Category / Research themes

What do we know about back pain? The Society for Back Pain Research AGM Bournemouth 2015

conferences, international, Research themes

 

SBPR logo

I was delighted to attend and represent BU at The Society for Back Pain Research (SBPR) Annual General Meeting 5-6 November 2015 which was conveniently held in Bournemouth, at Anglo-European College of Chiropractic, a partner college of BU. SBPR was formed in 1971 to promote the study of all clinical and scientific aspects of spinal pain, including the neck (my area of interest), and to encourage research into its causes, treatment and prevention. There are now over 200 members of the Society, from a wide range of disciplines including all sorts of healthcare professionals and scientists. Suffice to say if there is anything about back pain this audience does not know it is probably not worth knowing! Having said that, attending this meeting reminded me just how much about back pain is still unknown…

Biological Factors in Non-Specific Back Pain

The title of this year’s meeting was ‘Biological Factors in Non-Specific Back Pain’ to place an emphasis on the ‘biological’. It has been over 25 years since the biopsychosocial model was applied to back pain but lately research has tended to be more concerned with psychosocial aspects, such as fear-avoidance behaviour or depression; research into physical findings to diagnose back pain has sadly not been very fruitful. [An important point was made by Professor Maurits van Tulder, that research has actually been largely focused on psychological factors, to the expense of social factors]. While psychosocial factors do seem to be important in influencing patients’ recovery, they don’t get us much closer to a diagnosis, to finding out what is producing and driving the patient’s pain.
However, one of the presentations at SBPR hinted at where the research focus as regards imaging (and MRI specifically) could perhaps go. One of Associate Professor Mark Hancock’s suggestions was that we need studies that focus on changes on MRI, in response to treatment (or no treatment). But how do we best measure such changes? Which treatments and for whom? Could findings on MRI in a person without back pain predict back pain in the future?

Want to know more? For a longer version of this blog, click here.

Many thanks to the Professional Practice Development community, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, for making my attendance possible.

Dr Jonny Branney

Robust Semi-supervised Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

PG research

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Creative Technology Research Centre.Robust_Semi-supervised_Nonnegative_Matrix_Factorization

 

Speaker: Jing Wang

 

Title:   Robust Semi-supervised Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

 

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 2nd December 2015

Room: P302 LT, Poole House, Talbot Campus

 

Abstract: Clustering aims to organize a collection of data items into clusters, such that items within a cluster are more “similar” to each other than to those in the other clusters, which has been used in many fields, including machine learning, pattern recognition, image analysis, information retrieval, and bioinformatics. Clustering is usually performed when no information is available concerning the membership of data items to predefined classes. For this reason, it is traditionally seen as part of unsupervised learning. However, in reality, it is often the case that some data information (e.g. labels) is available and could be used to bias the clustering for producing considerable improvements in learning accuracy. Also, data have some new challenges, such as high- dimensionality, sparsity, containing noises and outliers, etc. This motivates us to develop new technology to deal with this kind of complex data. To address all these issues, we propose semi-supervised nonnegative matrix factorization approaches. Experiments carried on well-known data sets demonstrate the effectiveness.

 

We hope to see you there.

HSS Writing Week 4th-8th January – How can Bournemouth University Clinical Research Unit support you?

Publishing, writing

bucru identity

The Faculty of Health and Social Sciences is holding a Writing Week between 4th-8th January 2016 aimed at supporting staff to find time in their busy academic diaries to prioritise writing grant applications and papers for publication.

The Bournemouth University Clinical Research Unit offers methodological and statistical collaboration for all healthcare researchers in the area. It supports researchers in improving the quality, quantity and efficiency of research across Bournemouth University and local National Health Service (NHS) Trusts. It incorporates the Dorset office of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Research Design Service who offer free methodological support to researchers who are developing research ideas in the field of health and social care.

BUCRU will be supporting Writing Week in HSS by holding two drop-in sessions on Tuesday 5th January and Thursday 7th January 12-2pm in R508 Royal London House. We would also like to extend the invitation across the other Faculties for anyone who feels we may be able to support them. For those unable to attend the drop-in sessions, we would be delighted to arrange an alternative appointment.

Please see further information here, contact our adminstrator Louise Ward on 01202 961939 / bucru@bournemouth.ac.uk or visit our website. We look forward to seeing you!

Connecting histories of welfare

Fusion

Profs Jonathan Parker and Sara Ashencaen Crabtree undertook their annual field trip to Sherborne Abbey and St Johns’ Almshouse (Yes! The apostrophe’s in the right place, it refers to two Johns.) on Monday. The trip is held for Sociology & Social Policy students studying the histories of social welfare.

