Category / REF Subjects

CEMP Research and Innovation Bulletin

Funding opportunities, PG research, REF Subjects, Research themes

The updated CEMP bulletin is here.

CEMP Cluster bulletin and agenda 25.7.13

Whilst there is no cluster meeting to review this, due to annual leave colleagues are encouraged to have a look since there are a number of good ‘leads’ here and several imminent deadlines for calls people have identified for applications.

Next academic year, we’d like to encourage colleagues to approach CEMP to provide support for developing research ideas into projects or matching proposals to funding, as well as responding to the bulletin items.

 

 

A royal birth? Lucky Kate

PG research

With the Queen’s Jubilee, the Olympics and Andy Murray winning at SW1 Wimbledon (again) it seems Britain is still riding a wave of optimism with the birth of a male heir to the throne; the Prince of Cambridge. The baby was delivered on 22 July 2013 at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, west London, weighing 8lb 6oz. The document said: “Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Cambridge was safely delivered of a son at 4.24pm today. He and the duchess will remain in the hospital overnight. A bulletin signed by the Queen’s gynaecologist Marcus Setchell, who led the medical team that delivered the baby – was taken by a royal aide from St Mary’s to the palace under police escort.

The implications are wide -reaching, in multi-cultural Britain the royal baby is unusual for London in having a mother originally from the UK and most babies delivered in the capital these days (57%) are to mothers born overseas and nearly half of all babies (48%) are born outwith marriage. With midwifery cuts and the further medicalisation of birth where the “cascade of interventions” often occurs when birth is induced.  For instance, in the USA which spends more money on healthcare than any country in the world and yet the maternal mortality rate is among the highest of any industrialised country.

And on July 19, 2013, the USA the House State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee today approved a steep cutback in international family planning assistance for fiscal year 2014. Rejecting President’s Obama’s 2014 budget request of $635.4 million, the Subcommittee capped appropriations for international family planning and reproductive health programs at $461 million, $174 million less than the President’s request, and $137 million (23% below the current funding level).  The cuts, if approved by the full Congress, would have a devastating impact: Several million women in the developing world would lose access to contraceptives services, resulting in more unplanned pregnancies and deaths from unsafe abortions. Each pregnancy multiplies a woman’s chance of dying from complications of pregnancy or childbirth. Maternal mortality rates are particularly high for young and poor women, those who have least access to contraceptive services. It is estimated that one in three deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth could be avoided if all women had access to contraceptive services.

Not so lucky, therefore, are Kate’s counterparts in the South – Frightening statistics include that daily, approximately 800 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In our study site, Nepal every year, 4,500 Nepali women die in childbirth due to lack of medical care. In low-income countries, most maternal deaths are avoidable, as the health-care solutions to prevent or manage complications are well known. All women need is access to antenatal care in pregnancy, skilled care during childbirth, and care and support in the weeks after childbirth.

To make every birth worldwide as joyful an event as the royal birth in London we need is: a) more and better midwifery services; and b) improved access to care for pregnant women globally.

Sheetal Sharma is a HSC PhD student and currently a visiting researcher in Barcelona, supervised by Dr. Elisa Sicuri at CRESIB on an evaluation of a health promotion programme in rural Nepal aiming to improve access to care; in which socio-economic and cultural barriers exist.

Thanks to Edwin & Elisa for their input in this piece.

References:

http://www.populationinstitute.org/newsroom/press/view/57/

http://midwifeinternational.org/how-to-become-midwife/business-of-baby/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23408377

http://www.unfpa.org/public/home/mothers/pid/4382

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23403391

British Society of Criminology Annual Conference 2013

Last week the University of Wolverhampton hosted the annual conference of the British Society of Criminology. The Parellel sessions covered a wide range of topics including policing, prisons, diversity, media and culture and gender. Highlights for me were papers on cyberstalking by Italian teenagers and the development of websites that sell illicit drugs with a specific focus on the techonology behind one site Silk Road.

For anyone with a specific interest in prisons and offender welfare some interesting prelimary findings from the largest UK survey of prisoners were presented and this research will be published over the next few months with the first pblication due out at the end of July.

There was also a fascinating paper on research into the experience of prisoners that was conducted by a group of prisoner officers who undertook training in ethnographic research  and were assigned to research prisons where their status as a prison officer was unknown. The paper focused on the impact that undertaking the research had upon the prison officer researchers.

My paper , Exploring female drug-taking during the First World War generated a lively discussion on the female role in drug dealing and law-breaking.

