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Bryce Dyer talks about advances in prosthetics on BMA website

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Bryce Dyer, senior lecturer in Product Design at BU, commented on the potential implications of human enhancement for an article on the BMA website.

A recent Royal Society report has explored how advances in science and technology could allow people to work longer into old age and return to work quicker after illness.

“Look at it in the same way as mobile phones,” said Bryce.

“Ten years ago they were like bricks but they’ve become cheaper, easier to produce and more available over time. The same will happen with prosthesis.”

He also raised concerns about with genetic engineering, which could correct faults in an embryo and enhance it physically or mentally.

“We could make someone super-intelligent but it could have catastrophic effects for society. The lines between natural and artificial and technological could blur.

“At the moment we let nature take its course, but as time goes on we can affect nature and attempt to control and manipulate it.”

Bryce’s primary research interest is with the application and development of technology within sport, and he predicts a dramatic improvement over the next 10 years, which could see it used to enhance function rather than just restore performance.

But, he adds, we must treat technology with care.

“It could become a race between engineers and surgeons instead of sports people. The concept of what it is to be human could change.”

You can read the full article here.

BU TV Production student mingles with stars after winning ‘mini-Oscar’

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A Television Production student from Bournemouth University has received a prestigious First Light Award for a film he created.

The First Light Awards – known as the ‘mini-Oscars’ – celebrate the success of young filmmakers from across the UK.

Final year BA (Hons) Television Production student Gulliver Moore won in the YouTube Digital Innovation category for his short film, The Perfect Dream.

The film mixes real-life footage and digital effects to show a bed appearing in places ranging from the beach to space, and won through a public online vote.

Gulliver, 23, got to attend a star-studded awards ceremony in London alongside the likes of actors Rafe Spall, Simon Pegg and Joely Richardson.

“The Perfect Dream follows a man roaming through fantasies at the click of a bedside lamp, searching for his perfect dream,” said Gulliver, who lives in Winton.

“It was a great feeling to win at the ceremony – I had to give a completely impromptu speech to hundreds of people.”

He added: “I was expecting a small screening with a few people. It turned out to be a huge ceremony with a red carpet, a huge cinema, paparazzi and lots of British celebrities.

“I met some very interesting people at the after party and had to do lots of interviews. It was quite a surreal day.”

Gulliver received a trophy and £1,000 for winning the award, which he will put towards his next filming project.

The 2013 First Light Awards took place at Odeon, in Leicester Square on March 19.

To find out more about the First Light awards, and to see Gulliver’s winning entry, visit the website

BU students win all-expenses paid trip to Thailand to film documentary

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Two teams of TV Production students from Bournemouth University will be flown out to Thailand to make documentaries, after reaching the finals of an international film competition.

Final year students Lydia Harrison and Callum Cooper and first years Mark Benjamin and Anastasia Stankovsky are all on the BA (Hons) Television Production course at BU and will be the only representatives from the UK in the Amazing Thailand Film Challenge.

Teams from around the world will be flown out to Thailand to make documentaries about different aspects of the country for the competition.

They will all be screened at a red carpet event during the Thailand International Destination Film Festival, and the team behind the winning documentary will receive the equivalent of around £23,000 in prize money.

Lydia, 21, said the experience of going to Thailand will be great, even if they don’t win.

“We feel so lucky to have this opportunity and to be going to represent Britain at all,” she said.

“It’s a once in a lifetime experience and I’m excited to meet people and find out more about Thailand. It will be a great chance to network with other filmmakers from around the world.”

More than 800 teams applied for the chance to take part in the competition, which was also open to professional filmmakers, but only 100 have got through to the finals in Thailand – with just five teams from Europe.

They will fly out to Thailand on March 30, and will have to film and edit their documentaries using their own equipment for the festival screening, which takes place just before they fly back on April 11.

The teams have been provided with flights, hotel accommodation in Bangkok and a budget of around £700 for their films, as well as a local assistant and production advice.

Callum, 23, said that the experience would be stressful, but they were determined to make the most of their time in Thailand.

“It’s our first time on a really professional shoot with a big budget,” he said.

“We have got control and have this large budget, so there is that pressure on us to get it in on time. We know we will be thrown into the deep end but we are not going to let it stop us having a great experience.

“Our first priority is getting the documentary done as professionally as we can, but there is going to be some time to enjoy being out there.”

Both of the teams from BU are filming near Chiang Mai, in Northern Thailand.

Lydia and Callum, who both live in Winton while studying, will be filming a self-sustaining hill tribe in the village of Ban Mae Sa Mai, and a project there which helps them rebuild the surrounding forest.

Mark and Anastasia, who are both in Halls of Residence in Poole, will be filming at the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, focusing on the work being done to prevent poaching and increase the number of tigers in the wild.

Mark, 22, said: “I’ve never really travelled before, so it’s going to be a completely new experience for me. I think it’s going to be life-changing and is really going to help us a lot with gaining placements and contacts.

“The Media School have been really supportive and everyone is really proud and happy for us.” Anastasia, 19, added: “I didn’t think we would have an experience like this in our first year of university.

