Yearly Archives / 2013

Do you want to put science in the headlines?

BU research

If you do then the British Science Association Media Fellowships are for you.

The scheme offers a free and unique professional development opportunity for practising researchers to experience first-hand how science is reported by spending 3-6 weeks on a summer placement with a press, broadcast or online journalist such as the Guardian, The Times or BBC.

You will work with them to produce well informed, newsworthy pieces about developments in science.

Come away better equipped to communicate your research to the media, public and your colleagues.

You will develop writing skills that could help you produce concise and engaging articles and funding applications.

For details about the scheme and online application form, visit the British Science Association website.  Application deadline is 11 March 2013.

To be eligible to apply for the Media Fellowships scheme you have to fulfil the following criteria:

  • are a practising scientist, social scientist, clinician or engineer and have a minimum of 2 years postgraduate experience in your field. PhD students are eligible although we don’t recommend it due to the heavy workload.
  • are employed, and based, part or full time in the UK or Ireland and you have a work contract/ research funding until December 2013. If you are not a UK or Irish citizen you need to have a work contract until June 2014.
  • work at any level in an academic or research institution, industry, civil service or any other similar organisation
  • have your employers/funders consent to be released on full pay for the period of the Fellowships. Annual leave may be used for part of the placement.

Unfortunately the British Science Association ARE NOT able to offer Media Fellowships to freelancers, those who work in PR or communications, or those who want to change career full time into science communication.

 

REF2014 module on BRIAN

Research assessment

With the preparation for the BU REF Spring 2013 Full Mock Exercise in full swing, the deadline for nominating your Research Outputs on the REF2014 module on BRIAN is looming up.

In a previous blog post, we shared with you the official guidance document on making your NRO (nominated research output) selection. The REF2014 module is extremely straightforward and intuitive. The guidance note will provide you with a step-by-step instruction on nominating your research outputs.

If you find that the REF2014 module is missing from your BRIAN account, please get in touch with Peng Peng Ooi (pengpeng.ooi@bournemouth.ac.uk) or Rita Dugan (rdugan@bournemouth.ac.uk) and we’ll be able to help you.

Fusion supports new collaborative research project about the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro

BU research, Fusion, Uncategorized

 “Hello, hello, band from Ipanema – big hug! Hello, hello, girl from the favela – big hug!”. These are the lyrics of ‘Aquele Abraço’ (That Embrace), an iconic song in the samba genre performed at the closing ceremony of London 2012 to mark the transition for the Rio 2016 Olympics. The song celebrates all the neighbourhoods of the city, the wealthy Ipanema, but also the favelas (slums or shantytowns) by ‘sending a hug’, a form of friendly greeting in Brazil. It can be inferred that, just like the song, the Olympics are embracing the whole city and vice-versa. But how can mega-events such as the Olympics be truly socially inclusive? To what extent are the perspectives of the city’s impoverished communities being taken into account – being heard and seen – in the decision making process?

A new research project sets out to investigate issues of social inclusion, marginality and the ways in which the residents experience the on-going transformations of the city during the preparations for the Olympics through the senses of hearing and seeing. Funded by the Fusion Staff Networking and Mobility (SMN) fund, Dr Andrea Medrado, from the Media School, will travel to Rio de Janeiro in May 2013 in order to establish collaborations between Bournemouth University and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Whilst in Rio, Andrea will work with UFRJ’s Community Communications Studies Lab (LECC- Laboratório de Estudos de Comunicação Comunitária), which is led by Professor Raquel Paiva and is one of the most prominent in this field in the country. She will then share some of the lessons learned from the communities in Rio with students at BU, particularly those with an interest in social communications and community or student-led media. The project also has the participation of Dr Carrie Hodges and Dr Janice Denegri-Knott, who specialise in emerging promotional cultures in Latin America and are members of BU’s Emerging Consumer Cultures Research Group.

Besides developing stronger ties with universities in Brazil, the goal is to liaise with the Brazilian Olympic Committee, NGOs and the city hall of Rio de Janeiro in order to share research findings and insights. If you would like more information about this project, please contact Andrea Medrado at amedrado@bournemouth.ac.uk. Along with many colleagues in the Media School, she is also keen on initiating a cross-school research group on the Olympics and Paralympics.

Transfer viva? Only 10 000 words(!)

BU research, PG research

"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

 

Preparing for your transfer viva – a mere 10 000 words and a separate 500 abstract.

