Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
Emily Loring and I are in the Atrium, Poole House, Talbot Campus today giving out copies of the Bournemouth Research Chronicle (BRC) magazine to academic staff. Do come along and pick up a copy and have a cake with us!
We will be here until 4:30pm today (Tuesday) and again on Thursday between 9am-5pm.
Academics at the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health have published a series of articles over the past few years on aspects of academic publishing. The latest addition is called ‘Writing an Abstract for a Scientific Conference’ which has been published recently in the Kathmandu University Medical Journal .1 As the title suggests the paper advises novice researchers and students on the best way to write a scientific abstract. This paper also highlights some of the common mistakes academics make when drafting such abstract.
An earlier article in the series reflects issues around academic authorship, something which can be a tricky topic. The paper addressed issues around who should be an author and who should not, the order of authors, and highlighted the different conventions that prevail in different academic disciplines. The paper ‘Academic authorship: who, why and in what order?’ was published in the academic journal Health Renaissance.2
Further articles have focused on the basics of writing up qualitative research findings, 3 the general process of writing a scientific paper, including an attempt to answer the questions: “What to write? and “When to start writing?”4 and submitting such a paper to a peer-reviewed journal.5 One paper stresses the importance of selecting the target journal wisely6 and a further paper highlights some of the perils of the peer review process under the title ‘The long & winding road to publication’. 7
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen & Prof. Vanora Hundley
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health, HSC, Bournemouth University
References:
To celebrate the publication of Real Lives, Celebrity Stories, edited by Bronwen Thomas and Julia Round, the Media School’s Narrative Research Group will host a book launch at 3 p.m on 29 January in the Casterbridge suite. Featuring contributions by several colleagues from the Media School, including Shaun Kimber, Peri Bradley, Darren Lilleker and Sue Thomas, the book was inspired by the first symposium organised by NRG back in 2010 and explores narratives of ordinary and extraordinary people in television, film, fan cultures, comics, politics and cyberspace. At the launch, the editors and contributors will provide a brief introduction to each of their chapters, and light refreshments and wine will be provided. All welcome.
Title – Understanding the corrosion of archaeological iron to better manage its conservation
Date: Wednesday 12-03-2014
Start: 12:00 Finish: 12:30
Venue: PG 22 (Poole House)
Abstract – Worldwide there are millions of archaeological iron objects stored in museums. Most are inherently unstable, with their chloride content being cited as being the main corrosion driver in conjunction with relative humidity. Attempts to prevent their corrosion are time consuming and costly, with limited numbers of evidence-based conservation options available to managers. The talk reports work examining relationships between chloride and relative humidity for archaeological iron. The outcomes of the study are discussed in relation to their potential for developing new approaches to managing preservation of the archaeological iron heritage.
The above seminar will be delivered by Professor David Watkinson. He is Head of Conservation at Cardiff University, where he teaches undergraduate and post-graduate conservation students and directs conservation research. The Cardiff University ferrous metals research group is quantifying the corrosion rate of archaeological iron and evaluating desalination treatments, as well as carrying out studies to quantify the performance of protective coatings for heritage wrought iron and steels. David’s corrosion research underpinned the design for the desiccated storage of Brunel’s iconic steamship ss Great Britain and in 2010 he was awarded the Plowden Medal for innovative research and services to conservation.
All BU staff and students, who have interest in this area in terms of research and education, are invited to this research seminar. Please feel free to forward this invitation to your external contacts who might have interest in corrosion, conservation, structural integrity and related area.
These seminars are organised by the University Sustainable Design Research Centre in the Faculty of Science & Technology to provide a platform for disseminating latest research activities and results. These seminars are good opportunity of networking for both BU staff and students.
If you would like further information on research activities in corrosion, corrosion simulation and corrosion monitoring please visit SDRC webpage. For any specific inquiries please contact
Dr Zulfiqar Khan (Associate Professor)
Director Sustainable Design Research Centre
The third edition of the Bournemouth Research Chronicle (BRC) is now published. Thank you very much to everyone who contributed.
This is a glossy ‘coffee table’ magazine with some lovely images. It is aimed at peer researchers and research collaborators, prospective funders and (perhaps most importantly) research users such businesses, government organisations, policy makers and charities.
We all know that communication is an integral part of the link between research and societal impact and this magazine is a great way to get the message heard by the right people.
Content is presented through BU’s eight research themes. This edition provides a snapshot of some of the work BU submitted to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. In particular it focuses on the societal impact of our research, which forms a key part of REF2014.
