Research is fun; fun is research! Appraisal targets, REF, RKE income targets, online journal submission systems, conferences – just to name a few of my personal bête noirs – all squeeze the fun out of research for me. They all matter, no doubt about it, but they are all terribly serious! Give me a pair of boots, a spade and a note book in some distant field and the stress of the world disappears to be replaced by the intellectual puzzle before me, the banter of my colleagues and a story to tell of past events! Now that is fun and that is what research means to me. That is when research is at its most fun, an experience immortalised and crowned by a published paper with illustrations crafted by my own hand. I would love to know when research is most fun for you? In fact I am committing myself this autumn to the leading the research is fun campaign! So why not join me and share your experiences?
/ Full archive
Festival of Learning 2013: Poole Park BioBlitz Records now available
On the 8th of June University staff, students and members of the public descended on Poole Park to host a BioBlitz – an intense, yet most importantly fun, period of biological surveying which attempts to record all of the living species within a designated area in 24 hours.
Dr Pippa Gillingham helps identify insects
The event was a huge success with over 230 different species recorded on land, air and water across Poole, Baiter and Whitecliff Parks – so this is a big thank you to all of you who came down and took part and made the event a success.
The records have been collated and are being sent directly to key regional stakeholders. They are also available for download here and you can also find them and much more over on the Poole & Purbeck Portal.
New staff profile pages launched
We are pleased to announce that the new staff profile pages were deployed yesterday (Thursday).
The profile pages have a fresh, professional appearance.
If you have a BRIAN profile and access to an external page, please have a look at your profile.
The easiest way to navigate to your profile is to open the application (or click on the ‘academic profile’ link from the intranet home page). Next, click on ‘People’ in the page header and then on the start letter of your surname. Finally, click on your name. Your profile will then appear. You can also search for your name.
If you have any feedback on the new staff profile pages, please email us at BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk
Research Professional – all you need to know
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:
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Self registration and logging in
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Building searches
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Setting personalised alerts
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Saving and bookmarking items
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Subscribing to news alerts
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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:
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.
Bournemouth University’s School of Tourism Invited to Join the European Tourism Futures Institute
Nicole Ferdinand and Dr. Katherine King of the Events and Leisure Group in the School of Tourism were invited to attend the third annual meeting of the European Tourism Futures Institute (ETFI), which was held at the European Parliament in Brussels on September 16th-17th 2013. Among the items raised at the meeting was the Festival Impact Monitor, a successful Bournemouth Fusion Investment Fund bid submitted under the Co-Creation and Co-Production Strand. This project seeks develop an event evaluation approach to overcome the limitations of existing qualitative and quantitative methods. ETFI were contacted prior to the submission of this bid to act as an international partner. Jeroen Oskam, Programme Manager for ETFI was very enthusiastic in supporting this project as it fits in very well with the forward looking orientation of his institution.
For more on the Festival Impact Monitor, please see this link.
BU Staff Awarded the 2013 Ben Cullen Prize
Professor Timothy Darvill, together with co-authors Peter Marshall, Mike Parker Pearson and Geoffrey Wainwright, have been awarded the 2013 Ben Cullen Prize by the leading international journal Antiquity for their article ‘Remodelling Stonehenge’ published in the December 2012 issue. For further information about the prize and access to the article see: http://journal.antiquity.ac.uk/prize-winners.
Change of venue for eBU drop in session
The venue has changed for the first drop in session for prospective authors and those interested in eBU: Online Journal.
I had advertised sessions on Talbot on Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th – both in PG30d. However, the Monday session will now take place in TAG01. I shall place a sign on the door of PG30d in order to redirect people!
The revised eBU drop in sessions are now as follows:
Monday 7th October 11am – 2pm TAG01
Tuesday 8th October 11am – 2pm PG30d
And on the Lansdowne:
Wednesday 9th 11am – 2pm EBC ground floor cafe
New staff profile pages will be released tomorrow
The new staff profile page application is being transitioned into live operation during the morning tomorrow. The new pages should be accessible by noon.
