Category / Festival of Learning

Let’s Talk Tax!

Festival of Learning, Fusion

Ever puzzled over tax? Wondered about the politics or personal impact of international tax news? This session with BU researchers, students and the Chartered Institute of Taxation will give you a greater understanding and appreciation for tax and help you become more tax-savvy.

During this session, we have five star students presenting 5-minute ‘tax’ talks:

  • Martinas Prazauskas on the tax avoidance of Apple, Google and Amazon
  • Timothy Buck on tax arbitrage
  • Sesil Bou on thin capitalisation
  • Clémentine Saulnier on non-discrimination in the EU
  • Lucy Butler on the Robin Hood tax

Taking second billing in this session are BU’s tax academics: Dr Phyllis Alexander, Dr Alan Kirkpatrick and Richard Teather.  We will be joined by Mr Andy Brodrick of the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT), the organisation funding Dr Alexander’s research on tax morale.

There will be at least 15 minutes reserved for Q&A and an open discussion with this diverse panel on anything and everything to do with tax.   This will be a fast paced, interesting hour in which BU’s Fusion philosophy comes to light!

Please do join us and book your free tickets here. 

Nuffield Celebration Event at BU

Coffee Morning, Festival of Learning

The Nuffield Research Placement (NRP) provides students each year with the opportunity to work alongside professional scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians.
It aims to enable students to experience authentic research in a real scientific environment and is available across the UK, in universities, commercial companies, voluntary organisations and research institutions.

NRP is now celebrating its 20 years and last Wednesday at the Fusion Building, the students who took part in the placement, presented their posters.

As in the past year, also this year under the supervision Alison McConnell, James Gavin, Tom Wainwright and mine we hosted a student Holly Combes, who in a month not only collaborate in setting up research protocols but also wrote a dissertation about the Time-Up-and-Go, which was submitted to the Young Scientific Journal for publication.

Personally, I was inspired by all the fascinating research that the students have done, and I was glad to have the opportunity to give a small speech:

To my colleagues that are thinking to apply for next year placement, I will say do it. There is nothing more pleasing than help young minds, full of motivation and curiosity. You and your research will gain a lot from this experience.

Thank you for reading,

Francesco

 

 

My personal experience at Café Scientific

Coffee Morning, Festival of Learning

Café scientific was one of the best public engagement activities that I have done in the past years, and I do recommend going there and deliver your talk to the public.

In all my past experiences (including pint of science, the festival of learning, U3A, the Air Show and others) I have always met great people who were interested to know and learn more about what we are doing here at BU, and at Café Scientific, it was no different.

I arrived there 1h before the talk, the café (vintage/steampunk style), was already set up for the event, thanks to the great work of the Public Engagement Team. So I had all the time to calm down and get ready.

At about 19:30 the place was packed, and few people had to listen to the talk standing up.

A sample of the presentation is available on Youtube:

Even if the room was fully booked, the audience was very quiet and focused on listening to the 40 minutes presentation.

However, the best part was at the end, and I am not referring to the delicious brownie cake that Boscanova Café made for celebrating the 5th birthday of Café Scientific, but for the questions.

I was happily surprised to have so many interesting questions, which made me think again about my projects.

There were questions about: the effect of singing and yoga exercises on balance; why not make a POWERbreathe that instead of a mouthpiece has a nosepiece; how much the improvement in balance was due to the strength of the muscles trained and not just the ability to breathe deeper; why not test the effects of meditation, and others very intelligent questions.

Finally, it was challenging and I hope that all the audience received the right message: research can be fascinating and fun, especially if you can share it with others.

If you are interested in know more about how to breathe your way into balance, contact me at fferraro@bournemouth.ac.uk

Thank you for reading.

Francesco.

Research Impact – a new toolkit developed by the Health Foundation

Festival of Learning

I just wanted to draw attention to the following new toolkit developed by the Health Foundation.

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Communicating your research – a toolkit

The Health Foundation’s new communications toolkit for research helps researchers to increase the influence and impact of their findings in health and health care. It includes guidance, templates, support materials and links to help develop a communication strategy, package findings for different audiences and engage stakeholders to extend influence and widen impact.

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Many thanks

Clare Killingback

FHSS Impact Champion

Dr Elvira Bolat is awarded Academy of Marketing Research Fund 2017

Awarded & submitted bids, Festival of Learning

Dr Elvira Bolat from the Department of Marketing at the Faculty of Management has been awarded the prestigious Academy of Marketing Research Fund.

Her research titled ‘From Compassion to Defence: Exploring Service Brands’ Trust Repair Mechanisms across Traditional and Digital Media’ is the sub-project of the Faculty of Management’s QR-funded project on Trust Repair in the service sectors, led by Dr Julie Robson. 

Using integrative content analysis and emotional text analysis, Dr Bolat’s project will explore the trust repair process and trust repair mechanisms used in the context of traditional and digital media, within selected high profile trust erosion cases in the service sectors. Dr Robson (Department of Marketing, FM), Professor Juliet Memery (Department of Marketing, FM) and Dr Caroline Jackson (Department of Leisure and Events, FM) are acting as mentors for the project and advising on the contextual setting of the study.

