BU’s FACETS project, which focuses on managing fatigue in people with MS has been featured in a blog post by the MS Society. Fatigue is one of the most commonly reported and debilitating symptoms of MS and can have a real impact on people’s lives. It’s the main reason why people with MS eventually give up work.
Research from Professor Peter Thomas and Dr Sarah Thomas from BU’s Clinical Research Unit have developed a group based fatigue management programme called FACETS. The programme helps to equip people with the tools and strategies they need to effectively manage their energy and cope with fatigue. Below is an expert from the blog.
Mind the gap – getting care and services research to the clinic
It can sometimes take years for research findings to be rolled out in clinics. The gap between clinical trials and the clinic means that people often miss out on services that were developed with them in mind.
We want to make sure that everyone has access to the therapies, services and support that are right for them. And we’re working hard to make sure that happens.
‘FACETS’ is a group-based fatigue management programme for people with MS. FACETS stands for Fatigue: Applying Cognitive behavioural and Energy effectiveness Techniques to lifeStyle.
During the programme, people learn strategies to help them manage their energy levels more effectively and explore different ways of thinking about fatigue.
The programme was shown to reduce fatigue and improve quality of life for people with MS in a 2013 trial we funded.
Since then we’ve supported the research team to roll out FACETS, via training days for health care professionals so they can deliver the programme in their practices.
Over 200 health professionals have been trained so far. And a recent survey suggested that more than 1,500 people with MS have already attended a FACETS programme.
Dr Sarah Thomas, who developed the programme, said “One of the most rewarding aspects of carrying out this work has been seeing FACETS rolled out into clinics and, we hope, making a difference to people’s lives.”
Find out who you voted to be your winner of 2017’s Research Photography Competition.
Come along today at 2-3pm, in the Atrium Art Gallery, where Vice Chancellor John Vinney will be announcing the three winners.
The Competition is in its third year and saw 26 entries from across all faculties. The images give us just a small glimpse into some of the fantastic work our researchers are doing both here at BU and across the globe. These images will be displayed in the gallery and the researchers will be on hand to to talk about their research and the inspiration behind their photographs.
The NCCPE are hosting a selection of fantastic opportunities for academics to build upon partnerships with museums across London, the South East and the South West. Take part in a MUPI Match event…It’s a chance for those who are keen to meet museums and other academics in the region and to network and develop new ideas! Each event is regional, attracting museums and universities from various areas; free to participate in; and interactive.
After receiving funding from the Arts Council England’s Museum Resilience Fund, the NCCPE have been developing an 18 month project to maximise the potential for museums and universities to work together to mutually beneficial aims. This project builds on a successful pilot project which was completed earlier this year.
The benefits: It is well proven that there are mutual benefits to museums and universities working together. Projects can cover a wide range of topics – from improving audience understanding to developing more effective collections knowledge or interpretation; from inspiring museum audiences with cutting edge research to developing new exhibits and exhibitions; the opportunities are endless.
The MUPI Match events are based on tried and tested methods of bringing people together to explore innovative and useful partnership working, stimulating new connections and new projects. Each event involves museum staff, volunteers, and academics working together to find mutually beneficial ideas that they would like to develop together. Participants can then bid for ‘thinking funding’ – to enable them to do desk research; have conversations; test ideas; and work together to plan their potential project. Teams will be supported to develop their partnership, and find effective ways to fund their project in the future.
The details:There will be 9 regional networking events (or ‘sandpits’) but information and booking forms for the sandpits in the southwest and London can be found here:
London, 21 March 2017, Quayside Room, Museum of Docklands (details)
South East Region, 28 March 2017, venue tbc (details) – rescheduled from 8 February
South West, 3 May 2017, The New Room, Bristol (details)
There will also be two national networking events (one focused on designated collections) to broker partnerships between small and medium sized museums and HEIs:
Partnerships, London, 7 June 2017
Designated collections, Birmingham, 14 June 2017, Arts Council Offices, Birmingham
Contact:If you would like to find out more or register your interest in receiving regular updates about the project, including invitations to the sandpits and events, please contact Claire Wood (claire6.wood@uwe.ac.uk)
Additionally, if you’d like to discuss ideas for an event or need inspiration please contact Genna West, RKEO’s Engagement & Impact Facilitator (gwest@bournemouth.ac.uk)
Find out who you voted to be your winner of 2017’s Research Photography Competition.