There is nothing BRIAN users need to do. However, the staff profile pages draw most of their information from BRIAN so ensuring your BRIAN profile is up to date and you have populated the new fields, eg the research field, would be good preparation to ensure your new profile page looks great.
One area of the new profile pages that is still being worked on is the link to documents in BURO. Documents that are available in BURO can still be accessed from the staff profile pages. Our work is to remove the link to those documents that are no longer available in BURO. This work should be complete next week and will mean that BURO document links will only be displayed for accessible files.
Please have a look at the new pages once they are live and let us know what you think by emailing BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk.
BU PhD Studentship Competition 2014 – Call for Project Proposals
The Graduate School is delighted to announce the launch of the 2014 BU PhD Studentship Competition. Potentially, there will be up to 50 studentships available across two parallel strands: (1) Matched Funded and (2) Fully Funded.
At this stage, Academic Staff are invited to submit proposals for studentship projects which, if successful, will be advertised to recruit PhD candidates for an October 2014 start.
Full details can be found on the Graduate School Staff Intranet.
- For Information: BU Studentship Competition 2014 Policy
- For Information: Studentship Proposal Form (application form)
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For Information: Matched Funded PhD Studentships Flyer (useful information for potential matched funders)
Support for Academic Staff:
Staff Development are running a one day workshop “Funding your Studentship: engaging effectively with business and industry” on Tuesday 15 October 2013 for academic staff considering submitting a proposal(s). Full details of the event and how to book are available here.
Submission Deadline:
Applications should be submitted on the Studentship Proposal form to the Graduate School; email: phdstudentshipcompetition@bournemouth.ac.uk) no later than 5pm on Monday 6 January 2014. Funding decisions will be made in line with the Studentship Policy within 3 weeks of the deadline.
‘Workshop ‘Modelling Organisational Behaviour and Social Agency’
BU’s Business School is hosting the Workshop ‘Modelling Organisational Behaviour and Social Agency’, 27-28 January 2014, EBC. Abstract submissions are now open!
The Workshop is organised by Davide Secchi (Dept. of Human Resources and Organisational Behaviour, BU) and Martin Neumann (Institute for Information Systems in Business and Public Administration, U. of Koblenz) and it is supported by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) UK.
We aim at bringing together a group of people that is interested in any aspect of agent-based models (ABMs) of social agents in organisations. We invite submissions that seek to examine the applications, structure, how-to, potentials, and philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of ABMs applied to organisational behaviour and social agency. The workshop welcomes contributions from any discipline, including but not limited to psychology, sociology, management, computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, economics, philosophy, you name it!
Submissions are due 3rd November 2013.
For more information, check the Call for Abstracts. CFA-ABM Workshop
Patient involvement in research boosts study success!
According to a new study by King’s College London, involving patients in the design and implementation of research programmes increases the likelihood of studies recruiting to target. Delays in recruitment are a major reason why some studies fail, so better recruitment means studies are more likely to be successful and run on time and budget. The authors argue that researchers need to involve patients more comprehensively in research.
Published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers analysed 374 studies registered with the Mental Health Research Network (MHRN). Studies which included collaboration with service users in designing or running the trial were 1.63 times more likely to recruit to target than studies which only consulted service users. Studies which involved more partnerships – a higher level of Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) – were 4.12 times more likely to recruit to target.
More information can be found at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iop/news/records/2013/September/Patient-involvement-in-research-boosts-study-success.aspx and http://brc.slam.nhs.uk/our-blog/brcu/developing-best-treatments-means-patient-involvement-every-step-of-the-way
Paper reference: Ennis, L. et al. ‘Impact of patient involvement in mental health research: longitudinal study’ British Journal of Psychiatry (Sept 2013) doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.112.119818
Publication of the Third NUS/HEA ‘Student Attitudes towards and skills for Sustainable Development’ report
This is the third year of reporting on student attitudes towards, and skills for, sustainable development (SD) continuing research conducted in 2010 and 2011
Two page Executive summary available at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/sustainability/Executive_summary_2013-4.pdf
Full report at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/sustainability/2013_student_skills_final_report
BU is well placed in addressing SD within the curriculum but perhaps we could do more?
