The British Science Association’s (BSA) vision is of a world where science is at the heart of society and culture. Our mission is to support, grow and diversify the community of people interested and involved in science; and to strengthen their influence over science's direction and place in society.We organise major initiatives across the UK, including British Science Week; the annual British Science Festival; regional and local events through our network of Branches; activities and training for professional science communicators; and a range of initiatives for young people in schools and colleges. The BSA believes that science education shouldn’t only be to train future scientists. In addition to offering young people opportunities to participate in science that will help broaden their career choices and ensure that the UK has enough skilled scientists and engineers to meet the future needs of society and the economy, we also want to create a generation of young people who are comfortable with science and ...

The British science association aim to position science at the heart of our society, providing an opportunity for people to explore, investigate, enjoy, discuss and challenge science and its societal implications. Our journalism competition will offer students from a range of schools across Greater Manchester the opportunity to learn about cutting edge research directly from academics working in a variety of academic fields. Alongside engaging with active researchers, students will also be introduced to the challenging task of science writing and will learn how to balance the requirement for engaging and understandable content with the equally important task of correctly reporting scientific content. We hope that engaging with science in this manner will give students the opportunity to look beyond science as an abstract classroom discipline and to appreciate and recognize typical errors which arise when preparing academic content for the mainstream media. In the pilot competition we ran early in 2016 we engaged with 30 students from 9 different schools across Greater Manchester. The schools involved in this pilot competition ranged from grammar schools to academies - meaning we interacted with students from a range of backgrounds. The majority of these schools have already expressed a desire to participate in this contest again in 2017. We feel that this is an innovative and engaging way of providing students with the opportunity to learn and apply science in new, unusual and exciting ways. Indeed, the feedback we received from our pilot competition indicated that this was the case. Example feedback from 2016: "it was interesting to learn about graphite directly from an expert, not from second-hand sources - Tilly Hancock 2016 competition winner" "I thought the competition worked really well. The girls really enjoyed working with the academics and it gave them a real insight in to scientific research, I would definitely encourage other students to enter next year - Teacher at Oswestry School" "I personally felt the students got a lot out of the competition so thank you for all your help with the organisation - teacher at Withington Girls' School" "The most valuable lesson I have learned from entering the competition is that I was able to see science, that I have learned from class, utilized to solve current real life problems - student at Bury Grammar School". Overall we hope to deliver an engaging and thought provoking activity and to offer a wide range of student from a number of different backgrounds the opportunity to actively engage with cutting edge research. It is hoped that this form of active engagement will encourage more students to consider STEM careers and provide them with a better understanding of science in the media.

The 1960s was a period of intense struggles over knowledge about the human mind, with psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts in deep conflict. This was the period of professional and public arguments over the use of psychotropic and antipsychotic drugs, electroconvulsive therapy, psychosurgery, as well as issues such as the role of personality and genetics in human behaviour, children's emotional development, obedience and bystander apathy, the relationship between cinema and psychosis, psychology's role in defining sexuality and women's oppression, the popularisation of psychotherapy, and the anti-psychiatry movement. It was also a period in which cinema and audiences became preoccupied with the 'demons of the mind', with horror, science fiction, crime, and thriller films becoming increasingly significant ways in which psychological theories and new research findings were disseminated and debated within the public sphere. British and American cinema invested heavily financially and creatively in exploring child development, attachment and 'mothering', psychogenetics, psychopathy and personality disorders within overlapping cycles of genre films featuring the most celebrated directors and stars (William Wyler, Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Lawrence Olivier, Noel Coward, Audrey Hepburn) and luminaries of New Hollywood and the British New Wave (Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Jack Clayton, Karel Reisz, Terence Stamp). Many of these films were Anglo-American co-productions that integrated national cinematic traditions and talent in appealing to both British and American markets. This project will provide the first comprehensive account of the complex contestations and cross-pollinations of the psy sciences in this defining period as the influence of psychology and allied sciences expanded into everyday political, public and private lives in Britain and America. The project will explore the divergences and intersections of the two national cultures and bodies of medical thought, at a time when, as in cinema culture, there was significant traffic but also marked distinctions. The outputs from this project will therefore provide vital contributions to the history of science and medicine. In addition, the project will trace how key developments in the psy sciences interacted with popular cinema and other media in the 'long Sixties' period of the mid-1950s to early-1970s, when popular culture made an unprecedented intervention into debates regarding human psychology. The project will, therefore, also provide a significant contribution to media and film studies by seeking to understand Sixties cinema culture's fixation with the psychological not as unconscious meanings or subject positions, but rather as conscious and contested intermediations of medical, psychological, and psychiatric discourses and practices; these films were promoted as representing conjoined 'breakthroughs' in science and cinema. Through its research methods, personnel, and dissemination, this project will bring historians of science and medicine, science communication scholars, media and film studies academics, and psy science professionals into productive dialogue. It will also provide vital experience, mentoring, and training for the early career researcher (PI) and postdoctoral researcher in working with leading academics within and outside their fields of expertise. The project will facilitate productive collaboration between the leading Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at University of Manchester and one of UK's longest established centres for Film, Television and Media Studies at University of East Anglia. In addition, the project's partnership with the British Science Association will introduce humanities approaches into the science festival circuit, which is currently dominated by scientific perspectives.