Join us on Thursday 9 March 2017 at 2-3pm, in the Atrium Art Gallery, where Vice Chancellor John Vinney will be announcing the three winners.
The Competition is in its third year and saw 26 entries from across all faculties. The images give us just a small glimpse into some of the fantastic work our researchers are doing both here at BU and across the globe. These images will be displayed in the gallery and the researchers will be on hand to to talk about their research and the inspiration behind their photographs.
Last week was a good week for FHSS from a publishing perspective. On the last day of February Sociological Research Online published a book review with Dr. Pramod Regmi as first author, which we highlighted in an earlier BU Research Blog (see more here!) [1]. On the same the same day we received news from the Journal of Travel Medicine (published by Oxford University press) that our latest article on research in Nepal was accepted for publication. Our paper ‘Identifying the gaps in Nepalese migrant workers’ health and well-being: A review of the literature’ addresses the health and well-being of migrant health workers and ‘brings’ this to travel medicine specialists [2].
On Thursday our article ‘Vital signs and other observations used to detect deterioration in pregnant women: an analysis of vital sign charts in consultant-led maternity units’ was accepted by the International Journal of Obstetric Anesthesia published by Elsevier [3].On Friday The Lancet published correspondence from FHSS Post-Doc. Researcher Dr. Pramod Regmi and FHSS Ph.D. student Folashade Alloh, and BU Visiting Faculty Prof. Padam Simkhada under the title: ‘Mental health in BME groups with diabetes: an overlooked issue?’[4]. To round off the week on Friday afternoon the editorial office of Kontakt (published by Elsevier) emailed that the editorial ‘The medical and social model of childbirth’ had been accepted for publication [5].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
References:
Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E. ‘Balanced Ethics Review: A Guide for Institutional Review Board Members’ by Whitney, Simon N., Springer, (2015) ISBN: 9783319207056 (pb) (book review), Sociological Research Online 2017; 22(1) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/22/1/reviews/3.html
Simkhada, P.P., Regmi, P.R., van Teijlingen, E., Aryal, N. Identifying the gaps in Nepalese migrant workers’ health and well-being: A review of the literature, Journal of Travel Medicine (Accepted).
Smith, G.B., Isaacs, R., Andrews, L., Wee, M.Y.K., van Teijlingen, E., Bick, D.E., Hundley, V. Vital signs and other observations used to detect deterioration in pregnant women: an analysis of vital sign charts in consultant-led maternity units, International Journal of Obstetric Anesthesia (Accepted).
This week saw the publication of the latest issue of the internet-based journal Sociological Research Online. In this issue Dr. Pramod Regmi and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen published a book review of Balanced Ethics Review: A Guide for Institutional Review Board Members written by the American academic Simon Whitney. [1] In doing so they continue the tradition of FHSS scholars contributing to the research ethics debate. For example, Regmi and colleagues recently had a paper accepted on their insights into research in low-income countries in the journal Developing World Bioethics.[2] Whilst a 2012 FHSS-led paper stressed that researchers conducting research in low-income countries need to apply for research ethics approval to the relevant local authority, if national legislation requires one to do so.[3]
Looking better a little further back, Professor Emerita Immy Holloway wrote about the researcher who may have (potentially) conflicting roles namely those of researcher and health care professional.[4] Whilst a combination of midwifery researchers in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) highlighted the problems faced by practitioners doing research in their field of practice with perhaps the risk of blurring professional and research ethics, as balancing competing ethical concerns between protecting research participants and over-managing the ethical process can be problematic.[5-6] The latter issue of management and regulation of research ethics has recognised as getting more and more cumbersome and bureaucratic.[7-8]
Two further publications by Prof. Ashencaen Crabtree have added to the pool of FHSS publication on research ethics.[9-10] The first one, a book, addressed the problematic issue of gate-keepers in research together with the ethics of critical observation of abuse (potential or actual), as well as the ethics of advocating on behalf of research participants.[9] The second paper covered issues around working with research participants who are regarded as ‘vulnerable’ in a study into the context of care and patient/service user experiences.[10]
Whilst Prof. Parker has highlighted the benefits and dangers of using email and the Internet for social and health research.[11] An even newer research approach is the use of discussion boards as sources of data, which brings its own ethical dilemmas.[12]
In 2010-11 Prof. Parker and colleagues explored in two separate papers the contested meanings and difficulties associated with informed consent, highlighting challenges raised by an almost unquestioned acceptance of biomedical research ethics in social research and questioning whether potential ‘harm’ is different in this context.[13-14]
Prof. Hundley and colleagues discussed the ethical challenges involved in conducting a cluster randomised controlled trial, where getting informed consent can be complication.[15] Whilst it is worth reminding researchers that in issues of informed consent during pregnancy and childbirth one has to consider the potential for harm to two participants.[16]
References
Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E. (2017) ‘Balanced Ethics Review: A Guide for Institutional Review Board Members’ by Whitney, Simon N., Springer, (2015) ISBN: 9783319207056 (pb) (book review), Sociological Research Online 22(1) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/22/1/reviews/3.html
Regmi, PR., Aryal, N., Kurmi, O., Pant, PR., van Teijlingen, E., Wasti, P.P. (forthcoming Informed consent in health research: challenges and barriers in low-and middle-income countries with specific reference to Nepal, Developing World Bioethics.
