been dubbed Silicon Fen. The “Cambridge phenomenon” – the extraordinary ecosystem of science- and technologies-primarily based firms in and close to the town – has acquired close to-mythological standing. At the second there are some thing like 1,500 of these businesses in the area, some of which have turn into marketplace leaders in the Uk and the wider planet. Five of them have valuations in the billion-dollar region, and a single, ARM, is 1 of the UK’s most profitable firms and the dominant firm in 1 of the fastest-growing markets in the globe: that for the processor chips that power smartphones and other mobile products.

The Cambridge phenomenon has functioned as a honeypot attracting venture capitalists, big consultancy firms, bankers and other professional organisations that attend to the demands of expanding firms in complicated industries. Cambridge is now ranked as one of the top three “innovation ecosystems” in the world, in accordance to a recent worldwide survey. It is in which Microsoft chose to set up its major European research lab. Ditto Toshiba. And it truly is where AstraZeneca has chosen to locate its global R&ampD and corporate headquarters, a selection that will involve investing upwards of £300m and carry about 2,000 researchers and help staff.

Just down the road, in the village of Hinxton, is the Genome Campus, at the heart of which sits the Sanger Institute, named after the only British scientist to win two Nobel prizes, where Sir John Sulston and his colleagues first sequenced the human genome. And not far away is the Babraham Analysis Campus, which specialises in the incubation of bioscience businesses and into which the government not too long ago injected £44m of public funding.

For decades, policy-makers from Europe and beyond have been coming to Cambridge, wistfully eyeing its “engineering cluster”, shaking their heads at the record of vibrant companies that it has spawned, interviewing academics, executives, planners and venture capitalists and pondering what its secret formula is.

There is no formula. Nobody planned the Cambridge phenomenon, just as no person planned Silicon Valley. The two designed organically. That doesn’t mean that similar phenomena can not happen elsewhere, just that they can’t be delivered to purchase. And they consider plenty of time to evolve and mature.

In Silicon Valley’s situation, the story goes back to 1939, when two Stanford-skilled engineers, David Packard and William Hewlett, set up a small electronics firm in a Palo Alto garage. In the situation of Cambridge it also goes back a long way. Simply because of lobbying by the university in the early component of the 20th century, the town had no “legacy” industries – no mass manufacturing, no auto manufacturing (not like Oxford), no smokestacks. Insofar as Cambridge had any industrial sector at all in the 1st half of the 20th century, it was in reasonably clean locations this kind of as customer and broadcasting technological innovation (Pye, founded in 1896) and scientific instrumentation (Cambridge Scientific Instruments, co-founded by Charles Darwin’s fifth son, Horace, in 1881).

The initial stirrings of modify came in the early 1950s, when Cambridge University embarked on the development path that has turned it into one of the world’s intellectual powerhouses. In 1949, in what was then known as the Mathematical Laboratory (and at some point became the Pc Laboratory), Maurice Wilkes and his colleagues had constructed the Edsac, one of the first common-function electronic computers. Not like other researchers who have been creating equivalent machines in other locations, Wilkes &amp Co produced theirs right away obtainable as a computing device to colleagues in a variety of disciplines. This had two results: it led to a series of scientific breakthroughs (for example, plate tectonics in earth sciences) and it established Cambridge as a leader in details engineering and computing.

A 2nd supply of innovation was the discovery in 1953 by Watson and Crick of the structure of the DNA molecule. This was the initial link in a chain that led to the sequencing of the human genome in 2000 – and sooner or later spawned a entire ecosystem of biotechnology organizations.

A third considerable improvement was the founding, in 1960, of Cambridge Consultants, one particular of the UK’s initial technology-transfer organizations. It was set up by three Cambridge alumni to “put the brains of Cambridge University at the disposal of the problems of British market”. As far as the IT section of the ecosystem is concerned, Cambridge Consultants played a vital part, simply because 1 can trace links from a lot of of today’s successful companies (for instance ARM) that stretch back to it.

A fourth element was the change that took spot in the 1960s in the university’s and the regional authority’s mindset to industrial growth in the town. Inside the university, significantly of the pressure came from researchers in physics, engineering and computing who came to see neighborhood industrial growth in their fields as desirable for different reasons: as a way of exploiting their study via startup ventures as a likely source of investigation collaboration and funding and as a way of boosting the employability of their college students. These pressures were amplified by the university’s liberal – some would say relaxed – frame of mind to intellectual property.