“I was so shocked when I found out we’d got through out of all the hundreds of applications – and that the other UK team is from our course as well. It’s unbelievable.”

Dr Howard Davis talks about Abu Qatada legal case on BBC Radio Solent

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Dr Howard Davis, Reader in Law at BU, was interviewed on BBC Radio Solent about the government losing an appeal against a ruling preventing the deportation of preacher Abu Qatada.

Howard specialises in public law, and particularly the impact of the Human Rights Act on UK law, and told Drivetime presenter Steve Harris: “Home secretaries have the power to deport people if they think it is not in the public interest for those people to stay in the UK.

“In the good old days, the police would literally come along at 6am and whip you off and you’d be deported and there’d be very little you could do about it.”

But, he added, that there was now a special court commission to deal with cases and that:”It’s an absolute fundamental rule of human rights law that you cannot deport someone to a country where they would have a real risk of being tortured or a real risk that evidence obtained by torture would be used against them.”

He said that Britain’s hands were tied in the matter by a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights, but said that they could get around it if they had sufficient diplomatic assurances from Jordanian government about the treatment of Abu Qatada if he were deported there.

“What the recent case has been about is whether those assurances are sufficiently strong and robust, and whether they show that the other evidence that Jordan does engage in torture is not so strong.”

Howard said that the Home Secretary could now appeal to the Supreme Court, but is not likely to be successful because the actual point of law isn’t in dispute.

“What’s in dispute here is the credibility of these diplomatic assurances about the treatment of Abu Qatada and whether he’d get a fair trial.”

He added: “In the end, the legal process may come to a halt, and we must not forget that the ban on torture and the use of torture evidence in trials is probably the most fundamental rule of law that we have.”

You can listen to the full interview here

Work of BU’s Centre for Face Processing Disorders featured in CBBC documentary

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The work of the Centre for Face Processing Disorders at BU was featured in a documentary on the CBBC channel.

My Life: Who Are You? followed 14-year-old Hannah, who has been diagnosed with prosopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness.

Hannah has one of the most extreme cases of face blindness in the UK, following a brain disorder when she was eight, and cannot recognise her parents, best friend, or even her own face in the mirror.

The half-hour documentary showed Hannah and her family coming to the Centre for Face Processing Disorders at BU, and working with Dr Sarah Bate and her team.

Dr Bate, who is one of the leading experts in prosopagnosia, tested Hannah using eye-tracking technology to see where she looks when trying to recognise a face.

She also gave her homework exercises to do to try and train a different part of Hannah’s brain to help recognise people.

Dr Bate said: “[Hannah] is one of the most severely face blind people we’ve had here.

“It’s possible another part of the brain may take over and, to some extent, she might then recover some of her face processing ability.”

The documentary also shows Dr Bate conducting an exercise in one of the university lecture theatres, where Hannah had to try and pick out her friends and relatives from a line-up of people.

She manages to recognise them all, although some of them have to speak before she realises who they are.

In the documentary, Hannah also meets other people with face blindness – including Dragon’s Den star Duncan Bannatyne – to see how they deal with the disorder.

You can watch My Life: Who Are You? here.

Master’s Law courses at BU in The i newspaper

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Master’s Law courses offered by Bournemouth University were featured in an article in The i about career options opened up by doing postgraduate training in law.

The article, by Russ Thorne, argues that postgraduate training in law can provide students with many different opportunities.

While some students may pursue the Master’s to move into a legal career having done a different undergraduate degree, BU’s Sally Weston says that existing lawyers can also benefit.

Sally, who is head of the Law department, said that a Master of laws (LLM) course provides in-depth training.

“The LLM curriculum is designed to develop critical evaluation and analysis,” she says in the article, which appeared in a postgraduate study supplement.

She continues: “LLM students interpret the meaning of words and abstract concept skills which are useful for law and other careers that require analysis of complex qualitative data.”

You can read the full article here

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Academics to look at access to maternity services in Nepal with Fellowship grant

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A team from Bournemouth University will look at why women in Nepal don’t use health services when giving birth, after receiving the first International Fellowship for Midwives.

The Fellowship is awarded by the charity Wellbeing of Women, in association with the Royal College of Midwives, for research into maternity services and women’s health from an international perspective.

The team from BU will use the £20,000 Fellowship grant to look at the real and perceived barriers to women in Nepal giving birth within a health facility with a skilled birth attendant.

“There is evidence that access to skilled birth attendant is likely to lead to a better outcome for the mother and baby,” said Lesley Milne, senior lecturer in Midwifery at Bournemouth University, who will lead the project.

“If they don’t, it is more likely to end in a maternal mortality, and we are trying to determine why women in Nepal don’t access health services.”

Lesley will be supported by Vanora Hundley, Professor in Midwifery at BU, Edwin van Teijlingen, Professor of Reproductive Health Research at BU, and Dr Padam Simkhada, from the University of Sheffield.

The year-long project will start on April 1 and the money received as part of the Fellowship will enable Lesley to go to Nepal for three weeks in September to undertake the research.

She said: “This would not be possible if we had not been awarded this money.