van Teijlingen E.R., Simkhada, P.P. (2012) Ethical approval in developing countries is not optional, Journal of Medical Ethics 38:428-430.
Ryan, K., Brown, B., Wilkins, C., Taylor, A., Arnold, R., Angell, C., van Teijlingen, E. (2011) Which hat am I wearing today? Practicing midwives doing research, Evidence-Based Midwifery 9(1): 4-8.
van Teijlingen, E.R., Cheyne, H.L. (2004) Ethics in midwifery research, RCM MidwivesJournal7 (5): 208-10.
van Teijlingen, E. (2006) Reply to Robert Dingwall’s Plenary ‘Confronting the Anti-Democrats: The unethical Nature of Ethical Regulation in Social Science, MSo (Medical Sociology online) 1: 59-60 www.medicalsociologyonline.org/archives/issue1/pdf/reply_rob.pdf
van Teijlingen, E., Douglas, F., Torrance, N. (2008) Clinical governance and research ethics as barriers to UK low-risk population-based health research? BMC Public Health8(396) www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2458-8-396.pdf
Ashencaen Crabtree, S. (2012) Rainforest Asylum: The enduring legacy of colonial psychiatric care in Malaysia, London: Whiting & Birch.
Ashencaen Crabtree, S. (2013) Research ethics approval processes and the moral enterprise of ethnography. Ethics & Social Welfare. Advance Access: DOI:10.1080/17496535.2012.703683
Bond, C.S, Ahmed, O.H., Hind, M., Thomas, B., Hewitt-Taylor, J. (2013) The Conceptual and Practical Ethical Dilemmas of Using Health Discussion Board Posts as Research Data, Journal of Medical Internet Research 15(6):e112) Web address: http://www.jmir.org/2013/6/e112/
Parker, J. (2008) Email, ethics and data collection in social work research: some reflections from a research project, Evidence & Policy: A Journal of Research, Debate & Practice, 4(1): 75-83.
Hundley, V., Cheyne, H.C., Bland, J.M., Styles, M., Barnett, C.A. (2010) So you want to conduct a cluster randomised controlled trial? Lessons from a national cluster trial of early labour, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 16: 632-638
Helmreich, R.J., Hundley, V., Norman, A., Ighedosa, J., Chow, E. (2007) Research in pregnant women: the challenges of informed consent, Nursing for Women’s Health 11(6): 576-585.
Parker, J., Penhale, B., Stanley, D. (2011) Research ethics review: social care and social science research and the Mental Capacity Act 2005, Ethics & Social Welfare, 5(4): 380-400.
It’s that time of year where The Festival of Learning is heading back on-tour and taking BU’s research out to some exciting locations. One of our stops this year includes the Poole Maritime Festival on Saturday 20th May.
Whatever stage you’re at in your research career, academic or PhD, we’re looking for participants to display and promote their research at the festival. This could be through table-top activities, posters, interactive displays – we’re open to ideas! It would be fantastic if your activities fitted into the theme of maritime heritage and environment but if your research isn’t directly related, we’d still love for you to get involved.