On the planners’ side, there were pressures from central government to reverse their earlier anti-industrial bias for the region. A specific cause célèbre had been their refusal to permit IBM to find its European R&ampD laboratory in Cambridge. In the finish, the planners transformed their minds soon after a commission led by Sir Nevill Mott, head of the Cavendish Laboratory, signalled a radical shift in the university’s mindset to industrial advancement. From that minute, the die was cast.

What we see in Cambridge and Silicon Valley today are complex industrial ecosystems. But although a formula is unattainable, we can see that this kind of ecosystems need specified crucial elements if they are to thrive.

Very first of all, the ecosystem demands to have a considerable investigation university at its heart. It has to be in a pleasant urban atmosphere that has a excellent housing stock, affordable transport links, very good state and personal schools, great healthcare and a lively cultural existence. And the local planners have to be sympathetic to the demands of tiny tech-based mostly organizations, particularly in their early phases of their corporate life.

It’s critical that the university at the heart of the ecosystem must be one particular that gives considerable freedom to its academics and has a liberal attitude towards intellectual home. Also essential are legal firms that comprehend IP, and outposts of the global accounting and consulting companies simply because venture capitalists do not truly feel relaxed funding ventures which are audited by nearby firms. And there even wants to be a range of various kinds of hotel – which includes boutique ones – to cater for visiting researchers, financiers and conference attendees.

The ecosystem demands a good deal of tiny specialist firms that can swiftly tackle certain commissions together with a networking method that allows people rapidly to locate a particular specialist when they want him or her. Most critical of all, it needs a considerable population of “angel” investors – experienced entrepreneurs who have acquired wealth through building productive businesses and who are prepared and in a position to invest in, and mentor, companies at the startup stage, lengthy prior to any venture capitalist would deign to look at them.

Cambridge has a club of such angel traders. Membership demands include a net worth in extra of £15m and a track record of at least 1 effective “exit” from a startup. At present, the club has 56 members. It functions as an arena in which innovators and entrepreneurs can pitch suggestions to an audience that is seasoned, sympathetic but essential and exceedingly well-informed. Not each and every pitch that succeeds in this forum outcomes in a profitable new business. But it supplies a valuable reality examine on scientific and technological dreams.

At one more degree, the “Cambridge phenomenon” tells us that innovation ecosystems cannot be bought off the shelf and put in wherever governments want to locate them. Innovation is a complicated and delicate plant. You have to put together the soil carefully, be prepared to wait for the fruits and accept that your administration will be lengthy gone prior to they materialise. Even in swiftly moving technologies, patience is a virtue.

They call it Silicon Fen. So what is the special draw of Cambridge?

It"s no surprise that police were willing to spy on Cambridge students like me | Rachel Young

Hyperlink to video: Police officer to likely Cambridge University informant: ‘Try not to think too deeply about it’

Cambridge Defend Training was set up in late 2010 as portion of a huge wave of student activism, occupations, and protests towards rises in tuition charges and cuts to schooling. On 9 December 2010, as the coalition government voted in parliament to raise tuition charges, I was currently being beaten to the ground by police batons just 200 metres away. For people of us who have skilled first-hand the use of the violent force to suppress pupil dissent, it comes as no shock that the state is also inclined to resort to the underhand tactic of surveillance.

Indeed, this is not the very first time that the police have attempted to recruit spies in Cambridge to inform on fellow activists. In both situations, officers approached a person who had been the victim of an unconnected crime and contacted the police for assistance. They exploited this vulnerability to try to coerce these men and women into spying on their buddies. In latest many years we have seen that the police will go to any lengths to obtain intelligence on activist groups, like deceiving ladies into extended-phrase intimate relationships and stealing the identities of dead kids.

It is telling in this situation that the police defend their activities as the two legal and legitimate. Whilst it is handy for the police to denounce Mark Kennedy as a rogue officer, it is clear that surveillance of individuals who dare to dissent is in reality a central and schedule portion of police function. We know from our own experience of the two violent and covert repression that the police have played a vital position in enforcing austerity policies.

