Glamorgan Blogs

Graduate Prizewinners in History, 2010

Hijabs and headscarves have made headlines all over Europe recently. Is the Islamic veil a security threat, a symbol of oppression, a rejection of modernity? What can a historian add to this debate? In her prize-winning BA dissertation, Kara Hynes describes how French colonists stigmatised the wearing of the veil in Algeria long before twentieth-century feminism or fears of Islamist terrorism introduced new controversy. In revolutionary Iran, women wore the veil as a symbol of rebellion, even gender equality. More recently, it has been described as a "gateway to education"; adopted as a fashion item by young 'Muhajababes'; and used in performance art to challenge stereotypes concerning Muslim women.

Kara argues that veil has become the main symbol of differences between Islam and the rest of the world - and that its symbolic importance may distract us from its complex history. Catrin Isaac, the other recipient of this year's Ursula Masson Memorial Prize, confronted another powerful symbol in her BA dissertation: the nineteenth-century workhouse.

Until now, historians had barely touched upon the treatment of pauper children in nineteenth-century Wales. Catrin discovered that records preserved in the archives challenge the Dickensian image of the workshouse as a place where children were subject to unabated cruelty. Wales lagged behind England in funding alternative, family-style accommodation for destitute children, yet there is evidence that trustees were anxious to provide their charges with a 'sense of home'.

A third History BA graduate, Daniel Robinson, received the Alison Waite Memorial Prize (shared with Tiffany Oben, BA graduate in Art Practice). This prize rewards the students who achieve the highest average grade for third-year work in Humanities and Languages. Dissertations by history's three prizewinners will feature in a collection of outstanding undergraduate work to be published by the history division later this year.

IWMW Talks I remembered

Stylesheets for mobile phones with Helen from Cambridge.

I enjoyed this session where Helen from Cambridge showed the steps she’d considered and taken to experiment with media queries and different styles being fed to different devices. The slides are available, and there was some good discussion about linearising the page for mobile devices. There was no consensus about the best way to do this, illustrating that the focus of a homepage can be difficult to maintain when having to distill. If nothing else the constraints of smaller devices means you have to make some hard decisions about what is really useful and importanat to your vistors. Decsisons that perhaps can be fudged with the screen available to desktop users. I was struck by the amount of work and thought that Helen had done in considering the user, and yet it may all be to no avail, since devices have improved so much that they provide their own method for navigating sites.

Course Advertsing and XCRI

This session was quite a broad one, giving an overview of a project that has been running for a while to try to standardise a format that describes and structures course information. This session focussed on the XCRI-CAP part of the project which looks at marketing information of courses. Some good tools were presented to check how ready an institution would be to start using this. It struck me that it could be really useful in the our circumstances where we have courses across the Glamorgan Group, from a variety of different levels and a standard way of referring to them. Other universities are starting to use this format, and the real benefits of standards that might actually accrue to the end user.

Slate my website barcamp

Really fun session run by Mike Nolan from Edgehill. The idea was to have a quick look around a university’s site and mark it on design, content and code. Reading, Nottingham and Edgehill were reviewed (Dan from York did the honours for the Edgehill review), and marks then given whilst everyone discussed aspects of the site. Really useful to see the site through someone else’s eyes and it worked really well to quickly identify things that can be done better. Was a shame it didn’t go on longer.

The Web in Turbulent Times

Really good broad talk about IT and where the web fits in. Nice video here with twitter responses from the time. She makes very good point that IT projects are considered separate from business project when they are in fact integral. There is an unhelpful perception that IT is somehow separate from the business.Chris also made some interesting points about shared services and the pressure from government for the Education sector to share things more.

HTML5 (and friends)

Enjoyed the good talk from Patrick Lauke, thinking that it worked well as a tactical talk, encouraging a look at the practical steps one can take to get started with HTML5. It struck me that there was an appetite in the audience to get cracking and Patrick made it seem less daunting and complicated than many people (myself included)imagine it to be.