We’re expecting lots of interested members of the public with Poole Harbour Boat Show and the Seven Seas Festival forming part of Poole Maritime Festival’s exciting programme. The Boat Show alone attracted over 15,000 people in 2015! The Festival is linked with European Maritime Day, originally created in 2008 to give Europe’s community of maritime professionals a forum to meet, exchange knowledge and forge partnerships. It is a unique opportunity to promote Poole, local businesses and Bournemouth University’s research to an international audience!
If you’d like to get involved, need some idea inspiration or for any more information, drop me an email jpawlik@bournemouth.ac.uk. If you can’t get involved this year, still make sure that you head down to the Maritime Festival this year, taking place from the 15th-21st May.
‘Can you convey the impact of your research in a single image?’ That’s the challenge we set BU academics and students this year. The overwhelming response saw researchers from across the university getting creative and utilising their photography skills. The photos give just a small glimpse into some of the fantastic work our researchers are doing both here at BU and across the globe.
Researchers from across the university, working in areas as diverse as science, marketing, health and forensic investigation submitted images to the competition. Now we want your help to pick the winners!
To vote click on the ‘Vote’ button below your favourite image on this page. Or vote by liking an image via our Facebook album. Perhaps a particular research subject strikes a chord with you, or you find a certain image especially evocative – whatever your reason, the competition winners are for you to decide!
The deadline for voting is 3 March and the winners will be announced in the Atrium Art Gallery on 9 March, by Vice-Chancellor Professor John Vinney at 2pm. If you would like to come along to this free event please order your tickets here.
The full exhibition will then be on display in the Atrium Art Gallery from Thursday 9 March until Wednesday 22 March, so drop by and take a look.
Bournemouth University will be hosting a Public Involvement seminar series throughout March and April, which focusses upon the public/patients working with staff to: 1) prioritise research; 2) advise upon project methodology; 3) design recruitment campaigns; 4) develop research materials; and 5) promote the impact of findings.
Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) has broad application to research beyond Health and Social Care, allowing the public actively act as participants. Direct benefits to researchers include: ensuring research quality, credibility and relevance; public accountability and insights; and enhancing research funding.
Students, staff and the public are invited to the seminar series. UGR and PGR students attending three or more seminars will be eligible to apply for an opportunity to run their own PPI advisory group with hip-replacement patients. This will be supported by ORI and the Department of Sport and Physical Activity, and has ongoing potential for conference presentation and journal article preparation.
Patient & Public Involvement (PPI) Seminar Series
Location EB708, Executive Business Centre, Lansdowne Campus
Monday 6th March, 3-4.30 pm
Why PPI is crucial to designing effective health research studies
Professor Jo Adams,Professor Musculoskeletal Health, University of Southampton
Wednesday 15th March, 3-4.30 pm
Importance of public involvement in research design: an orthopaedic case study
Lisa Gale-Andrews & Dr Zoe Sheppard, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, Bournemouth University
Monday 3rd April, 3-4.30 pm
Recruiting and supporting participants to engage in meaningful PPI
Dr Mel Hughes & Angela Warren, Carer and Service User Partnership, Bournemouth University
Monday 24th April, 11-12.30 pm
How can today’s patient help research tackle tomorrow’s health challenges?
Simon Denegri National Director, Patients and the Public in Research (INVOLVE)
As part of his inaugural lecture, Professor Robert Middleton, Head of BUORI, will share his research into developing virtual reality training for surgeons, which allows them to practice in the space in front of them – or even in space!
After the lecture, you’ll have the chance to see some of the state-of-the-art training equipment being used by BUORI and even try your hand at virtual surgery.
Professor Middleton joined Bournemouth University in 2015, while continuing to practise as a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital and working as the Director of Trauma at Poole Hospital. His extensive clinical experience helps to inform his research and the direction of Bournemouth University’s Orthopaedic Research Institute (BUORI).
Bournemouth University’s inaugural lecture series aims to celebrate new professorial appointments and the depth and breadth of research produced by the university. For further information on the inaugural lecture series, please visit www.bournemouth.ac.uk/public-lecture-series
Dr James Gavin is running a free series of seminars on patient and public involvement (PPI).