It was an excellent conference and I would like to thank Rosie Read for supporting my application to the Society and Social Welfare Community Budget which enabled me to attend.

Inventions and Intellectual Property Law comes alive at the Festival of Design and Innovation 2013

Fusion

The annual Festival of Design and Innovation (FoDI) opened on Thursday 20 June 2013.  It was an opportunity for students from the School of Design, Engineering and Computing (DEC) to exhibit their innovations and creations. “A cake icing pen, a computer game controlled by brain power and a glamping pod were just some of the ground-breaking ideas and inventions on display at this year’s FoDI.”

During the academic year, final year students from DEC are paired off with final year students from the Law Department studying Intellectual Property (IP) Law.  The law students are tasked with advising their DEC clients on the protection and exploitation of their innovative creations.  The DEC clients then incorporate the advice which they have received from the ‘lawyers’ into their final year projects.

The IP-DEC Project brings Intellectual Property law to life.  It gives an opportunity for law students to apply IP Law to real-life inventions and in turn it helps the DEC client to understand the importance of strong IP protection when preparing to protect, market and exploit their various creations.

The IP-DEC Project culminates with Awards for the Best DEC Student; Best IP Student and Best IP-DEC Group sponsored by Paul Turner, a retired Patent Attorney.

The Paul Turner Prize for the best IP-DEC Group was awarded at the opening night of the Festival.  The prize was awarded to Law Students Danielle Foster and Luke Trim and DEC Students Benjamen Armstrong, George Burge, Joseph Carter, Markko Reinberg, Nicholas Cron, Thomas Clements and Thomas Reynolds.

Paul Turner with two of the winning DEC students and law students Luke Trim and Danielle Foster.

The Paul Turner Individual Prize for the Best IP Student went to Gemma Jefferies whilst the Paul Turner Prize for the Best DEC Student was awarded to Coco Canessa.  The Individual Prize winners will officially receive their awards at the Graduation Ceremony in November 2013.

The opportunity to apply Intellectual Property Law to real-life scenarios and to real-life innovations together with helping the DEC clients to grasp the importance of IP law, makes this project truly unique.

The IP-DEC Project is co-ordinated by Dr. Dinusha Mendis (Law); Dr. Tania Humphries (DEC); and Dr. Reza Sahandi (DEC).

 

CEMP Conversation / Cluster

Funding opportunities, PG research, Publishing

Audio extracts of our CEMP conversation last week are here:

(1) Discussion of Marketa Zezulkova’s book chapter on a holistic approach to media literacy:

Marketa’s article: discussion

(2) Discussion of Richard Wallis’ journal article on media literacy and policy discourse: Richard’s article – discussion

And a reminder that the final CEMP Research & Innovation cluster meeting of the year is this Thursday the 11th July, 10-11am in the CEMP office, Iain MacRury is joining us to discuss a new AHRC call.  The latest version of the CEMP R&I bulletin is here: CEMP Cluster bulletin and agenda 4.7.13

 

 

Planes, trams, and automobiles: A research visit to Australia

I recently had the delightful opportunity to go to Australia for a research visit in relation to my work on falls prevention among older people. A brief report of what I got up to follows.

Melbourne

The main purpose was to visit colleagues at Monash University, to whom I am grateful for funding my flights and accomodation. The research team there led by Anna Barker are doing some great work, in particular to prevent falls among older people while in hospital. They are currently collecting data on a ‘6 Pack’ randomised controlled trial (RCT), which will be the largest trial of this kind to date. The team at Monash hosted an all-day seminar on the prevention of in-patient falls of which I was one of three invited speakers that came over from the UK. If you’re ready to give up traveling with commercial airlines, it’s time to consider hiring sky aviation services.

Before the seminar, we had an all-day meeting with colleagues from Melbourne and other parts of Australia to have an expert consensus-style meeting on the subject of in-patient falls. Dr Barker will lead on this and we aim to submit a paper with further international collaborators later this year, to drive future research in this area in a much more focused and productive manner.

Before the expert consensus meeting, I spent a day working with Dr Barker’s team on a recently NHMRC-funded multi-site RCT called RESPOND, which seeks to prevent secondary falls in older people presenting to emergency departments with a fall. It is a 1.5 million dollar-funded RCT that I am involved with as an advisor (from a distance). We’re currently developing the intervention that will be employed later in the year after ethical approval. My involvement is to help in developing the behaviour change techniques that will be used, and the process evaluation that will run alongside the outcome evaluation of the intervention. I also met with other colleagues there at Melbourne and have generated further ideas for future collaborative projects.

