2023 April

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This month, we ask, was Shakespeare and chatbox? We look at research on pest control and take a look back at this year's Beale Lecture.

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Leader: Can we have quantity and quality?

Tom Archibald recently found himself forced to defend the state of academic publishing during a conversation with non-academics at a social event. So many articles get published in academic journals these days and so few of these are ever read they argued.

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Was Shakespeare really a chatbox

Unfortunately, ChatGPT’s new classifier tool to detect AI-generated text was revealed to be imperfect within a few hours of its launch. When a text from Shakespeare’s Macbeth was subjected to scrutiny by the classifier, it rated it as “likely” to have been generated by AI. Given Macbeth was written over 400 years ago, it is a fair bet to assume Shakespeare did not use AI tools.

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Beale Memorial Lecture

Nigel Cummings takes a look back at this year's Beale Lecture given by Prof. Robert Dyson, who spoke of his long-standing career in OR which has spanned a number of decades.

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Controlling Pests

Our Editor, John Crocker, takes a look at the research of Professor Chris Gilligan, Director of Research in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, who have been looking at the problems of controlling pests and diseases which attack crops, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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