After a bit of nudging from a few staff @HSC-BU, I thought to write a short on how to prepare for the transfer viva. I had mine in Dec 2012 and these are few things at the time that helped and a few I got the hang of post-viva. By now you should have done an RD6 and 1 Annual Review. These forms, available from your school administrator, help you put down what you are going to do for the next few years (sigh) and how you will ‘physically’ do it (double sigh). When I started my transfer viva, I took (i.e. copy and pasted) a lot of what was in my RD6 research plan and used it as the skeleton in order to write the 10000 words. I then looked at the BU PhD bible  – Code of Practice for Resarch Degrees booklet and borrowed a transfer viva from the school admins. The older ones  helped me for structure and format. And the same rules apply, be concise and write you abstract last.

The timeline for transfer from MPhil to PhD is usually a  year/and a half after you start (or submit your RD6, 24-36months for PT), once you hand it in, after your supervisors are ‘happy’, you will have a month before your viva. Have a chat with your school admin (for HSC, it is Paula Cooper and Sara Glithro), and your supervisors as they will read it, then look for examiners (2), an independent chair and a supervisor (if you wish; I asked mine, you don’t have to, so as to gain feedback, as he also took notes and could comment on my ‘performance’; all towards the final viva). There is a one page form that you and your supervisors need to fill in, hand in duplicates of form and of bound thesis and done. Not quite.

Take it very ‘seriously’, I took it for granted once written and discussed you would carry on the PhD (this is not always the case read the BU PhD bible), the quality of the document and performance in the viva voce matters. It should ressemble as much as possible the ‘final product’. Once you hand in your 10 000 words, read it the week before or the night before. I was really nervous but the best piece of advice I got was ‘go in and talk’ – you know your work the ‘best’: so pretend like you want your best friend to understand your work. A few things I could have done better? Better writing, made sure I did not repeat myself and written it more as a ‘story’. Using power point where each slide helps you plan what you will write. For me the viva was the best time to say this is my work and to gain (brutal) feedback from people from a similar field as it gives you time to plan your final product. One major thing I realised I needed to put my study in context and what it means to ‘science’.

Essentially it looked something like this:

  • Title page (Name, Title, Supervisors, School, University)
  • Acknowledgements (Thank you to your supervisors, school, funders…)
  • Abstract (500 words)
  • Table of contents (in a table with invisible borders)
  • List of Abbreviations (in a table with invisible borders)
  • Introduction (which is your literature review)
  • Research Plan: Methodology and justification of method(s) used (your literature review will help here)
  • Aim and Objectives – which are drawn from your research question
  • Progress to date: Research contribution to the field (a PhD means a new contribution to the field or new tools); Findings (Here – I only included the findings that I had ‘cleaned’ for the final table and I was sure I would be able to discuss if asked) and a discussion of your findings.
  • Ethical considerations (Ethics body and in the appendix letter of ethics body);
  • Conclusion & future work (what I infer from what is done so far and how it will lead to the next stage).
  • Reference list
  • Appendix (Tables, survey questionnaire, letters…)

Start with the ‘niggly’ bits, making sure your endnoteTM lets you insert during cite and write (the librarian can help you with this if you haven’t done the course, Emma Crowly for graduate school). So that it should only take a click to insert your bibliography as BU Harvard. I chose headings in the layout so that when I write my final thesis it will be a matter of adding heading and sub-heading titles. So for the table of contents: Use a table from excel or use Home>Headings, e.g. Heading 5. Abbreviations can be sorted with the function ‘sort’ in WordTM.

A few useful resources for writing:

Good luck!

Research related brochures from the EC to download

EU

The European Commission has published eight new, mostly environment-related, brochures that provide an overview of the challenges faced in each research area, as well as what EU-funded research is doing to address them. The brochures, which can be downloaded from the Commission’s  website, cover the following themes:

Biodiversity

Environment and Health

International Cooperation

Marine Environment

Natural Hazards and Disasters

Social Innovation for Sustainability

Soil and Sustainable Land Use Management Waste as a Resource.

Research Professional

BU research, Guidance

Every BU academic has a Research Professional account which delivers weekly emails detailing funding opportunities in their broad subject area. To really make the most of your Research Professional account, you should tailor it further by establishing additional alerts based on your specific area of expertise.

Research Professional have created several guides to help introduce users to ResearchProfessional. These can be downloaded here.

Quick Start Guide: Explains to users their first steps with the website, from creating an account to searching for content and setting up email alerts, all in the space of a single page.

User Guide: More detailed information covering all the key aspects of using ResearchProfessional.

Administrator Guide: A detailed description of the administrator functionality.