All more than the Uk, we are encountering the intensification of attempts by police, university management and the government to criminalise and suppress dissent in universities. In Cambridge, university management has colluded with the police to use each legal coercion and violent force against dissenting college students. Since 2010, university management has repeatedly invited police onto campus, resulting in the damage of its own college students, and has picked out and victimised individual students as ringleaders of protests, using the two punitive academic suspensions and legal proceedings. Far more recently, the university is suspected of engaging in its personal surveillance of picket lines in Cambridge for the duration of the 31 October strike by lecturers and employees.

The message students and academics have been getting from Cambridge University management, time and time once more, has been: “do not believe for yourselves if you know what’s excellent for you”. This is strikingly related to the suggestions of “Officer Smith” to “John Armstrong” to “try out not to consider as well deeply about it … you will commence tying yourself up in knots”. In spite of – or maybe since of – its cosy connection with the police, Cambridge University has refused to comment on yesterday’s surveillance revelations. Conveniently, in this distinct instance “the matter is a single for police to deal with”.

Of course, this scenario is not distinctive to students at Cambridge. Yesterday, the University of London pupil union president, Michael Chessum, was arrested, apparently for not getting gained advance permission for a protest. College students in Sussex have been banned from protesting on campus following a campaign towards the outsourcing of university jobs. Certainly, the role of universities as spaces of creativity, dissent and training for all is under risk, not only from cuts to funding and the rise in student debt, but also the repressive techniques of the government, police and university management.

Despite these multifaceted attempts at repression, we are witnessing a resurgence of student activism not noticed since 2010. As staff salaries are reduce and the government threatens to privatise pupil loans, college students, academics and workers are organising to fight back towards the commodification of our education. We refuse to be intimidated by these coercive and underhand techniques, and will proceed to resist – in our universities and on the streets.

It"s no surprise that police were willing to spy on Cambridge students like me | Rachel Young

Police tried to spy on Cambridge students, secret footage shows

Website link to video: Police try to recruit activist to spy on Cambridge college students and political groups

Police sought to launch a secret operation to spy on the political actions of college students at Cambridge University, a covertly recorded movie reveals.

An officer monitoring political campaigners attempted to persuade an activist in his 20s to grow to be an informant and feed him information about college students and other protesters in return for cash.

But rather the activist wore a hidden camera to record a meeting with the officer and expose the surveillance of undergraduates and other folks at the 800-year-previous institution.

The officer, who is component of a covert unit, is filmed saying the police need to have informants like him to gather info about pupil protests as it is “extremely hard” to infiltrate their own officers into the university.

The Guardian is not disclosing the identify of the Cambridgeshire officer and will call him Peter Smith. He asks the man who he is making an attempt to recruit to target “student-union type things” and says that would be of interest due to the fact “the factors they discuss can have an influence on local community problems”.

Link to video: Police officer tells prospective spy how to inform on Cambridge students

Smith wanted the activist to name students who were going on protests, list the cars they travelled in to demonstrations, and determine leaders of protests. He also asked the activist to search Facebook for the most current data about protests that had been being planned.

The other proposed targets of the surveillance consist of Uk Uncut, the campaign against tax avoidance and government cuts, Unite Towards Fascism and environmentalists. The Cambridgeshire police at first insisted that there have been implications for “national safety” but later dropped this argument when challenged.

At another stage, the activist asked regardless of whether a group acknowledged as Cambridge Defend Training, which has protested towards tuition costs and schooling cuts, would be of interest. Smith replied: “That’s the sort of thing that we would be seeking for. Once more, fundamental sort of things. It truly is all the internet. When they have meetings and they are discussing what they are going to do, that is when we’ll say: ‘Will you go along?’”

Website link to video: Police officer discusses using Facebook to check Cambridge activists

Cambridge Defend Education describes itself as being “largely college students and academics from Cambridge University”.

Rachel Wenstone, deputy president of the Nationwide Union of Students, stated: “This is yet yet another illustration of the questionable techniques that undercover police officers have taken in latest many years to infiltrate campaign groups and extract info.”

Julian Huppert, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, tweeted: “I’m shocked by this – looks wholly inappropriate.” Cambridge University did not comment, saying it was a matter for the police.

Cambridgeshire police mentioned: “Officers use covert techniques to gather intelligence, in accordance with the law, to help in the prevention and detection of criminal exercise.”