Every BU academic will receive a copy of the BRC. My colleagues and I will be in the Atrium, Poole House on Tuesday and Thursday next week with a large stash so do pop along, say hello and pick up yours. Otherwise, we’ll put it in the internal post for you.
Throughout January I’ll be sending the BRC to an extensive list of research users, including policy makers, community figures, opinion leaders, businesses and journalists. I will be providing a supply to each School so please do send it to your contacts, collaborators, peers, prospective funders, industry partners or anyone else who has an interest in BU’s research.
R&KEO will keep a larger stock of the BRC. If you would like copies for an event or conference then email me (Sally Gates – Editor) to arrange a delivery.
Thank you again to everyone who contributed and happy reading!
Our next Creative Technology Research Centre Research Seminar will be presented by Xinglong Ma.
Title: Knowledge Points based annotation for Open Educational Resources
Date: Wednesday 15th January 2014
Time: 2 – 3PM
Venue: P302 LT
Abstract: In recent years, the emergence of open educational resources (OERs), in particularly Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), such as Coursera, Edx, Udacity, are making efforts to enhance openness and reuse regardless of demographic constraints. In 2011, the first course, “Introduction to AI”, from Stanford University reached 160,000 enrolments, and in the following years, millions of learners have been involved in the MOOCs. High dropout rates ensued in this self-regulated and self-controlled learning process. In order to encourage seamless learning under the open and reusable learning environment, an innovative approach is proposed based on semanticized Knowledge Points. This talk will discuss the concept of Knowledge Points and suggest the potential values of the Knowledge Points with semantics by comparing them with other annotation approaches.
We are pleased to announce the formation of the Arts in Research (AiR) Group. This effort grows out of the experience of HSC’s ReThink process and previous work at HSC in using tools from the Arts in carrying out research, disseminating findings and sharing them with students, colleagues and communities beyond the University. The Group is open to members of any School with an interest or even curiosity in how they might infuse their interest in the arts within more routine research and/or presentation practices.
The interest in Arts-based Research is international and growing. Areas such as video, film, photography, dance, drama, poetry, radio production, creative writing—even clowning—are becoming more mainstream. Conferences, for example, no longer routinely consist of hour-after-hour packed with 20-minute PowerPoint presentations. Young students balk at PPT and expect more creativity from lecturers in their learning experiences. Reaching wider audiences (including ‘service-users’ and the public) is now routinely demanded by funding bodies. Tools from the Arts can greatly enhance all of these efforts.
Using Arts-based approaches in research requires thinking about Method from novel viewpoints. Involving research participants in producing outputs frequently enlivens projects, for one example. Finding the right arts-based method for the research questions or findings is key to their use. Finding the right collaborator for your project can be central to its success.
The ARTS in RESEARCH (AiR) Group will begin meeting in January (watch for announcement by email, Facebook and Twitter). We will begin by exploring what interests group members have and what resources are already available. We will also explore the possibility of collaborations with working artists, so no need to feel that great personal skill is required, just enthusiasm.
Please contact Kip Jones (kipworld@gmail.com) if you are interested in joining the group.
Venue & date: Thursday 30th January at 4pm in K103 (Kimmeridge House)
Situation awareness can be loosely defined as, ‘knowing what’s going on around you and what to do about it.’ In everyday life we make complex decisions – some good, some bad – on the basis of our awareness of what is going on around us. Sadly situation awareness can sometimes be sub-optimal leading to catastrophic errors such as road traffic accidents and air crashes. Such errors often appear to result from a ‘tunnelling down’ with available and useful information being ignored. This attentional tunnelling is widely reported by (amongst others) firefighters, medical staff and military personnel.
Dr Graham Edgar from the Centre for Research in Applied Cognition, Knowledge, Learning and Emotion at the University of Gloucestershire will present his research examining information-use in building and maintaining situation awareness, and the influence that affective state has on that process.
All are welcome and there is no need to book – just come along!
Dr Padam Simkhada, senior lecturer in ScHARR at the University of Sheffield was awarded the CEA Award of Global Health Research for his contribution to global research at a special ceremony at the Mahatma Gandhi University, India just before last Christmas. Dr Simkhada has been Visiting Faculty at BU in the School of Health & Social Care since 2010. He is involved in various BU projects, including the Fellowship awarded by the charity Wellbeing of Women, in association with the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), for research into Nepalese maternity services and women’s health from an international perspective. The research team consists of Lesley Milne, Senior Lecturer in Midwifery, Vanora Hundley, Professor in Midwifery, Edwin van Teijlingen, Professor of Reproductive Health Research at BU, and BU Visiting Faculty Dr. Padam Simkhada.