‘So what do you do exactly?’ In challenging times justifying the roles of the web teams

Galvanising talk about stats and measuring what we do. Particularly liked the reminder that Universities are big businesses and the web is central to how we do business. I think the whole room saw the value of taking the time to present the case for what we do in business terms (going back to the unhelpful separation between IT and Business goals). The importance of providing context for costs per click was nice with Sid explaining that the cost of a link to gocompare.com on google seems high in isolation but was worth it to that company. Similarly the link to download a brochure from a car manufacturers site could be measured and used to make the case for that method of communication.

No money? No matter – Improve your website with next to no cash

Another talk, by Paul Boag, that had many nodding their heads and resolving to implement the suggestions. The key one for me was the idea of content curation. In the forecast hard times ahead, he suggested that we take the opportunity to scale down sites to provide a better user experience and focus on making smaller but more better sites.

Sharepoint, Sheffield CMS and Student Portal

There was a mixture of talks on the last day which began merging a little by then. Josef Lapka presented a very nice Student Portal that they have created at Canterbury, which lots of people were impressed with. Richard Brierton gave a talk about the process of rolling out a new CMS at Sheffield, and people were eager to hear about the practicalities and problems that they had faced. We then came to a talk on Sharepoint by James Lapping and Peter Gilbert that provoked a very busy twitter back channel, coming out strongly against.

General Themes

• 2 years is too long for an IT project
• Lots more people seem to be doing or thinking about agile.
• CMS – The eternal search for the holy grail goes on.
• Mobile Apps vs Mobile Web
• Practical talks versus strategic vision

Rather than link individually to each talk, it’s better if I point you to the Resources page where the organisers have done a great job in collecting and presenting much of the event content.

This solution is only for Mac’s. Use the following information at your own risk.

If you have an iPad (I would imagine it is the same for iPhones) and you have recorded something with Smart Recorder (or Smart Recorder Lite) and the iPad has been synced with a system there is a way to successfully recover your audio recordings.

First find your backup location. This will be in /Users/[user_name]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ (replace the [user_name] with your account’s username) and in backup you will have a number of folders with semi-random names. These are your backups. Find the latest one and go to this directory in the Terminal (e.g, cd /Users/[user_name]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/).

We will now use grep to find the header of the recordings: grep AIFFCOMM *

The output of the grep search will be the files you want to copy off into a new folder and you can rename them to .aif . These can be tested then with VLC.

You could probably find any other documents in a similar fashion (e.g. for PDFs: grep PDF * ).

Happy hunting.

Like milk, when data is stored in our refrigerated data storage facilities it should have an expiration date. Imagine a milk that degraded in your fridge and disappeared after the expiration date. The perfect solution to taking out the trash and having to deal with milk that has gone off.

In the same fashion would it be wonderful to be able to have the ability to submit your information on a form and set an expiration date on them. This way you know that the information will only live for the required time-period set.

From a legal point of view this is very well justified and supported. The Data Protection Act clearly states that data must only be kept for its intended purpose and deleted afterwards. And many organizations do not adhere to it or have very relaxed regulations about when data shall be deleted.

The article by the BBC [2] also talks about fading data. This is looking at data from another perspective. This is one that data is not deleted but abstracted to other forms of information i.e,generalized.

Restrictions

The current restrictions that I can see are:

1. Database engines will need to be engineered in such a way to facilitate the storage of such information
2. Will operating systems need to implement the expiration of data?
3. What happens if someone copies the information e.g.backup ? Will the expiration details follow the information?
4. It is a very data intense exercise if data is to be transform into an abstract set of the original data, then what are the rules, inputs and outputs that define this process. This can be very tedious and I would imagine very few organizations would implement it unless it was automated in some way.

There are probably many more, certainly I can imagine a number of people who would love this feature of having data that expires. We must be careful though because once it is gone then there will be no way to retrieve it again and in some very rare occasions forgotten information can be handy.

Links Used

[1] – Harold van Heerde - http://www.vanheerde.eu/

[2] – Fading data could improve privacy - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10324209.stm

The funding bodies have today published Units of assessment and recruitment of expert panels setting out decisions in relation to the following aspects of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF):

• the configuration of units of assessment and grouping of sub-panels under main panels • the roles and responsibilities of main panels, sub-panels and their members in the assessment • the criteria and process for recruiting panel chairs and members.