This year was particularly valuable as the students are producing group narratives concerning a range of characters and scenarios from history involving research into policy, legislation and practices to contextualise their stories. Seeing at least six hundred years of active community welfare and care through the almshouses, and tracing back Sherborne’s history to the time of Alfred the Great – who initiated a precursor to the poor laws for his people – the students were able to see the lived experiences and histories written about in their own research. This was brought sharply into the present day when it was revealed that the Sherborne foodbank programme serving a population of little over 10,000 people is delivering in excess of 1,000 food parcels each year! Students gained great insight into the connecting strands of welfare at formal and informal, state and charitable/third sector levels.

Sherborne

Suicide in India: Modelling data

international, Publishing

The latest BU research publication used a modelling approach to suicide in India [1].  The paper ‘Time Trend of the Suicide Incidence in India: a Statistical Modelling’ is now online and freely available as it was published in an Open Access journal.  The first author of this paper is BU Visiting Faculty Dr. Brijesh Sathian.  The modelling resulted in some useful predictions of future risk of suicide at a population level, see for example: 10.12691.ajphr-3-5A-17.fig_1

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Reference:

Sathian, B. , De, A. , Teijlingen, E. V. , Simkhada, P. et al. (2015). Time Trend of the Suicide Incidence in India: a Statistical Modelling. American Journal of Public Health Research, 3(5A), 80-87.  Online at:  http://pubs.sciepub.com/ajphr/3/5A/17/

Ecosystem Services Partnership 2015 Conference, South Africa

conferences

 

Over 350 delegates from around the world attended the Ecosystem Services Partnership conference this year (9-13th Nov 2015) in Stellenbosch – near Cape Town, South Africa. Being fortunate enough to attend this year myself, I presented my research on assessing cultural ecosystem service; a multifaceted approach using various techniques including participatory GIS, spatial mapping, GPS tracking of visitors and use of existing data sets explored in relation to the New Forest.

ESP

Themed around nature, people and prosperity, the conference aimed to centre on the dialogue between public and private sector utilisation of the ecosystem services concept.

The largest conference of its kind, the keynote speakers were diverse. Highlights included Executive Director of the Natural Capital Coalition’s Mark Gough (the coalition aims to build clear guidance on how business can effectively and measure natural capital just like financial capital is measured). The conference was closed with an inspiring and convincing talk from ‘Gross Domestic Problem’ author Lorenzo Fioamonti (Professor of Political Science at the University of Pretoria) about the downfalls of using the GDP statistic as the only measure of an economy.

Arjan Gosal is currently working as a Research Assistant on the HEIF project: Modelling Natural Capital in Dorset.

Team BU shortlisted for Sports Technology Awards

innovation

photoWell done to Team BU who has been shortlisted for Sport England Sports Technology Hackathon Awards 2016.

The team developed a location based game app called ‘Nudge’ and incorporated social gamification strategies to encourage sustained physical activity adherence. We also sought strategies to help those who are already active in this age group encourage their inactive peers to participate.
The winning team will be announced at the Sports Technology Awards in April 2016 and awarded a bursary of £10,000 to help them build the app.
Well done Team BU and good luck for next April!

Successful ESRC Festival of Social Sciences in EBC today

Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer, PG research, student research, Women's Academic Network

Slide1Slide2This afternoon Prof. Jonathan Parker introduced the final of three session in the Executive Business Centre under the title ‘Enhancing social life through global social research: Part 3. Social science research in diverse communities’.  This session was well attended and coveredwas a wide-range of interesting social science research topics.

Professor of Sociology Ann Brooks started off the session with her presentation on ‘Emotional labour and social change.’   She was followed by Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen who gave an overview of research in Nepal.  FHSS PhD student Andy Harding introduced his thesis research into ‘Information provision and housing choices for older people.’  At this point Prof. Brooks gave her second talk on ‘Risk and the crisis of authenticity in cities’. Social Anthropologist Dr. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers spoke about her research on ‘Reconciliation and engaged ethnography in the Balkans.’  Dr. Hyun-Joo Lim highlighted her study on ‘North Korean defectors in the UK’ and the session was completed by Dr. Mastoureh Fathi who presented her analysis of parenting books for Muslim parents in the UK.

ESRC banner (2)

This was the last day of the ESRC Festival of Social Science at which Bournemouth University was extremely well presented!

 

Thank you to my colleagues for organising this and the ESRC for funding the events!

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

(medical sociologist)