Dr. Simkhada is also co-supervisor of HSC PhD student Ms. Sheetal Sharma. Sheetal Sharma’s poster presentation recently won the best poster prize at a conference in Birmingham for the poster Getting women to care in Nepal: A Difference in Difference analysis of a health promotion intervention. Sheetal is supported by Bournemouth University with a studentship and a Santander grant.
Dr. Simkhada has published over 70 research articles on issues such as reproductive and sexual health, migration and sex trafficking and maternal and child health. Furthermore, he has been working to improve the quality of health research among higher education institutions in Nepal.
This Global Health Research Award for Dr. Simkhada has been reported widely in the media in India, Nepal and in England.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health
Read what the Centre has been doing over the last year by clicking on the link to a PDF of our latest newsletter.
In the Centre we are rightly proud of the achievements of our students and their engagement in public activities and international opportunities, as well as those of our staff. It is through our newsletter that we keep our colleagues, here in the UK and internationally, abreast of our activities. We thought you would want to share in this.
In this edition you will find articles on student international placements in Malaysia, our hosted international week, and our new Sociology & Anthropology programme. There is information about conference presentations undertaken by Centre members, and introductions to some of the exciting and innovative social science research conducted within the Centre.
Should you want to find out more, to collaborate with members on research projects please get in touch with any of us.
Title
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN NOVEL ALTERNATIVE RENEWABLE ENERGY TECHNOLOGY
Sustainable Design Research Centre (SDRC) – Research Seminar
Date: Wednesday 8th Jan
Venue: P 406
Time: 12:00 – 12:30
Abstract
Renewable Technology is a BU recognised sub-theme within Technology & Design. SDRC has significant portfolio of research within Renewable Technology, this include Cross-Channel Consortium in Mechanical Current Turbine (MCT) research , working closely with community interest groups such as Poole Tidal Energy Partnership in Tidal Energy, final year design projects in Tidal Energy, Heat Pumps & Retro-Fitted Micro Wind Turbines & cross-school activity within Fusion initiative.
Fossil fuels have become the main energy source for human after the Industrial Revolution. However, with ever-increasing energy consumption, they are not sustainable in terms of their finite reserves, environmental implications and contributions to climate change. Within the Energy 2020A strategy for competitive, sustainable and secure energy, the EU and UK have together set a mutual objective to generate renewable energy as 20% of the total energy supply by 2020, for further details please click here. The current research aims to develop low cost renewable technology systems with competitive efficiency and readily adaptable systems both for domestic and commercial applications. In this seminar, the study will present the project background and experimental methodology employed for recording thermodynamic attributes of the solar thermal system to be used in mathematical analyses. The presentation will also present some results and engineering design of key components for improving the overall thermal efficiency of the solar thermal system.
Biography
Bruce Wen is currently conducting research as a PhD student. This research project is fully funded by Future Energy Source Ltd [Dr Zulfiqar Khan PI]. The proposed programme is a direct response to the needs of developing novel alternative renewable technology solutions capable of converting solar energy into useful clean energy. Bruce has participated in the DEC PGR conference and currently planning to present at the BU Graduate School Annual Conference this month.
If you have interest in this research area or would like further information then please contact
Dr Zulfiqar Khan (Associate Professor)
Director SDRC
Email: zkhan@bournemouth.ac.uk
The Association of American Geographers (AAG) has awarded an annual meeting grant to Dr. Anna Feigenbaum, lecturer in Media and Politics at the Media School. AAG Enrichment Funds “support participation of distinguished non-geographers in the annual meeting,” helping to promote cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange between geography and other fields of study. Dr. Feigenbaum will travel to Tampa, Florida in April 2014 to deliver a presentation on her Tear Gas project in preparation for her monograph on the subject due out with Verso in 2015. She will also participate in the ‘subconference’–a set of meetings within the meeting focused on collaboration and skill-sharing. As part of the ‘Professional and intellectual triage for emerging and early career scholars’ panel, Dr. Feigenbaum will offer guidance on moving through the first years of academia in these times of precarity and change in the HE sector.
The increasing volume of academic activity on the internet coupled with a growing obsession about privacy and data protection means for many academics a rapidly expanding number of online accounts and associated passwords. This is, of course, over and above our regular dose of accounts and passwords as citizens of the virtual world. The average adult in the UK must have at least 25 internet accounts, for the bank/building society, supermarkets, phone companies, social media, airlines, trains, insurance companies, eBay, the website of the parents’ council of your children’s school, your electricity provider, the council tax, etc.