This series will highlight the importance of PPI throughout the research cycle, from design to dissemination. PPI is gaining importance to identify treatments that meet people’s needs and are more likely to be adopted in practice.
Speakers will share insights on involving the public as partners to improve: relevance, quality, study protocol design and the communication of findings in health research. The speakers are from a variety of roles in occupational therapy, mental health, social work, health demographics, education and national health governance.
Terrorist attacks are designed to intimidate and change behaviour. It should be no surprise then that we allow fear to be a great motivator when we plan trips abroad. News of an attack is a vivid factor as we decide where to travel with our families, perhaps to places of which we know little else. Efforts by reporters to appeal to our concerns end up feeding us the prompts to avoid certain countries or cities, hammering an often crucial tourism industry in the process.
Ever since real-time news coverage brought the horror of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks into people’s homes, global audiences have become used to watching such events unfold on screen. Recently, we have witnessed shootings at Port El Kantaoui beach, near Sousse in Tunisia in 2015, the Bataclan attack in Paris in the same year, and the New Year’s Eve nightclub shootings in Istanbul less than two months ago.
These are all key holiday destinations. The tactics used and the damage inflicted may differ, but every attack has the potential to stop us in our tracks. This is clearly of huge significance to the tourism and hospitality sectors.
Choices
The first problem is obvious. Uncertainty around safety often translates into avoidance of those places considered dangerous. Holidays are postponed or cancelled. Ultimately, limitations are placed on tourists’ freedom of mobility.
Unsurprisingly, the tolerance of potential physical harm is low in discretionary travel, where other options are readily available and the destination can be incidental. Terrorism has served to highlight the fragility of the tourism industry: the displacement of holidaymakers has caused severe economic losses. In Tunisia, where tourism accounts for 15% of GDP, the effect has been stark, with 2016 revenues cut by half from a year earlier.
In Turkey, which suffered from a wave of attacks during 2016, the Association of Turkish Travel Agencies has predicted a negative impact on tourism revenues of £2-2.5 billion.
In truth, many potential holiday destinations will have a recent or more distant history of safety issues of one kind or another. In an era of uncertainty, under pressure of time, family member concerns, and the risk of financial loss, many tourists turn to the news media for explanation. The question is, how do we arrive at our final decisions?
Judgement call
Years of study on the psychology of risk suggests that the way the public assess danger has much more to do with stuff like emotional responses, their perceived level of control, or their familiarity with a hazard, than official statistics.
News stories of new and emerging hazards often entail multiple storylines, especially in times of conflicting accounts and factual uncertainty. These act as qualitative indicators of risk that allow audiences to simplify complexity and categorise the situation as involving more or less danger. And so terrorism which is framed as religious extremism can appear irrational, beyond compromise and uncontrollable, and can lead to higher levels of perceived risk.
One recent study I carried out with Bournemouth Professor Barry Richards has shown that small variations in news reports can lead to significant changes in leisure tourists’ risk perception. We all have our own unique set of experiences that dictate how we digest news. However, it seems likely that tourists, who instinctively seek to minimise risk will – after years of exposure to coverage – share a deep pool of associations to terrorist attacks: why they are carried out, and who is likely to be targeted. This allows them to create a coherent picture, a mental shortcut which feeds decision making around a fraught and complex task.
It can come down to details. One experiment in the study mentioned above suggests that if articles emphasise the proximity of a bomb explosion to points of tourist interest, or reference other events where tourists were harmed, then there tends to be a greater judgement of risk. It’s the same for an alleged link to religious extremism as opposed to other things, such as a domestic separatist movement.
Moving target
We are also sensitive to accounts from the general public when assessing risk related to terrorism. Reports which quote reactions from local people and which stress the relative newness of the problem, and a lack of confidence in maintaining order and normality, lead to higher estimations of risk. Portrayals of the incident that stress resilience decrease perceived risk.
This doesn’t mean that the media has an agenda in pushing an intimidating interpretation of these events, or that audiences can be easily influenced. The point is that journalists who report on these tragic incidents do so in a style that seeks to resonate with the audience. That means using templates which appear to give information which helps us protect ourselves and our loved ones. It is this transaction which can end up devastating a country’s tourism revenues.