The document also:

• invites individuals to apply to become sub-panel chairs (deadline for applications is 17 September 2010). • invites organisations and associations with an interest in research – except for higher education institutions – to nominate candidates to become panel members (deadline for nominations is 8 October 2010).

Summary: High quality research at the engineering and physical sciences (EPS) and economic and social sciences (ESS) interfaces is of strategic importance to EPSRC. The Cross-Disciplinary Interfaces Programme (C-DIP) aims to enable UK engineers and physical scientists to be world-leading in research and training at existing and emerging cross-disciplinary interfaces. C-DIP aims to be at the leading edge and to strategically intervene at targeted interfaces that are a priority for EPSRC.

The Cross-Disciplinary Interfaces Programme (C-DIP) wishes to support cross-disciplinary proposals at the engineering and physical sciences and economic and social sciences interfaces, with the majority of outputs looking to strengthen and feed back into the engineering and physical sciences. EPSRC invites applications from integrated cross-disciplinary groups to undertake research at these interfaces and promote cross-disciplinary culture and exchange across the respective disciplines.

Up to £6 million has been earmarked for this targeted activity and, subject to the quality of the submissions received, it is anticipated that we will fund up to four proposals. Grants funded under this call will provide funding to support a suite of related research and people based activities focusing on one major theme.

Please note the requirement to register the intent to submit a full proposal, by 1200 on 10 September 2010. Furthermore, a “webinar” session will be held on 02 August 2010 (details and timings to be confirmed) to give potential applicants an opportunity to learn more about this call.

Deadline: 4pm on 12 October 2010

Funder link: Promoting Cross-Disciplinary Research: Engineering and Physical Sciences and Economic and Social Sciences

Scheme link: EPSRC

Any application for external funding requires the completion of an External Funding Application Submission (EFAS) form. To create a form please visit EFAS (link http://inform.glam.ac.uk/research-office/efas/)

HEFCE recently confirmed speculation that the REF has been delayed and is now set to take place in 2014 with submissions in late 2013.

The proposed timetable and details of the appointment of the Main Panel Chairs Designate is now available on the HEFCE website

Further information about the panel structure and recruitment of panels is due to be published by the end of July.

Government policy documents and the language of Star Trek normally make for unusual bedfellows. However, the reaction of one of my colleagues to the publication last week of the new White Paper on the NHS in England was understandable; for many, it does mark a voyage into hitherto uncharted territories.

Some of the headline messages you may have heard, and the White Paper proposes a radically reshaped landscape. By 2013 all 150 plus PCTs will have gone, replaced by somewhere between 300 and 500 GP consortia (numbers to be determined locally and over time). These consortia will be responsible for some £80 billion of NHS monies; GPs will truly be front and centre in commissioning services. How they manage this process, their accountability regime and how they secure support for this work remains to be fleshed out.

SHAs will be gone by 2012, their functions absorbed by an Independent NHS Commissioning Board. It’s this Board that GP consortia will be accountable to, but what – if anything – happens regionally remains to be determined. Responsibility for Public Health goes to Local Authorities.

Provider-side changes have received less coverage, but are potentially more groundbreaking. The stated aim is to develop a large and vibrant social enterprise sector, with all NHS Trusts becoming Foundation Trusts by 2013/14. Staff can have a greater say in their Trust’s future, including via employee-led social enterprises. Moreover, the provider market will be opened up to providers from all sectors.

For patients there’s the promise of greater access to information, some personalised health budgets, choice of hospital, consultant and GP practice and shared decision-making under the philosophy of ‘no decision about me without me’. There will also be Health Watch England, a new independent consumer voice, supported by local Health Watches (CHCs anyone ?). Some have argued that the messages on structured public engagement are more ambiguous.

Care is still free at the point of use and based on need, not the ability to pay. However, the Chief Executive of NHS England has written to all PCTs, SHA’s, Trusts and Foundation Trusts setting out clearly that ‘The NHS is a system, not an organisation’. It’s heady stuff.