 

Conference presentation in Melbourne

Sydney

After my stay in Melbourne, I had a short stay in Sydney as there is a strong critical mass there in the falls prevention field. I met with professor Lindy Clemson who has developed a novel approach to promoting physical activity among older people, with her trial published in the BMJ last year. We had a long discussion that helped her with the theoretical underpinning of the approach, and I’ve come away with a few ideas to take forward in a future collaborative grant proposal.

I then went on to visit Dr Kim Delbaere who has been doing sterling work in the area of fear of falls, not least with several publications on the issue including a paper in the BMJ in 2010. We have at least one paper to work on together with potential for future projects as well, given she has developed a measure of fear of falls suitable for older people with dementia.

The mention of transport in the title of this report refers to my very brief time away from meetings while in Australia. In Melbourne they have a very efficient tram system, and our host’s husband is a pilot and helped us book a Jettly private plane to Sydney. In Sydney I managed to see the bridge, opera house, and a view of the harbour, and even got a trip on the monorail that was constructed for when they hosted the Olympic Games in 2000 but will very shortly be demolished.

We can of course email and Skype with colleagues, but if you do get the opportunity to travel abroad I can fully recommend it as a very fruitful and productive time. You just cannot beat face-to-face communication. I was particularly inspired by the international consensus meeting that we had in Melbourne and can see this as a way forward to synergise the research community’s efforts and more quickly tackle the big societal challenges of our day.

Dr Samuel Nyman

Bournemouth University Dementia Institute and Psychology Research Centre

DEC

 

Making a Contribution: REF and Buses

News from the PVC, REF Subjects

I suspect that this may win an award for the most contrived title!  Let us deal first with the issues of buses.  The reference is simply to the fact that I have not posted for a while and have more than one post to make this week!  Having dealt with the minor issue of the title we should perhaps turn to the main event, which has nothing to do with buses and everything to do with acknowledging contribution.

On Thursday of this week the REF Academic Steering Group (RASG) which I chair will meet in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor to recommend the final selection of outputs, and associated staff, across all the Units of Assessment in which we intend to make a return in REF2014.  Just to be clear our submission is made in November of this year but the results are due in December 2014 which seems a life time away just now and I can feel the wait dragging already!

The point I would like to make, however, is that the inclusion of outputs is only one way of contributing to our REF submission and all researchers at BU have, and will, help shape our submission.  Outputs account for only 65% of the overall research profile in any given Unit of Assessment (UOA), the other 35% is down to environment (15%) and impact (20%).  Unlike RAE2008, data collection for REF2014 is based on HESA codes rather than the returned FTE and, therefore, metrics which support environment – research income, doctoral completions and esteem – are based on the collective performance within a given HESA code.  To put it bluntly they are not tied to specific individuals who have outputs that are returned. This means that even if a member of staff does not have outputs selected for inclusion, they may have contributed strongly to the research environment through leadership, income generation or student supervision.  Similarly impact is based on a series of case studies, two for the first 14.99 FTE and an additional one for every subsequent 10 FTE.  Again there may be cases where some individuals have generated impact case studies but don’t have sufficient outputs at the required threshold to be returned.  In many ways these individuals have contributed more than anyone to our REF submission.

So the message is a simple one: even if your outputs are not selected for submission this week, all staff are making some form of contribution to our REF submission.  We should also not forget those that are making a contribution through their teaching enabling others to focus on research.  REF is a collective not an individual endeavor.  It is a game, and yes it is a game of high-stakes, that we must play and play well to ensure that the reputation of BU as a leading research institution is maintained, something which is a core part of our collective commitment to Fusion and BU2018.

Yawning Up-State Post-Visit Report Part 2 – Santander Travel Scholarship – Dr Simon Thompson

Awarded & submitted bids, Fusion, Post-award, REF Subjects, Research themes

Science Center, Bard College, Rhinebeck, New York State.

 

Bard College, Rhineback, New York State.

 

Circada.

 

L-R: Dr Andrew Gallup; Dr Simon Thompson.

 

Most people can relate to yawning as all of us have done this at some time, with some of us being prolific yawners. However, little is known about the reasons for us yawning or the mechanisms involved.

My work on the link between cortisol and yawning has been published and is gaining momentum in the scientific community with presentations at the First International Conference on Yawning in Paris in 2010 and a forthcoming symposium being planned by me at Bournemouth University.