“It’s fantastic to have received this grant and we are really pleased about it.”

She added: “There is an under-utilisation of health services in Nepal. It is about getting women to use the services available and trying to find out why many of them currently don’t.

“I will be going out to Nepal to observe and also undertake some interviews of health personnel of both a rural hospital and a hospital in Kathmandu, to try to see what they think is preventing women from accessing services.”

Lesley added that possible reasons for women not accessing health services could include having to travel a long way, having had poor previous experiences or their cultural beliefs.

Bournemouth University has been building links with Nepal across a number of areas and academic schools, including the School of Health and Social Care, and both Lesley and fellow researcher Professor Edwin van Teijlingen have experience in the surrounding area.

Lesley said that she hoped the research could be a springboard for future study.

“I hope that we may have a great insight into why women aren’t accessing services and hopefully will be able to address that in the future,” she said.

BU in budget day coverage

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Dermot McCarthy, a lecturer in Economics at Bournemouth University, spoke to BBC Radio Solent on Budget Day to talk about the budget’s key points and the impact this will have on the general public.

Speaking to presenter Steve Harris, Dermot said, “I think there are some good points in what we see in the budget today, it does show some movement in the right direction from George Osborne, particularly with things such as the reduction in corporate tax and increased support for housing. But it does not go far enough at addressing the underlying problem in the economy, which is that we are pursuing austerity at a time when economic growth is below expectations.”

Dermot also gave a nice analogy for how Britain should be looking at digging itself out of debt. Dermot continued, “We are sinking into debt one way or another so it is a case of saying ‘what are we going to use that debt for?’ It could be seen as similar to me or you and our household. If we have to go into debt to be able to meet our gas bills then we are in trouble, but if we are sinking into debt in order to invest in a little workshop at the end of the garden to be able to work on repairing your neighbours car for a little extra income then that is a good investment. So perhaps there is a problem when the UK government is getting into debt in order to meet welfare payments but it might be better to invest it in infrastructure and other things that will generate income in the future to meet that debt payment.”

Paola Palma, Programme Co–ordinator in Maritime Archaeology at BU, also spoke about the budget, giving her view to The Times newspaper. She spoke about the budget from the perspective of an Italian working in the UK and said, “The education in this country is so far ahead of the rest of Europe. The Universities and schools mean that I need not worry about the future of my family.”

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Dr David McQueen talks about class on BBC Radio Solent

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BU Politics and Media course leader Dr David McQueen was on BBC Radio Solent talking about class, and how people define what class they are in.

He spoke about the issue on Alex Dyke’s mid-morning show, following a survey which showed that people without an above average salary identified themselves as middle-class.

“The fact is that survey has generated a lot of interest, I think because the British are obsessed with class, basically,” he said.

“I think there’s a mirror image of America, which denies there’s a class system, I think we obsess on the tiny details of class.”

He added: “I think people used to be more comfortable in their class – I think if you go back to 1966, what’s interesting is that only a third of people identified themselves as middle-class. That’s now leapt up to 50 per cent according to this survey, and other surveys have shown it to be up to 70 per cent.

“So I think there’s a real anxiety about representing yourself as working class.”

But he said that the results may be skewed as people have to tick a box identifying themselves as one or the other.

“I think that most people feel uncomfortable with either of those definitions – there’s parts of their identities which don’t fit in with either.

“But what’s also interesting is that the family background continues to be important; if you are born into a family which has money, that you are likely to inherit the wealth and values of that family, and I think that’s come across in this survey – that they value education, that they think the type of home they live in is important, and their income as being important.”

He added that, increasingly, social mobility was being stifled and it was becoming more difficult for people to change the class that they are in.

“I think the real issues here is that people’s salaries are falling, and that people want to identify themselves as not being poor, and as not working class, when actually, by objective standards, they are.”

You can listen to the full interview here

BU Prosopagnosia research in The Telegraph

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A feature on BU’s research into prosopagnosia was included in The Daily Telegraph.

The article, focussing on 14–year–old Hannah Ray*, talks about what living with prosopagnosia is like, while the work undertaken by Bournemouth University researcher Dr Sarah Bate is also featured.

In the article, Dr Bate says, “Normally, people look at the key features – eyes, nose, mouth – and our brains identify the differences. But Hannah scans faces at random.”

The article continues to talk about Hannah’s condition and the work that she has been doing with Sarah to try and improve her face recognition skills. Sarah continued, “It’s likely that ‘flooding’ Hannah’s brain with images has helped her focus on faces in general – and taught her to look for features that are useful in recognition.”

Concluding the article, Dr Bate said, “Hannah is one of 50 patients we have worked with on this project and we hope further training will help her make more progress in future.”

To find out more about Dr Bate’s work with prosopagnosia you can visit her website – prosopagnosiaresearch.org – and to find out more about Hannah and her condition you can watch the CBBC programme ‘My Life: Who are you?’ which focusses on Hannah’s story. The programme airs on Tuesday 26 March 2013 at 5.45pm

*Hannah’s surname was changed for the Telegraph interview – the same surname has been used for this article.

To read the article in full please visit The Telegraph news story.

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