It also puts NHS England on a markedly different trajectory from Wales, where the emphasis has been on increasing co-operation and partnership, even planning. The new Health Boards have deliberately brought commissioning and providing together and the internal market is history. Conversely, the English strategy is explicitly linked to competition and the market, consumer choice and clear organisational separation. Whatever the arguments for either system, there’s undoubtedly much more clear blue water between the two neighbours. It’s not quite the intergalactic journey of the Starship Enterprise, but a voyage of discovery still awaits.

*Dr Paul Worthington, Hereford PCT *

Government policy documents and the language of Star Trek normally make for unusual bedfellows. However, the reaction of one of my colleagues to the publication last week of the new White Paper on the NHS in England was understandable; for many, it does mark a voyage into hitherto uncharted territories.

Some of the headline messages you may have heard, and the White Paper proposes a radically reshaped landscape. By 2013 all 150 plus PCTs will have gone, replaced by somewhere between 300 and 500 GP consortia (numbers to be determined locally and over time). These consortia will be responsible for some £80 billion of NHS monies; GPs will truly be front and centre in commissioning services. How they manage this process, their accountability regime and how they secure support for this work remains to be fleshed out.

SHAs will be gone by 2012, their functions absorbed by an Independent NHS Commissioning Board. It’s this Board that GP consortia will be accountable to, but what – if anything – happens regionally remains to be determined. Responsibility for Public Health goes to Local Authorities.

Provider-side changes have received less coverage, but are potentially more groundbreaking. The stated aim is to develop a large and vibrant social enterprise sector, with all NHS Trusts becoming Foundation Trusts by 2013/14. Staff can have a greater say in their Trust’s future, including via employee-led social enterprises. Moreover, the provider market will be opened up to providers from all sectors.

For patients there’s the promise of greater access to information, some personalised health budgets, choice of hospital, consultant and GP practice and shared decision-making under the philosophy of ‘no decision about me without me’. There will also be Health Watch England, a new independent consumer voice, supported by local Health Watches (CHCs anyone ?). Some have argued that the messages on structured public engagement are more ambiguous.

Care is still free at the point of use and based on need, not the ability to pay. However, the Chief Executive of NHS England has written to all PCTs, SHA’s, Trusts and Foundation Trusts setting out clearly that ‘The NHS is a system, not an organisation’. It’s heady stuff.

It also puts NHS England on a markedly different trajectory from Wales, where the emphasis has been on increasing co-operation and partnership, even planning. The new Health Boards have deliberately brought commissioning and providing together and the internal market is history. Conversely, the English strategy is explicitly linked to competition and the market, consumer choice and clear organisational separation. Whatever the arguments for either system, there’s undoubtedly much more clear blue water between the two neighbours. It’s not quite the intergalactic journey of the Starship Enterprise, but a voyage of discovery still awaits.

*Dr Paul Worthington, Hereford PCT *

My career spans well over 30 years and in that time I’ve been to numerous scientific/health conferences and listened to eminent speakers present leading edge research. I’ve been impressed by facts, figures, charts, and fabulously colourful diagrams (molecular geneticists seem to excel at these). From all of these, probably three stand out. Two because complex material was presented so clearly we were all able to appreciate the implications and value of what was being achieved. The other was because I was so bitterly disappointed that the keynote leading lecture by the very eminent scientist was completely over the heads of most of the audience (even the molecular geneticists struggled) and I learnt nothing (except a reminder of the importance of avoiding jargon and PowerPoint slides that no-one more than a metre away can read…).

Last week I found myself at another conference, on Alzheimer’s disease hosted by the Faculty of Health, Sport and Science and Grwp Gwalia. We had the facts and figures (that there are currently around 38,000 people in Wales with dementia, and this figure is likely to rise to 48,000 by 2021) alongside some interesting presentations on initiatives to provide care for patients and families affected by the condition. But what I think will really have moved the audience to try to ‘do their bit’ for such families was the story told by Peter Oldacre, husband and carer of Ann. Peter showed a brief video of Ann’s life since her diagnosis just a few years ago, narrated by her daughter. The story was told simply, sincerely and with occasional humour. I was not the only person wiping away tears as Peter’s story drew to a close. Good quality evidence is of course crucial in informing policy. But the human face of that, as told through real life stories, is what I think can really make a difference in getting people to engage with the evidence. I shall remember Peter’s story, and his courage in telling it, for a long time.