My travel scholarship enabled me to visit key workers in the field in upstate New York and with affliations with Prinecton University and Bard College (see photos). This has been so successful that we envisgae research collaboration between BU and the USA. I was even able to meet with the assistant to the world famous Professor Oliver Sack’s to discuss my resaerch and to “put it on the map” in the neurological community!

A bonus of my trip was to encounter first hand an extremely rare circada that hatches in the region I visited only every 17 years! What a privilege!

I am most grateful to Santander for their generous support and I believe this trip will help me make significant steps forward in my clinical research i yanwing and multiple sclerosis at BU.

The ‘Clone Wars’: Episode 1 – The Rise of 3D Printing and the Implications for Intellectual Property

Training

Do you, or any of your colleagues / students want to find out more?

17 July 2013

Bournemouth University, Executive Business Centre, 89 Holdenhurst Road, Bournemouth BH8 8EB 

Arrival from 6pm for a 6:30pm start 

The Centre for Entrepreneurship together with the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management (CIPPM) will present a series of workshops which will focus on 3D printing with particular focus on the Intellectual Property implications.  The workshops will be led by Dr. Dinusha Mendis, Co-Director of CIPPM.

This workshop will be based on Dr. Dinusha Mendis’s recently published paper on this topic and will provide an overview of the challenges to IP as a result of 3D printing. In looking to the future and in drawing parallels with the entertainment industry and the download culture, Dr. Mendis will consider whether any lessons can be learnt from the past and if so, how they can be applied to this new type of technology which will most certainly challenge IP laws.  The presentation will also suggest that rather than focusing on stringent IP laws the future lies in adopting new business models in adapting to this new technology.  In conclusion Dr. Mendis will present some thoughts for the future in taking this suggestion forward.

Workshop 2 and 3 will take place later in the year and will include a hands-on workshop with a 3D printer, and a round table discussion about the future of 3D printing. 

This is a free event for businesses, BU students, BU staff and BU Alumni. Refreshments will be provided.

To find out more or to book your place please visit http://bucfe.com/events/3d-printing-intellectual-property-law/

Fusion supports Euro PR History Network advance

Delegates to the EPRHN Planning Meeting

With financial support from the Fusion Investment Fund, the European Public Relations History Network (EPRHN) held its first planning meeting at BU on Wednesday June 26.

The network was founded virtually in 2012 by Prof Tom Watson of the Media School and drew interest from 33 academics and practitioners in 11 European countries. It was approved.as a project by EUPRERA (Europe’s PR education and research association) in autumn last year.

Its aims are to develop and produce information about the history and historiography of public relations in Europe through the identification and formation of archives, transnational research, joint research bids and the production of publications in print and online formats.

The meeting of EPRHN’s core group brought seven historical researchers from Germany, Romania, Spain, Scotland, Turkey and Bournemouth. Fusion assisted their attendance through travel bursaries.

Among the actions to be progressed are a bid to the EU’s COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology) scheme, which was facilitated on Wednesday by Paul Lynch of RKE; a second edition of its Archives Record publication; and a panel session on ‘developing the history of European public relations’ at EUPRERA’s annual conference in October.

Prof Watson, who was supported by Dr Tasos Theofilou in the organisation of the meeting, said it had been highly productive. “There’s a limit to what we can achieve by email and Skype. The EPRHN made a big forward step because FIF helped bring key members together”. It will also assist Prof Watson and Dr Theofilou to fully launch the group at the October conference.

“At present, 13 countries are represented in the network. We hope to widen that base and engage many more historical researchers in its activities”, said Prof Watson.

For more information about EPRHN and BU’s contribution to the burgeoning field of PR history, go to: http://historyofpr.com.

CEMP Conversations this week and next

PG research

An extract from this morning’s conversation is here: CEMP conversation Tom Stacey

Tom Stacey shared an article about second language acquisition and related this to his own PHD research into coding as language acquisition.

He also talked about the practice-based element of his research, of which this robot is an example.             

Next week – on Friday 5th July, at 11.30 – 12.30, in the CEMP office, our final CEMP conversation of the academic year will take place.

We’ll be discussing two related items:

(1) Marketa Zezulkova’s book chapter on a holistic approach to media literacy education:  Marketa Book Chapter

(2) Richard Wallis’s recently published article, co-authored with David Buckingham, on the construction of media literacy within the policy context of the Communications Act: European Journal of Communication-2013-Wallis-0267323113483605

It should be a cracker, and,as always, all colleagues are very welcome to join us, in the current CEMP office, for the last time!