BU Research Blog

Back in September 2012, Professor Matthew Bennett, the PVC for Research, Enterprise and Internationalisation announced in a blog post that Bournemouth University was in the process of applying for membership of the Athena SWAN Charter, which was a positive and significant development for the University.

The Athena Swan charter recognises commitment to advancing women’s careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) employment in higher education and is underpinned by three beliefs:

• The advancement of science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine is fundamental to quality of life across the globe
• It is vitally important that women are adequately represented in what has traditionally been, and is still, a male-dominated area
• Science cannot reach its full potential unless it can benefit from the talents of the whole population, and until women and men can benefit equally from the opportunities it affords

(information taken from http://www.athenaswan.org.uk/content/charter)

The University of Southampton, supported by EPSRC is hosting a Gender Equality Conference “Athena SWAN and Beyond” on the 20 March 2013. This is a FREE event and is a fantastic opportunity for those who are keen to get involved with Athena SWAN.

Event details are as below

To register for the event, please visit this webpage http://www.southampton.ac.uk/diversity/

You can also find out more about the event from here.

I was idly flicking between TV channels last night, as you do, desperate to find something to watch for a few minutes before bed.  I eventually latched in a frenzy of button pushing – the batteries in the remote need changing – on yet another programme about Richard III, this time the ‘untold story’.  There has been some discussion amongst my peers about the ethics of this whole saga; not the ethics of digging up a king, but the ethics around how this discovery was presented to the world.  There is no doubt that presenting it via a series of news conferences and documentaries has maximised the publicity for the University of Leicester but is this the most ethical way for research to be presented?

 Research is dependent on the process of ‘peer review’ as the gate keeper of quality.  Nothing without peer review should be accepted by anyone as accurate and without flaw, at least so the doctrine goes.  I would probably go as far as to argue that it is unethical and damaging to the reputation of researchers for work to be published that has not undergone rigorous peer review, receiving that quality stamp.  If we take an extreme case I am sure you will agree with me.  A research lab has new results which claim that child vaccination is dangerous; should they be allowed to publicise their claim, causing public hysteria, until their work has been rigorously peer reviewed and the faults and limitations exposed critically?  I am sure you would agree that peer review prior to disclosure has an essential role here?  What if the science was flawed?  But is this not the same, at least in principle, as the case of Richard III?  The quest for the media stories and for the associated glory is not always a positive attribute within academia, being simply an extension of the ‘fame cult’ which seems to haunt modern society were everyone apparently wants to be the latest one hit wonder! 

 I know this bitterly from first hand.  In 2005 I was part of a research team which believed that it had discovered a series of footprints in Mexico which due to their age challenged early colonisation doctrine for the Americas.  The ideas were first subject to protracted review in the journal Nature and in parallel we were successful in being chosen to exhibit at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Society in 2005.  Our desire to publically launch the work at the exhibition became progressively out of sync with our plans to publish it; the exhibition was an immovable date and the review process fluid and on-going.  In fact by that stage we had abandoned Nature and submitted elsewhere.  At the time of the exhibition the new paper was only just under review and was not actually published until January of the following year, 2006.  Our opponents had a rebuttal published in Nature in December before the publication of the paper they were rebutting!  I went on to prove that these footprints were not in fact footprints at all, a paper four years later that took courage and cost me the friendship of my former collaborators.  It was the right thing to do however.  I view the publicity back in 2005 now with some mild embarrassment; the idea was simply wrong and a more cautious approach would have served better.  It did raise the profile of optical laser scanning and lead to the invitation that took me to Kenya in 2007 and some very real footprints, in fact the second oldest in the world.  But in my heart, and with the benefit of hindsight, I know that the quest for publicity before ensuring the rigorous foundations of the claim was wrong and I learnt a hard lesson about the power of patience and of peer review as the great gate keeper.  Yes peer review may inhibit some of our more creative and innovative ideas and encourages conformism to existing research doctrine, but despite these faults it does stand as a bulwark against bad research.

 I am in no way criticising those involved in the Richard III story, they choose to break their story in the way they did for good reason no doubt; it was after all a huge secret to keep.  But I do believe that in most situations there is an ethical issue of good practice here and a principle that needs upholding.  It is a question that BU has faced quite recently with respect to some of its research on prosthetics at the time of the Paralympics and we held the line at the time that no disclosure should be made until work had been rigorously peer reviewed.  It is a line that I am proud of, founded on personal experience and basic common sense.

This exciting full-day event provides opportunities to explore novel and emerging practice in narrative approaches in education and research for professional health and social care practice. Facilitated through creative and collaborative workshops, interactive posters and social media, this event will develop networks to extend the theory and practice of narrative for enriching professional practice.

Hosted at the Executive Business Centre on Holdenhurst Road, the aim of this one-day workshop is to explore the power of narrative approaches for contributing to transformative education and influential research for professional practice.