In fact, interviews I carried out with my colleague after the study demonstrated that news consumers have become able to do the job themselves. Even when exposed to reports that aim to soften perceived risk, the audience can use examples of other events when tourists were targeted to interpret destinations as particularly dangerous. For example, a report that stressed a focus on military targets in remote areas of a destination was met with distrust by a tourist who believed the information was intended to downplay the magnitude of risk to Western tourists.
Those “gut feelings” we use to make difficult decisions like this under pressure may actually be wired in from exposure to news coverage. The hard bit is to acknowledge that and manage our responses to emotive and vivid content which can cloud reason and lead us to over- or underestimate risk.
Eating out is bad for us. Studies have shown that food provided outside the home contains more calories and more fat, especially saturated fat. The trouble is, many of us are eating this food every day without really realising what’s in it.
In recent years great efforts have been taken to help us understand the composition of packaged food. The clear marking of allergens, ingredients lists and “traffic light” indicators on the front of packs show retail customers how much fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt are contained. However, there is an important gap in this admirable trend.
Those of us who eat our lunch in a workplace canteen find it a lot more difficult to access the kind of information that leads to informed choices. And canteens can play a critical role in terms of healthy eating. They are a captive, sometimes subsidised, setting that is often used to provide the main meal of the day. In effect, many of us are eating out five times a week without really acknowledging it.
So how many of us are using these canteens? Well, three quarters of workers in the UK stay at work over lunchtime, with 31% eating at a workplace canteen. That’s more than 7m of us. While nutritional and allergen labelling is now widespread in our supermarkets, workplace canteens rarely provide such information in an easily accessible format. Influencing dietary behaviour here could be instrumental in reducing employees’ risk of developing chronic diet related diseases such as type 2 diabetes or obesity. It should give companies and organisations healthier, happier and more productive employees.
The personal and economic benefits are clear. Health, simply put, can contribute to an organisation’s value. And we have got used to knowing: there is growing consumer interest in information on food eaten out of the home. This includes the nutritional content of dishes, the origin of ingredients and the presence of possible allergens. It could easily be argued that it is a fundamental right to know what we are eating.
New EU regulation requires the clear labelling of the presence of 14 allergens for pre-packaged food and food served. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, in the US goes further, requiring nutritional information to be posted in restaurants and large fast food chains. There are similar requirements in Ireland. However, more can be done in workplace canteens to ensure that diners are able to make informed choices. Where dish information is available, it is often not provided in a consumer-friendly way. Possibly as a consequence of this, studies have found that the increased presence of data is not always having a strong influence on consumer choice.
So how can we change this? Currently, most information on food offered at work is printed out on a menu card or information board. If you’ve ever eaten in a canteen you will know how cursory the glances are from busy staff to these sources. And if you do take the time to look, the information is normally limited to a description of the dishes with little nutritional or other enhanced information available.
It means that each diner has to work hard to find the information that is relevant to them. After all, the ideal nutritional intake of a manual worker will be quite different than for staff who just push pens or hammer keyboards for a living. What is healthy for one diner might not be so ideal for the next. The need for a personalised approach to providing information is clear, and the solution might lie in our pockets.
Technology, most notably apps on our mobile phones, have been shown to have good potential for providing detailed but clear individualised information. People will happily interact with a well-designed bit of software where they wouldn’t hunt down the printed menu.
That is why a pan-European partnership between industry and academia has developed the FoodSMART project. This project is developing a smart phone app, which uses detailed dish data uploaded by the caterer to provide you with personalised information. You can tailor the information to your particular dietary requirements and preferences and it should allow the lunchtime crowd to assess their food intake precisely and efficiently. It can also make individual recommendations to help diners improve their health and well-being. All you have to do is scan a QR code with your phone to access the menu and all of this enhanced dish information.
Any initiative encouraging us to eat more “attentively” can help to reduce calorie intake. Enhanced information also allows those with food intolerances and specific dietary needs the freedom to eat away from home with ease. The millions of us who eat at a workplace canteen have been left in the dark while other initiatives help to shape our lifestyle choices. So whether you download an app, hunt down the menu cards or interrogate the canteen staff, it is probably time we did something about a five-day-a-week habit that could be damaging our health.