In addition to the above, there are a set of 2-3 minute videos online, designed to take a user through all the key features of ResearchProfessional.  To access the videos, please use the following link: http://www.youtube.com/researchprofessional 

Research Professional are running a series of online training broadcasts aimed at introducing users to the basics of creating and configuring their accounts on ResearchProfessional.  They are holding monthly sessions, covering everything you need to get started with ResearchProfessional.  The broadcast sessions will run for no more than 60 minutes, with the opportunity to ask questions via text chat.  Each session will cover:

  • Self registration and logging in
  • Building searches
  • Setting personalised alerts
  • Saving and bookmarking items
  • Subscribing to news alerts
  • Configuring your personal profile

Each session will run between 10.00am and 11.00am (UK) on the fourth Tuesday of each month.  You can register here for your preferred date:

26th February 2013: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/267446504 

26th March 2013: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/518275168 

23rd April 2013: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/255287520 

28th May 2013: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/806064201 

25th June 2013: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/492839664 

23rd July 2013: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/771246561 

27th August 2013: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/398714217 

24th September 2013: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/882372120 

These are free and comprehensive training sessions and so this is a good opportunity to get to grips with how Research Professional can work for you.

PhD student at HSC? BEACON needs you

BU research, PG research

Ref: (http://www.sterlingtimes.org/kitchener.jpg)

Wondered if you had thought of writing a few lines for this years Beacon on your PhD study.

Just a short summary.  It could be as little as 150 words, nothing to big.  Just to raise the awareness of your work internally.

Please email <ssharma@bournemouth.ac.uk> Thanks Sheetal!

Socially-Adaptive Cloud gets the 3 Bs

BU research, Fusion

 

Brasilia-Birmingham-Bournemouth Social-Adaptation in the Cloud The BBB Project

This project creates a community of interest which involves academics from the computing groups of University of Brasilia, University of Birmingham , and Bournemouth University . The three groups are focused on Software Engineering research and this project involves exchange visits and the establishment of joint work.  BBB co-operatively initiates a timely thread of research on “Socially-Adaptive Cloud SaaS”. We are investigating core engineering foundations required to enable end-users to formulate Software-as-a–Service adaptation decisions at runtime. This focuses on the collection of users’ feedback about the quality of SaaS which could be used by the SaaS to adapt autonomously.

BBB welcomes any potential collaboration with interested academic and industrial institutes to exchange knowledge and join us to work in this area.

The project is funded by the The Fusion Investment Fund Staff Mobility & Networking (SMN) Strand of Bournemouth University.

 

 

The Research Apprenticeship Summer Scheme, networking and ‘brain drain’

Uncategorized

Dr Sarah Bate, Professor Sine McDougall and I were recently awarded money to expand our previous efforts to give second year undergraduate students the opportunity to experience life as full-time researchers. Run for 8 weeks last summer for the first time, the selected students applied for and won the opportunity to work closely with a member of the Psychology Research Centre, and took part in discussions about experimental design, analysis and theory.  They contributed fully to the whole process. The students reported gaining tremendous benefits from the scheme in terms of knowledge and skills gained (and consequently applied to their final year of study); particularly, they said, in their ability to digest academic articles, a task previously daunting and time-consuming.

Buoyed by this first run, this year’s scheme will not only give new students the same opportunity but will also involve sponsorship (financial and non-financial) by external bodies, generating greater interaction with significant external bodies; relationships/networks that have the potential to help with research goals and award funding in the future. This first-step engagement with potential grant funders could represent a new path to funding larger projects; we foresee the possibility of matched-funded positions (at less than £1000 per student it is not too much to ask).  Our aim is for each of the positions to be associated with a local charity or business. For example, one RA position this year will be referred to as the ‘Dorset ADHD Support Group Research Apprenticeship Position’.  Engaging with this support group to garner non-financial sponsorship has led to an invitation to the NHS ADHD Strategy Group and discussions about how future financial sponsorship might come about (not to mention their help in identifying families that live with ADHD and the introduction to other key personnel in the local NHS Trust and other relevant bodies).

A further betterment of the scheme this year is specifically aimed at preventing ‘brain drain’. We recently lost three of our best students to some prestigious institutions in the transition from BSc to MSc level. In the present bid we also applied for funds to have two excellent students work as RAs between their undergraduate and postgraduate degrees on projects specifically geared towards a topic they could address at MSc level. Importantly, for the very best students this will complete the path from the voluntary term-time RA scheme which we also run at second year level to the summer apprenticeship scheme right through to MSc project, ensuring an unprecedented level of co-creation. The postgraduate RA scheme will, we hope, act as an incentive for these students to stay with us.

In future we hope to port this model to other Centres and Schools. It is relatively cheap to run, and the benefits are considerable and, even if we do say ourselves, great fusion. If you are interested, please contact us.

Kip Jones interviewed by LSE’s Impact blog

BU research, Research news

London School of Economics’ “Impact of Social Sciences” weblog has just published a five-minute interview with HSC and the Media School’s Kip Jones.  Mark Carrigan, Managing Editor of the British Politics and Policy blog talked with Jones for a piece entitled, “5 Minutes with Kip Jones: “we engage in the creative process and open new doors for communication” on the site.