Delegates will be invited to participate in a variety of creative and collaborative workshops, interactive poster stands and engage with social media to advance the theory and practice of narrative approaches for enhancing education and research for professional practice. Networking will be facilitated to promote the development of an emerging community of narrative practice across disciplines and institutions.

Spaces for BU staff is encouraged, but limited. In order book a place, please complete the booking form on this website , and return to healthandsocialcare@heacademy.ac.uk

Date:  Wed, 27/02/2013

Time: 14:00

Venue: P302 (Poole House)

Speaker: Andrew Yearp

Title: Untying the Knots: Wireless Remote Patient Monitoring

Abstract:

Wireless Remote patient monitoring systems can provide continuous assessment of vital signs, facilitating early detection of abnormalities. They enable vital signs of patients, on general hospital wards, to be monitored, raising the alarm when abnormalities are detected. Existing patient monitoring processes and systems in hospitals are discussed. The development in patient monitoring systems will be elaborated. This will be followed by a discussion of a proposed remote patient monitoring system for general hospital wards, using mobile and wireless communication technologies. The seminar will be concluded by discussing progress on various building blocks of a prototype system which have, so far, been developed.

Dr Sarah Bate, Professor Sine McDougall and I were recently awarded money to expand our previous efforts to give second year undergraduate students the opportunity to experience life as full-time researchers. Run for 8 weeks last summer for the first time, the selected students applied for and won the opportunity to work closely with a member of the Psychology Research Centre, and took part in discussions about experimental design, analysis and theory.  They contributed fully to the whole process. The students reported gaining tremendous benefits from the scheme in terms of knowledge and skills gained (and consequently applied to their final year of study); particularly, they said, in their ability to digest academic articles, a task previously daunting and time-consuming.

Buoyed by this first run, this year’s scheme will not only give new students the same opportunity but will also involve sponsorship (financial and non-financial) by external bodies, generating greater interaction with significant external bodies; relationships/networks that have the potential to help with research goals and award funding in the future. This first-step engagement with potential grant funders could represent a new path to funding larger projects; we foresee the possibility of matched-funded positions (at less than £1000 per student it is not too much to ask).  Our aim is for each of the positions to be associated with a local charity or business. For example, one RA position this year will be referred to as the ‘Dorset ADHD Support Group Research Apprenticeship Position’.  Engaging with this support group to garner non-financial sponsorship has led to an invitation to the NHS ADHD Strategy Group and discussions about how future financial sponsorship might come about (not to mention their help in identifying families that live with ADHD and the introduction to other key personnel in the local NHS Trust and other relevant bodies).

A further betterment of the scheme this year is specifically aimed at preventing ‘brain drain’. We recently lost three of our best students to some prestigious institutions in the transition from BSc to MSc level. In the present bid we also applied for funds to have two excellent students work as RAs between their undergraduate and postgraduate degrees on projects specifically geared towards a topic they could address at MSc level. Importantly, for the very best students this will complete the path from the voluntary term-time RA scheme which we also run at second year level to the summer apprenticeship scheme right through to MSc project, ensuring an unprecedented level of co-creation. The postgraduate RA scheme will, we hope, act as an incentive for these students to stay with us.

In future we hope to port this model to other Centres and Schools. It is relatively cheap to run, and the benefits are considerable and, even if we do say ourselves, great fusion. If you are interested, please contact us.

Following on from a  successful conference in Rio, colleagues in Germany have organised an event which can be participated in virtually.

If you would like to participate, details on the content and approach are available at

http://www.world-sustainability-day.net/

Date:  Wed, 30/01/2013

Time: 14:00

Venue: P302 (Poole House)

Speaker: Karsten Pedersen

Title: Platform Agnostic Game Development

Abstract:

With the recent explosion of new devices, platforms and programming languages now entering the technology landscape, writing  cross platform and portable code is becoming increasingly relevant within the entertainment industry. This is because in order for a game to reach out to as many players as possible, the software will need to be ported to a large number of different devices the players are now potentially using. Whether this is an Android tablet, an iPhone or a desktop computer running a multitude of operating systems, the challenge of multi-platform deployment remains a huge contemporary issue.

Research is undertaken at 4T2 Multimedia in collaboration with Bournemouth University to look into different approaches to target all of these platforms, not only in cross platform manner but also with an aim of being platform agnostic where the same game plug into different APIs and engines such as OpenGL and Unity without changing the architecture or rewriting large portions of the game specific logic.

The Advances in Media Management (AiMM) research group are delighted to announce that the Editorial team for one of the leading journals in the field of Media Management, will hold their annual board meeting at BU in 2013.

The International Journal on Media Management (IJMM) publishes original research on the management aspects of the media and communications industries. The content is both interdisciplinary, combining a number of different academic disciplines (strategy, technology, marketing, finance, etc.) and multi-sectoral, exploring the interrelationship between developments in related industries.

If you would like to meet with members of the board to discuss your current and future research plans in this area – then please let Dr John Oliver, Media School, and he will arrange for you to meet with them.