Tonight is the night for Cafe Scientifique’s one year anniversary! Join us for an exciting talk on – Technobiophilia: How nature calms your wired life.
Why do we adorn our screens with pictures of forests, waterfalls, animals and beaches? Why are there so many nature metaphors in the language of the internet? The answer lies in biophilia, 
the innate human attraction to life and life-like processes. Sue Thomas believes that nature can soothe our connected minds and offer unexpected benefits – an improved attention span, a rested mind, and enhanced creativity. So there’s no need to choose between technology and well-being – we can have both! This talk is about the best way to make our digital lives integrated, healthy, and mindful.
If you would like to find out more about Sue Thomas, please visit her website: www.suethomas.net
This month we have worked with the Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival, so this is definitely not one to miss. Also, as an extra special treat we have brownie cake to celebrate our one year anniversary – what a great success Cafe Scientfique has been!
Doors open at the wonderful Cafe Boscanova, Boscombe at 6:30pm and Sue Thomas will begin her fascinating talk on Technobiophilia at 7:30pm-9pm. There is no need to register for this event, so just simply come along! There is also some excellent food available (and chocolate brownie – if I hadn’t already mentioned).
The Cafe Scientifique team look forward to seeing you there!
CEMP Research & Innovation
At the open forum last week, we agreed the following actions for the coming year:
Research & Innovation Bulletin – to continue for information only, once a fortnight, via the research blog, from October 10th;
CEMP meetings – for CEMP staff only, once a month, to include bidding and income monitoring;
CEMP Coffee Mornings – once a month, ‘drop in’ for anyone in the MS who wants to talk to us about funding applications or other research / innovation opportunities. The first of these will be Thursday October 17th;
CEMP workshops – a series of supportive events to help people get started with research, bid writing, publishing, networking;
CEMP Associates – a proposal will be submitted to facilitate more experienced colleagues working with CEMP in a more structured fashion – to collaborate on bid writing, projects and making connections across academic groups.
Fusion: Sports Academic Group and School of Tourism to Advance Partnerships with US East Coast Universities
As part of the overall internationalisation dynamics spreading through the School of Tourism – especially concerned with creating opportunities for students – Dr Tim Breitbarth, Senior Lecturer in Sports Management, will travel to South Carolina and Florida end of October.
The project is funded through the BU Fusion Investment Fund, based on the trips’ three impact-focused objectives of, firstly and mainly, advancing partnership development for the sports academic group as well as the School of Tourism and potentially other Schools as well; secondly, Tim will collect further sets of empirical data for an established and awarded international collaborative research project on CSR and sport; and thirdly, develop and foster industry and research contacts aiming towards strengthening BU’s golf/sport management programmes and editing a first book on global golf business.
Main contacts and places to go are the University of South Carolina, which has the largest undergraduate sports and entertainment management programme of its kind in the USA, with more than 1000 majors and minors (recently been listed in the Top25 in the 2013 SportBusiness Global Postgraduate Ranking), and the University of Central Florida, where a university partnership agreement covering many subject areas is already well underway.
“My experience with the Fusion fund and the way it is managed is that coherent applications focusing on wider impact and multiple outcomes are very welcome,” says Tim, who already was successful with staff mobility and networking applications in the past. Please feel free to contact Tim (tbreitbarth@bournemouth.ac.uk) if you like to learn more about his upcoming trip.
Events and Leisure Students Help Create Carnival Futures
Bournemouth University students from the Events and Leisure Group in the School of Tourism joined carnival organisations, young professionals, experts, researchers and Notting Hill residents to plan for the future of the Notting Hill Carnival.
Annie Mbagwu, Roxana Nucu, Olivia Wreford and Billy Wright participated in the public workshop held on September 24th 2013, which was organized as part of the Carnival Futures: Notting Hill Carnival 2020 project. The project is being funded by the King’s Cultural Institute which sponsors knowledge exchange projects that seek to test new ideas and stimulate innovation within the cultural and creative sector. It is jointly led by led by Principal Investigator Nicole Ferdinand, PhD researcher with King’s College London’s department of Culture Media and Creative Industries and Kemi Sobers, Director of the London Notting Hill Carnival Enterprises Trust.