This proposal builds on the findings from a two-year AHRC funded research project which was undertaken between 2019-2021. It examined how and why, despite a long-standing international discourse about participation, approaches to increase cultural participation have largely failed to address social inequality in the subsidised cultural sector. It further examined why meaningful policy change has not been more forthcoming in the face of such apparent failure. What we found was the extent to which a culture of mistrust, blame and fear between artists, organisations, funders and the public has resulted in a policy environment that engenders overstated aims, accepts poor quality evaluations, encourages narratives of success and is devoid of meaningful critical reflection. In our academic research outputs we argue that this absence of transparency and honesty limits the potential for "social learning" (May, 1992) which is necessary for greater understanding about the social construction of policy problems, something which is a precondition to any radical change in policy. We offer suggestions as to how failure might be better acknowledged, learnt from, and acted upon by policy makers, funders and art organisations and have developed frameworks and tools which are intended to be of practical use to those working within the cultural sector, in particular those involved in policymaking and grant distribution, but also to evaluators and managers of participatory programmes. By employing participatory research approaches during our earlier research process and co-creating knowledge with our research participants, we have given policy makers and practitioners a real stake in our research. As a result there is a strong appetite from the cultural sector to test our research findings in practice. We have already had requests from a number of evaluation consultants, policy makers and arts networks to work with them to embed our recommendations in practice. Some of these are represented in letters of support attached to this application. This proposal therefore seeks funding to support a number of initiatives to test and develop the recommendations, frameworks and tools designed out of our research in policy and practice. It will do this by working in collaboration with industry, including cultural practitioners, cultural policy makers and evaluators on a number of case studies of learning from failure. It will also build new audiences for the research through feasibility studies with health workers as well youth work and community services to test the applicability of our findings on other parts of the public sector. Funding therefore would specifically be used to - support at least 6 champions from different locations and/or different parts of the arts sector to extend the reach of our research by facilitating opportunities for their networks to discuss failures openly - partner with a targeted group of funding organisation to embed our approach in policy - partner with at least 2 organisations outside the cultural sector to test the transferability of our findings to new audiences - deliver a media campaign to raise awareness of our research - encourage more open conversations about failure to take place by arranging a 'Failspace' conference for cultural sector professionals - create an online repository of 'Failstories' that will act as a longer term legacy of the work

The description of the laws of quantum mechanics saw a transformation in society's understanding of the physical world-for the first time we understood the rules that govern the counterintuitive domain of the very small. Rather than being just passive observers now scientists are using these laws to their advantage and quantum phenomena are providing us with methods of improved measurement and communication; furthermore they promise a revolution in the way materials are simulated and computations are performed. Over the last decade significant progress has been made in the application of quantum phenomena to meeting these challenges. This "Engineering Photonic Quantum Technologies" Programme Grant goes significantly beyond previous achievements in the quantum technology field. Through a series of carefully orchestrated work packages that develop the underlying materials, systems engineering, and theory we will develop the knowledge and skills that enable us to create application demonstrators with significant academic and societal benefit. For the first time in quantum technologies we are combining materials and device development and experimental work with the important theoretical considerations of architectures and fault tolerant approaches. Our team of investigators and partners have the requisite expertise in materials, individual components, their integration, and the underpinning theory that dictates the optimal path to achieving the programme goals in the presence of real-world constraints. Through this programme we will adopt the materials systems most capable of providing application specific solutions in each of four technology demonstrations focused on quantum communications, quantum enhanced sensing, the construction of a multiplexed single-photon source and information processing systems that outperform modern classical analogues. To achieve this, our underlying technology packages will demonstrate very low optical-loss waveguides which will be used to create the necessary 'toolbox' of photonic components such as splitters, delays, filters and switches. We will integrate these devices with superconducting and semiconducting single-photon detector systems and heralded single-photon sources to create an integrated source+circuit+detector capability that becomes the basis for our technology demonstrations. We address the challenge of integrating these optical elements (in the necessary low-temperature environment) with the very low latency classical electronic control systems that are required of detection-and-feedforward schemes such as multiplexed photon-sources and cluster-state generation and computation. At all times a thorough analysis of the performance of all these elements informs our work on error modelling and fault tolerant designs; these then inform all aspects of the technology demonstrators from inception, through decisions on the optimal materials choices for a system, to the layout of a circuit on a wafer. With these capabilities we will usher in a disruptive transformation in ICT. We will demonstrate mutli-node quantum key distribution (QKD) networks, high-bit rate QKD systems with repeaters capable of spanning unlimited distances. Our quantum enhanced sensing will surpass the classical shot noise limit and see the demonstration of portable quantum-enhanced spectroscopy system. And our quantum information processors will operate with 10-qubits in a fault tolerant scheme which will provide the roadmap to 1,000 qubit cluster state computing architectures.