I feel as an academic, the burden is even worse. Every single time another scientific journal invites me to review a paper it opens an on-line account for me. Every time I apply for a grant from a funding body to which I have not previously applied, I am required to set up an account with a new password. When you apply for 20-odd grants every year and review manuscripts for a similar number of different journals the number of accounts and passwords add up rapidly. Then there are the other accounts and passwords related to work for sites such as this BU Research Blog, BRIAN, Survey Monkey, for the university for whom you act as external examiner, for Drop Box, the British Library, ORCIC, ACADEMIA.EDU, ResearchGate, Researchfish, Linkedin, and the list goes on.
These last few months I was reminded how non user friendly some systems are. First, I received new secure email account for my part on a REF sub-panel. The account name chosen for me is different from what I would have chosen and what I am used to at Bournemouth University. The importance of confidentiality for the REF work is clear so my password has to be different from anything I use elsewhere. Secondly, a few weeks later I attempted to put my name done for the tri-annual conference of the International Congress of Midwifery in Prague next year. It turns out you cannot join the conference without opening an on-line account first. The account name was automatically chosen for me and so was the password. Unfortunately, both are impossible to remember, neither the account name nor the password (which was case sensitive) were ones I would have selected personally.
There is some hope as some journals allow you to choose your own account name and password. Elsevier has brought most of its journals into one account, with your own email as the account name and all with the same password. Similarly a group of English-language journals in Nepal called Nepal Journals OnLine (NepJOL) use one account name for all participating journals. For the rest of my account names and passwords I can only follow the advice given by Stephen Fry on an episode of QI: “Write it down somewhere on a piece of paper”. The underlying idea is that the people who try to steal your internet account details sit in a bedsit in London or Hong Kong and won’t come to your office or living room to steal a piece of paper with computer addresses. The people who try to break into your house or office are looking for objects with a street value, such as your TV, phone or laptop, they are generally not interested in a piece of paper with some scribbles on it.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health
The outcomes of CEMP’s Spirit of 13 inter-generational research project are now online.
The screening and forum event with Ken Loach, hosted by the British Film Institute, was the outcome of a project for which people aged 25 and under produced inter-generational documentary films in response to Loach’s ‘The Spirit of ’45’. CEMP collaborated with Sixteen Films, the BFI, the Media Education Association and Media Magazine.
We are grateful to Daniel Weissman and his production crew and to Trevor Hearing, for support.
A specialist Session at the Washington Conference will be devoted to Legal Aspects of Nuclear Disarmament and to discuss future activities to be taken under the Committee’s mandate, ‘to consider legal approaches to non-proliferation and regulating nuclear weapons within the contemporary context and, ultimately, to present options for future legal cooperation in this field’.
The Committee has compiled a report on the subject and drafted a draft resolution for consideration. The work of ILA as a scholarly NGO and its Committees often feeds into lawmaking at the UN.
Dr.Sascha-Dominik Bachmann, Associate Professor in the Department of Law, is a member of the British section (http://www.ila-hq.org/en/committees/index.cfm/cid/1025/member/1) and has been part of the on-going Committee work since 2010.
field’.
Congratulations to Health & Social Care PhD student Mr. Jib Acharya who has been offered a funded place at the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) workshop. The SUN workshop will be held in Morocco in early February 2014. The British Council and CNRST have launched a new five-year programme to encourage international research collaboration between ambitious young researchers from the UK and eighteen countries around the world. The forthcoming SUN workshop is a part of this programme. One leading team of researchers from the University of Southampton and from Morocco proposed this bilateral workshop to be held in Morocco to bring together early career researchers to discuss their research and start to build international relationships.
The selection committee wrote to Mr. Acharya: “the selection was challenging. The selection panel (UK and Moroccan coordinators and mentors), has chosen 16 applications that would contribute to and benefit from the workshop most”. The British Council and CNRST will cover the costs related to the participation to the workshop, including: travel (both international and local), visa, accommodation and meals.
Jib is delighted with his award. He commented: “It will give me a chance to build up networks with participants at this workshop. It will help to establish personal and institutional relationships.”
Jib’s PhD thesis is based on A comparative Study on Nutritional Problems in Preschool Aged Children of Kaski District of Nepal. His research applies a mixed-methods approach and he is supervised by a team of three BU supervisors: Dr. Jane Murphy, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, and Dr. Martin Hind.