Moreover, this project supports Dr Bolat in acquiring new skills in quantitative analysis of qualitative data and deepening understanding and use of language processing software.

Dr Bolat comments: “Academy of Marketing is one of the biggest international organisations to support marketing scholars and to be one of the few recipients of this prestigious funding scheme is an absolute honour. This also helps our QR project to extend its impact and reach.”

To find out what other projects are recipients of this year’s Academy of Marketing Research funding scheme, access: https://www.academyofmarketing.org/research/amrc-research-funding/

Trust Repair team has delivered a successful Festival of Learning 2017 event on 11 July titled ‘Lies and Scandals: Whatever happened to Trust?’ and received an overwhelmingly positive feedback from the audience. Once of things that came out of this interactive event is a powerful impact media has on stakeholders’ interpretation of organisational transgressions and, therefore, on ability of brands to repair trust damage. Hence, this sub-project will help in extending scholar’s and practitioners’ understanding on role of both traditional and digital media play in repairing trust towards brands.

This grant is a very positive recognition of BU’s standing internationally and nationally within marketing and consumer behaviour research and contributes towards a growing impact generated by Influences on Consumer Behaviour research centre.

To connect with Dr Bolat, email at ebolat@bournemouth.ac.uk or tweet at @Elvira_MLady

To follow Trust Repair project, tweet at @TrustRepairBU

 

 

CDE Research Showcase – BU Festival of Learning 2017

Festival of Learning

Join us at the CDE Showcase – a free drop in event taking place in the Fusion Building, 307 – 309 as part of the Festival of Learning.

 The Centre for Digital Entertainment, is an EPSRC doctoral training centre, funding researchers in games, visual effects, animation and other industries that use digital visualisation skills.  It is a joint venture between Bournemouth University and the University of Bath offering a four year Engineering Doctorate.

Our showcase will highlight the diverse range of research currently taking place.

CDE Research Engineer Thomas Matthews, will showcase the Virtual Reality world of ‘Mayan Adventure’, courtesy of his host company AiSolve.  Visitors will have the opportunity to explore a virtual world filled with twists and tunnels, traveling further into an action adventure.

 

Zack Lyons, one of our Research Engineers based at the University of Bath, will have a demo of his ‘Virtual Reality Experiences for Brain Injury Rehabilitation’.  Zack recently showcased this demo during the 50th anniversary festival in Bath and it proved to be extremely popular.  Walk through streets, give instructions and react to the situations you’re presented with. This technology is being used in the rehabilitation of brain injuries, analysing how people behave and predicting problems that they may experience in real life to develop new therapeutic opportunities.  This demo is in collaboration with the University of Bath’s Dr Leon Watts and Zack’s host company designability UK.

Dr Hongchuan Yu, will be joining us to showcase his current research.  Hongchuan along with PhD student Yunfei Fu will demo “From brush paintings to bas-reliefs”,

“Relief is a kind of sculpture in which 3D models are carved into a relatively flat surface. In essence, it creates a bridge between a full 3D sculpture and a 2D painting.

We present a new approach for generating bas-reliefs from brush paintings. Our approach exploits the concept of brush strokes, making strokes possible to generate 3D proxies separately suitable for recomposing in art design. We apply layer decomposition by imposing boundary constraints. The resulting 3D proxies of brush strokes are sufficient to evoke the impression of the consistent 3D shapes, so that they may be further edited in 3D space. This fulfils the request of recomposition in bas-relief design.”

We will also be joined by Soumya Chinnachamy Barathi, FIRE Fellow PhD at the University of Bath, showcasing her research on ‘Affective Ludology in VR Exergames.  Simone Barbieri CDE Research Engineer for Bournemouth University, with his demo on  ‘2D characters in a Virtual Reality environment’ and Daniel Finnegan – CDE Research Engineer from the University of Bath who has recently successfully defended his thesis, ‘Compensating for Distance Compression in Virtual Audiovisual Environments’.  Daniel will demo ‘Dungeon Escape’, a compendium of realities (Real, Virtual, Mixed).

 

We hope you are able to pop in to see us on Saturday 8th July in the Fusion Building 307 – 309

Festival of learning 2017: “Human Psychology: When your mind is in my mind”.

Festival of Learning

Evolutionarily, human beings are shaped as social animals and often engage in interpersonal interactions. Recent findings in psychology suggest that one person’s cognition and behaviour could be shaped by another person who performs similar tasks along with that person. The influenced cognitive abilities include memory, attention, face cognition, and action. During this talk, we will introduce some of these scientific findings and the theories behind, along with their potential implications for our everyday life. You will also have the chance to see psychological experiments in action, and to try some of them on-site (if you are willing to volunteer for that :P).

If you are curious about it and want to come along, please try the link below, where you book the tickets for the event and join as on the talk.

Date: Saturday 8 July
Time: 2pm – 3pm
Location: Talbot Campus

https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/festival-of-learning/events/human-psychology-when-your-mind-is-in-my-mind/