In the past few weeks, I have been involved in two publications in the field of disability sports medicine that have been accepted for publication. The first is in Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, and explored the differences in baseline concussion scores between athletes with and without disability (http://journals.lww.com/cjsportsmed/Abstract/publishahead/Do_Neurocognitive_SCAT3_Baseline_Test_Scores.99486.aspx). This study demonstrated that traditional ways of testing for concussion in athletes that already have a disability are flawed, and is part of a larger PhD study which is evaluating this area.
The second study (which is not yet available online) was accepted by the journal “PM&R”, and is titled “Medication and supplement use in disability football world championships”. This builds on the work of one of the co-authors on this (Phillipe Tscholl), who has conducted extensive research into the overprescription of medications in elite sport (http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/9/e007608). Findings from our study were consistent with previous work in the area, and indicated that there were very high rates of prescribing anti-inflammatory medications.
Osman Ahmed, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences
Have you ever considered what’s in your food when you’re eating out?
14:Live will be welcoming FoodSMART on 28 February, at 14:00-15:00.
FoodSMART is an innovative technical ICT solution which uses QR coding on your smartphone to provide nutritional information and deliver personalised advice when eating out. This means that consumers can make an informed choice about what they’re eating. The app can even be tailored to your individual dietary requirements or tastes.
It can be quite difficult to eat healthily when in a restaurant or cafe, as menus often give you limited information about the ingredients in a meal. By working with partners across Europe- nutritionists, chefs and other universities- the team have developed an app that can show exactly what is in your meal. The app gives consumers all the data they need and encourages the food service industry to support healthier eating.
Come along to Floor 5, of the Student Centre, on Talbot Campus to hear from Dr Heather Hartwell as she speaks all about the project and even get a chance to test out the prototype.
If you have any questions, then please contact Hannah Jones
‘Can you convey the impact of your research in a single image?’ That’s the challenge we set BU academics and students this year. The overwhelming response saw researchers from across the university getting creative and utilising their photography skills. The photos give just a small glimpse into some of the fantastic work our researchers are doing both here at BU and across the globe.
Researchers from across the university, working in areas as diverse as science, marketing, health and forensic investigation submitted images to the competition. Now we want your help to pick the winners!
To vote click on the ‘Vote’ button below your favourite image on this page. Or vote by liking an image via our Facebook album. Perhaps a particular research subject strikes a chord with you, or you find a certain image especially evocative – whatever your reason, the competition winners are for you to decide!
The deadline for voting is 3 March and the winners will be announced in the Atrium Art Gallery on 9 March, by Vice-Chancellor Professor John Vinney.
The full exhibition will then be on display in the Atrium Art Gallery from Thursday 9 March until Wednesday 22 March, so drop by and take a look.
The IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (IEEE CIBCB 2017) will be held at the INNSIDE Hotel, Manchester from August 23rd to 25th, 2017.
This annual conference has become a major technical event in the field of Computational Intelligence and its application to problems in biology, bioinformatics, computational biology, chemical informatics, bioengineering and related fields. The conference provides a global forum for academic and industrial scientists from a range of fields including computer science, biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, statistics, and engineering, to discuss and present their latest research findings from theory to applications.
The topics of interest for the special session include (but are not limited to):
Medical image classification
Medical image analysis
Expert systems for computer aided diagnosis and prognosis
Pattern recognition in the analysis of biomarkers for medical diagnosis
Deep learning in medical image processing and analysis
Ethical and Security issues in machine learning for medical diagnosis and prognosis
Up-to-date information and submission details can be found on the IEEE CIBCB 2017. The submission deadline is the 14th of April, 2017.
Michel Foucault, who died more than 30 years ago, has something to tell us about Donald Trump. The French philosopher once delivered a famous lecture which sought to explain why the people of Europe had done away with the warrior kings of the past and embraced a whole new way of running things. The US now has a president whose advisers announce that he has “a mandate to blow up norms of good governance”.
The extraordinary events of the past few weeks also brought to mind something I heard in private while working as a financial reporter. The CEO of a major multinational happily declared: “No one ever accused this company of being a democracy.”
The corporate sphere and the state have unique characteristics, of course, but Trump is bringing the preoccupations of one into the other. On his first full day in office, the White House CEO invited the CEOs of major US corporations to discuss the future governance of America. They of course come from a world where establishing good corporate governance has sometimes felt like pulling teeth. It will be intriguing to discover what good governance means for Trump.