Title: Servicing Big Data
Time: 14:00-16:00 Wednesday, 18 Dec. 2013
Venue: PG143 (Thomas Hardy Suite, Talbot Campus)
Speaker: Prof. Athman Bouguettaya, Head of School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Big data is here and in a big way. Big data is coming from all sorts of sources and means, including sensors, deep space, social media, smartphones, genomic, etc. The cloud has been instrumental supporting the storage and processing of the ever increasing amount of data. “Domesticating” the data, i.e., making it useful, however, has been a major challenge. Service computing is the next major evolution of computing that aims at transforming massive data into artefacts that are acted upon, i.e., services. Service computing is increasingly being recognized as part of a broader agenda in Service Science. In that respect, service computing may be viewed as the “engineering” side of service science. Service computing broadly focuses at providing a foundational framework to support a service-centric view of designing, developing, and exposing data (and applications), whether it is in the enterprise or on the Web. In that respect, the Web is and will undoubtedly be the preferred delivery platform of service-based solutions. More specifically, Web services are currently without contest the key enabler for deploying service-centric solutions. Fully delivering on the potential of next-generation Web services requires building a foundation that would provide a sound design for efficiently developing, deploying, publishing, discovering, composing, trusting, and optimizing access to Web services in an open, competitive, untrustworthy, and highly dynamic environment. The Web service foundation is the key catalyst for the development of a uniform framework called Web Service Management System (WSMS). In this novel framework, Web services are treated as first-class objects. In this talk, I will first motivate the need for a uniform service management to service big data. I will then overview the core components of a typical WSMS. I will conclude by describing our latest research servicing sensor data.
Short Bio
Athman Bouguettaya is Professor and Head of School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) in 1992. He was previously Science Leader in Service Computing at CSIRO ICT Centre, Canberra. Australia. Before that, he was a tenured faculty member and Program director in the Computer Science department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (commonly known as Virginia Tech) (USA). He is a founding member and past President of the Service Science Society, a non-profit organization that aims at forming a community of service scientists for the advancement of service science. He is on the editorial boards of several journals including, the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, the International Journal on Next Generation Computing, VLDB Journal, Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, and the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. He is also on the editorial board of the Springer-Verlag book series on Services Science. He served as a guest editor of a number of special issues including the special issue of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology on Semantic Web services, a special issue the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing on Service Query Models, and a special issue of IEEE Internet Computing on Database Technology on the Web. He served as a Program Chair of the 2012 International Conference on Web and Information System Engineering, the 2009 and 2010 Australasian Database Conference, 2008 International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) and the IEEE RIDE Workshop on Web Services for E-Commerce and E-Government (RIDE-WS-ECEG’04). He has published more than 170 books, book chapters, and articles in journals and conferences in the area of databases and service computing (e.g., the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, the ACM Transactions on the Web, WWW Journal, VLDB Journal, SIGMOD, ICDE, VLDB, and EDBT). He was the recipient of several federally competitive grants in Australia (e.g., ARC) and the US (e.g., NSF, NIH). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM.
At the end of November Stella Rawnson and Catherine Angell (both Senior Lecturer in Midwifery at BU) attended the European Midwives Association Education Conference in Maastricht, the Netherlands. This two-day event brought together 300 midwife educators from universities across Europe, from Norway to Greece and Ireland to Hungary.
Stella presented ‘The best people for the job’ which focused on our experience of introducing new methods for assessing the suitability of applicants to BU’s BSc Midwifery programme. This generated a considerable amount of interest and discussion. It was clear that student selection was an issue for educators from a wide range of countries, both in terms of identifying competence in numeracy and literacy but also assessing applicants’ communication and ‘people skills’.
Catherine’s presentation was entitled ‘Loosing the luggage; strategies that enable effective learning around infant feeding for student midwives’. This identified how we have used education theories to develop a programme that enables students to ‘unlearn’ negative or unrealistic ideas about infant feeding before embarking on new learning around this subject. This fitted well with a key theme that emerged from the conference relating to the role of emotion in enabling and blocking learning.
The conference included keynote presentations from Prof. Cees van der Vleuten, who spoke about evaluation and assessment of health sciences students, and Prof. Raymond DeVries who discussed the value of academic skills in midwifery. The conference highlighted the considerable differences in terms of length of midwifery programme, entry route and content between different countries in the EU. However, it also enabled us to learn from sharing some of the challenges that we experience in areas such as recruitment and assessment, and in terms of developing curriculums against shifting models of care and changing political priorities. Naturally it also provided an excellent opportunity for networking and identifying potential collaborations.
Winter in Maastricht
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BRIAN drop-in surgery – Lansdowne
Postgraduate Research Summer Social – 1 week to go!
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 Call
ERC Advanced Grant 2025 Webinar MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025
Update on UKRO services
European research project exploring use of ‘virtual twins’ to better manage metabolic associated fatty liver disease
Research Information Network
Horizon Europe Work Programme 2025 Published
Horizon Europe 2025 Work Programme pre-Published