Dr. Mary Beth Gouthro, Lecturer in Events Management in the School of Tourism has also been retained as an independent evaluator for the project.
For more information please see this link.
Annie Mbagwu BU Student, working under the watchful eye of Dr. Albert Postma, Professor of Scenario Planning
Roxana Nucu, BU Student (bottom left) with Nicole Ferdinand, Principal Investigator (top left) and Duchess Williams Alonga, Head of the Bahama Host Association (bottom right).
Don’t delay – today is the deadline to complete the Research Ethics e-module!
The research ethics e-module is available on myBU for all academic staff and for those who supervise students. To access the e-module login to myBU and click on ‘Research Ethics’ in the ‘My Communities’ tab. Please note that the preferred browser to view the course/quiz is either Internet Explorer or Google Chrome.
Why are research ethics important?
It is important to conduct research in line with ethical standards for a number of reasons:
• In order to respect and cause no harm to the participants
• As a sign of respect for other researchers and those who will use the research
• It is a professional requirement particularly in some disciplines and failure to do so may result in disciplinary procedures.
• It is a requirement to obtain funding.
• Failing to conduct research ethically could be embarrassing or result in research (or the researcher) being dismissed or rejected by the research community.
• Research involving human beings, including using questionnaires and focus groups, must be passed by an Ethics Committee whose job it is to confirm that the research conforms to a set of ethical guidelines.
If ethics are considered, this should make sure that the work is acceptable to the research community and other users of the research results.
10 features of the new Staff Profile Pages you need to know
Here are the top 10 features of the new Staff Profile Pages (SPP) application that is to be released this week.
1. Improved header information. The header contains information on your title, job title and contact details. This is always present at the top of every page. Icons are also displayed to indicate the research themes to which you are linked and the keywords selected. Social media and website links are also displayed.
2. Improved searching. Previously the search facility was quite poor. Now, it is possible to search for partial matches for people’s name and publications. In addition, SPP will prompt with ‘Did you mean?’ suggestions. This is very useful where users are searching for staff but don’t quite enter the name correctly.
3. Displaying favourites. Within BRIAN you can highlight a publication (or grant) as a favourite. This is achieved by clicking on the heart icon next to the item. We suggest staff select a maximum of five favourites. These items then appear on the home page of the SPP in chronological order.
4. Displaying your current research activity. We have just introduced to BRIAN the ability to record your current research activity. If completed in BRIAN, this is displayed on the home page of SPP. Having this information makes you profile feel contemporary and up to date so we encourage your to complete this area within the Professional Activities area of BRIAN.
5. Immediate profile refresh. The frustration that changes in BRIAN cannot be viewed in the profile page until the next day has been removed by the ability to refresh a page immediately in SPP. There is a small area at the base of the SPP pages which tells you when the page was last refreshed and, by clicking on the icon, allows you to refresh the page. This means that any changes you make in BRIAN are immediately visible so that you can see how the change looks.
6. Browse by research theme or keyword. You can click on a research theme or keyword and see all the people who have that association. To make this feature useful, please ensure your RTs and keywords are up to date.
7. Existing links to your page continue to work. While the application has changed, people who have bookmarked the URL for your profle can lick on this old link to access your new profile.
8. Two-way link with PhD students. The method of linking to PhD students is much improved with the ability to hyperlink from a supervisor to the student and from the student back to the supervisor(s). To achieve this, it is necessary to enter the student’s username when adding a PhD student to BRIAN.
9. Improved scrolling. Where there are many publications to display, the header is always visible on the screen so that the user knows which section is being viewed. It also allows the user to easily switch section without scrolling. Also, at the bottom of the screen, there is a button that returns the user to the top of the screen.
10. Publication format. The format for publications conforms to the BU standard.
While these 10 features of SPP are great, some of them (items 1, 3, 4, 6 & 8 ) require you to enter the information into BRIAN. To a large extent, the SPP pages will only be a good as the underlying information in BRIAN so please spare a few minutes to update your BRIAN profile, add a recent picture etc.
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