The disclosures follow prolonged criticism of the police more than their secret deployment of long-phrase undercover officers in political groups considering that 1968. Police chiefs have been accused of unjustifiably infiltrating and disrupting political groups that use non-violent techniques to promote their aims.

Yet another approach for gathering intelligence on campaigners has been to persuade activists to turn into paid informants and pass on details of future protests and prominent campaigners. The amount of informants in political groups, in accordance to police sources, runs into the hundreds.

Hyperlink to video: Police officer provides Cambridge University activist funds for info on political meetings

The covert film sheds light on the seldom visible world of informants, illuminating how the police recruit and task them. The activist, who does not want to be named and has been given the pseudonym John Armstrong, was rung on his mobile out of blue at the beginning of October by the police officer.

Smith said he worked for the police and asked him if he was prepared to come to a police station in Cambridge to aid him with a matter that he did not disclose.

According to Armstrong, Smith had selected him due to the fact he had been lively in environmental and anti-nuclear groups and had been arrested three instances on demonstrations, though not charged. He has also lived in Cambridge for several years.

Afterwards, Armstrong contacted the Guardian as he did not want to turn out to be an informant. He agreed to wear a concealed camera to record the contents of his second meeting with Smith.

During this meeting, Smith advised that he wanted Armstrong to commence by offering data about local groups in Cambridge, prior to progressing on to national campaigns.

“Let’s preserve it small, you know small factors that go on, small meetings that take place where they are going to talk about different problems in Cambridge, whether or not it be, such as at the university or individuals sorts of issues,” the officer is recorded as saying. When Armstrong explained he had been involved in a student-organised occupation of Cambridge University in a protest against tuition costs 3 many years ago and asked if Smith would have been interested in that, Smith mentioned yes. “Again, it really is individuals sorts of issues. You know, what is the feeling of folks, if you are inside.”

The younger man then asked if it would have been tough for the police to send their own officers into the occupation, to which Smith replied: “We can not do it. It truly is extremely hard. That’s why we need to have to work with people.” Armstrong has not been a pupil at Cambridge, though several of his buddies are at the university.

When contacted by the Guardian, a Cambridgeshire police spokesperson said: “Officers use covert tactics to collect intelligence, in accordance with the law, to aid in the prevention and detection of criminal activity.” They declined to give any information of the unit Smith works for.

Smith outlined what info Armstrong would be necessary to slip him. “It will be a case of you going to meetings, say, I don’t know, Uk Uncut, pupil … something like that, how several folks were there, who was the primary speaker, who was offering the talks, what was your evaluation of the talk, was it a case of – had been they attempting to cause issues or were they striving to aid men and women, you know, those type of factors.”

Smith also mentioned he desired Armstrong to gather data about Cambridge campaigners who had been arranging to go to protests in other components of the country. “That is exactly where the names come in. Because what I will want to know is – Okay, who’s going, do they program on a peaceful protest which is absolutely fine, how they are going to go, as in what autos they are going to use, index numbers.”

He goes on to say: “So you will tell me, for illustration, there is 50 people going from Cambridge University, these are the cars they are travelling in and they are going as a peaceful protest?”

Smith outlined how the information gathered by Armstrong would be funnelled to the police officers in charge of policing the demonstration: “The purpose I am asking these concerns is because it offers the officers or whoever’s looking right after it on that side of things, as in at the protest, an notion of how numerous folks are going to attend, in which they are coming from, how many autos are going to turn up, so they can place measures in location to hold them off the street and items. It really is not since we want to target people and round them all up and arrest them.”

Smith also recommended that Armstrong use Facebook to uncover details about groups, incorporating: “It is less complicated to inquire individuals like by yourself to give us updates … It is all about us performing issues legally … We don’t hack into people’s accounts so then we would request you for updates.”

The officer also recommended the guy he hoped to recruit would be paid expenditures or other sums. “You may possibly go to a Uk Uncut or Unite Towards Fascism meeting one evening, you may well get say £30 just for your time and effort for carrying out that. Which is the type of factor you are looking at.”

Link to video: Police officer to potential Cambridge University informant: ‘Try not to consider as well deeply about it’

As Smith sought to convince Armstrong to sign up, he also advised him not to “feel as well deeply” about informing on his fellow campaigners as he might “tie himself up in knots”.

Police tried to spy on Cambridge students, secret footage shows