Carrigan was particularly interested in questioning Jones about the impact that the research-based, award-winning short film, Rufus Stone, has produced. Jones answered questions about how the script was crafted from years of in-depth research. He also discussed the possibility of social scientists collaborating with artists, but also generating their own small projects, which Jones likes to call ‘kitchen sink’ work.

The growing Performative Social Science movement is commented upon. Advice on funding such ventures and the possibilities of arts-based research and dissemination in  engaging ‘in the creative process and open(ing) new doors for communication and future development possibilities’ is highlighted.

Rufus Stone will be screened at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse cinema on the 22nd of February at 4 p.m.as part of their Arts and Science Researcher Forum. The film also can be seen at BU at Talbot campus hosted by BU Media School’s Narrative Group on 18 March, Kimmeridge (KG03) at 1 p.m.

 

 

Are you making the most of your RKEO?

BU research

We in the Research & Knowledge Exchange Office (RKEO) have extensive experience and qualifications that you can really utilise to help you with your own research career…and we’re an interesting lot too, so if you don’t know us already get in touch to come and say hello.

To give you a snippet of our the skills and experience we have that you can tap into, you may be interested to know that some of us have PhDs and Masters degrees and have worked as researchers or grant writers ourselves. We have qualifications in subject areas ranging from biology, to international business and management; anthropology to economics and psychology to MBAs. Some of us have clocked up experience working for other universities, research councils, research organisations, banks and libraries before coming to BU, others have worked at BU for many years in a range of Schools and Services and others have worked all over the globe.

In addition to academia, some of us have had former careers as media producers, journal editors and international marketers and indeed some of us still have dual careers as interior designers, bespoke jewellery designers and creators and NLP practitioners. So not only so we have a lot of expertise and experience to help you, we’re also a diverse and fascinating bunch. If you are interested in learning more, then take a look at our RKEO Development Team and Operation Team pages and get in touch with us.

 

Training course on agent-based modelling techniques

BU research

Have you ever heard of agent based models, and wondered what they are? Have you perhaps been dazzled by computer simulations of flocking birds or shoals of fish, and wondered how they are produced? Or perhaps you enjoy computer games involving interacting individuals, such as the magnificent Fifa13. If so, you might be interested in a training course that we are hosting later this year, supported by the Fusion Fund.

Agent-based models (ABM) can be described as a type  of computational model that are used for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous “agents”. These can be either individuals, such as people or animals, or collective entities such as businesses or other types of organization. The models enable the behaviour of such agents to be explored in relation to the behaviour of the system as a whole. The approach is relevant to areas such as game theory, complex systems, computational sociology, multi-agent systems, and evolutionary programming. They are relevant to a wide range of research domains including ecological and social sciences, and enable the study of how simple behavioural rules can generate complex behaviour. They provide a very useful method for supporting interdisciplinary collaboration.

The course will be led by leading practitioners of this rapidly developing technique, and will focus on the use of Netlogo (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/). This is an open source software environment, which is both powerful and user friendly, enabling attractive graphical output to be generated readily. The course is open to both staff and postgraduate students  who are interested in learning the technique. While the course will be introductory, it is principally aimed at researchers who already have some experience in modelling, or who can see a direct potential application of this method to their own research. Please contact me for further information – Adrian Newton anewton@bournemouth.ac.uk

MASTERCLASS: INTRODUCTION TO GROUNDED THEORY

BU research, PG research

MASTERCLASS:  INTRODUCTION TO GROUNDED THEORY

14-15 February 2013

This two day Masterclass will be an introduction to Grounded Theory – theory developed from the data.  The masterclass has been designed to suit postgraduate students, academics and professionals who may wish to use grounded theory (GT) in their research but do not yet have full knowledge of the approach.  The masterclass can also be taken as a stand-alone Master’s level unit of study – Contact Dr Caroline Ellis-Hill for details: cehill@bournemouth.ac.uk

Facilitators:

Immy Holloway, Professor Emeritus in the School of Health & Social Care at BU.  Immy is a sociologist and has taught and supervised qualitative research for several decades.  She still actively pursues her interest in qualitative research by supervising PhD students and writing articles and books.  Immy used GT in her PhD before the proliferation of books and articles on GT.

Liz Norton is a Senior Lecturer at BU.  Her professional background is in education and nursing and her current academic interest and work is in public health.  Liz has a particular interest in Glaserian GT and her experience of using GT in practice includes completion of environment and health-related grounded theory studies for MPhil and PhD qualifications.

 Quotes from previous masterclass attendees:

“Their knowledge and expertise felt like a valuable resource open to all”

“Presenters were very experienced . . . particularly high quality and effective teaching methods”

Full details of the Masterclass and the online booking form can be found at: www.bournemouth.ac.uk/masterclass