Immigration rhetoric
We have an early clue. Trump’s executive order closing the border to citizens of seven, mainly Muslim states was quickly set aside by the courts. And like a CEO annoyed by an underling, Trump ranted on Twitter against judges. Was he not the “Leader of the Free World”? Was he not, as president of the first democracy of the modern era, carrying out the will of the people?
This vignette brings to mind Foucault’s view of governance, and that extraordinary dismantling of the concept of divine right for Europe’s monarchies.
The new form of governance that emerged was based on central administration, guided notionally by rational processes. Foucault recalled Machiavelli’s The Prince, where right choices sustain faith in the ruler’s absolute authority. Poor decisions might destroy it. In the Enlightenment, the start of the modern era, such faith transferred to the state.
What happened between Machiavelli in the 16th century and the Enlightenment in the 18th, of course, was the Thirty-Years’ War of 1618-1648. Protestants and Catholics slaughtered each other over articles of faith that disguised the territorial ambitions of kings and princes. It sapped the legitimacy of monarchies, setting the stage for the unenlightened French Revolution. Democratic at first, it reverted to pre-modern barbarism, which ended only when Napoleon conquered much of Europe and declared himself Emperor.
But before that, modernism – what scholars like Foucault called the turn towards rationalism and scientific method in the Enlightenment era – had ushered in a truly enlightened revolution, the American one. The US Constitution adopted broad enfranchisement, which broadened further over the decades that followed, and created three co-equal branches of government to constrain a president from ruling by divine right.
Hacked off
Reading Foucault’s lecture a few years ago, I reflected on a big news story of that time: The News of the World, a British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and directed by his son James, had hacked into the mobile phone messages of celebrities. Their protests did little to halt the practice.
But then its journalists hacked the mobile phone of a child who had vanished and was feared dead. Deleting voicemails, they led the family and police to conclude the girl was still alive – a runaway, not a victim.
After a popular outcry, the Murdochs closed the newspaper. They appeared before a parliamentary committee, on what the elder declared, ungrammatically, the “most humble day of my life”.
At that moment, I saw Rupert Murdoch as a Foucault-like version of Machiavelli’s prince, at great risk of forfeiting his “divine right” through the clumsy slaughter of his legitimacy. But Murdoch did not disintegrate. Indeed, he has retained and grown his empire. Now we learn that this corporate emperor was observing events as Trump gave an interview with Michael Gove for one of Murdoch’s titles, The Times.
Trump knows that many successful CEOs are indeed imperious. Murdoch built a small Australian newspaper into a global news and entertainment giant. The lack of external constraint – coupled with ambition, ideas and personal self-control – can create superior outcomes. But the evidence is mixed. Think of accounting scandals at Enron under CEO Jeffrey Skilling, or at Bernie Ebbers’ WorldCom.
And public governance is different from corporate governance. Consider this: markets constrain imperious CEOs when board structures and guidelines cannot – shareholders can sell and walk away. But the market in nationalities is very narrow, as the migrants controversy has underlined.
Trump has so far acted like the CEO of pre-modern corporate governance. He has sought to assert the “unfettered power” which the 1992 UK Cadbury Code sought to constrain at British companies. How it works in the boardroom echoes the checks and balances in the US Constitution.
Trump’s executive orders suggest a wilful, self-absorbed and self-justifying mentality of governance. It has clear echoes of the world of princes and the divine right of kings which the Thirty Years’ War destroyed and to which Foucault drew our attention. But the protests we have seen suggest many are not willing to return to governance that accepts anything like divine right.
There are large parts of US society – Trump’s supporters and doubtful but loyal Republicans – who think differently. Perhaps the “strong man”, with answers to all ills, still has an allure in our unfathomably complex world.
But if Trump pursues this path, he will find that dissatisfaction with both the rationalism of modernism and the intricacies of postmodernism isn’t strong enough to revert to pre-modern governance. Trump’s election may be a big moment in history; just not that big. We can hope so, at least. To put it another way, democracy rules: our ancestors’ rejection of the war-mongerers of 400 years ago is a legacy that will not be easily overturned.
James Gavin
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