Season ticket order deadline

All staff requiring a season ticket renewal before the Christmas break should place their order between 5 December and 9 December.

LSE Chill

Come and watch our talented staff and students perform at the next LSE Chill on Friday 25 November from 5.30pm in the Fourth Floor Café Bar.

Hassan Dahdouh

While on holiday in 2007, database services manager Hassan, saved a nine year old girl from drowning. He also knows how to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

A world-leading economist who predicted the present financial crisis engulfing Europe will be the first holder of the John Paulson chair in European Political Economy at LSE.

Professor Paul De Grauwe (pictured) will take up the post at LSE’s European Institute in February. He is currently Professor of International Economics at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

The chair is funded by John A Paulson, founder of the investment firm Paulson & Co. He has donated more than £2.5 million for research and teaching to help understand the crisis gripping the eurozone, the threat to the stability of the EU and the actions politicians and economists can take to ensure a stable future for the European trading bloc.

James Mak (pictured), a recent graduate from LSE’s Department of Geography and Environment, has won the national Royal Geographical Society-IBG Developing Areas Research Group 2011 Undergraduate Dissertation Prize for his dissertation entitled Spaces in the Reconstruction of Post-conflict Cambodia.

James said: ‘This dissertation is especially close to my heart because of the two years of development work I had in Cambodia. I was interested in how Cambodians maintain their attachment to their landscape and how they articulate a renewed sense of place through vernacular architecture in a post-conflict context. It is an honour to receive this prize and I hope to continue my research in this fascinating subject.’

Research Division move

The Research Division will be moving from New Court to the seventh floor of Tower One on Friday 25 November.

The office will be closed on that day and there will be limited service from Thursday 24 to Monday 28 November inclusive. If you have an urgent query during this time, please call the Research Division director, David Coombe, on 07540 673520.

Phones and computers should be up and running by next Monday afternoon.
 

All staff requiring a season ticket renewal before the Christmas break should place their order with thetrainline.com between 5 December and 9 December.

Any orders received after this date will not arrive until January 2012. Please bear this in mind if your ticket expires at the end of December.

Nigel Stead, School photographer, will be holding a staff portrait photo session on Monday 5 December. The session will be held in room G.19 in the Old Building from 2-5pm.

New staff (or old staff who need to update their existing pictures) can turn up at any time in the given time slot and there is no need to book. All pictures are in colour and in a digital format and will be supplied to each department/centre electronically. Hard copy prints will not be provided. Pictures will be sent after post production, which can be up to two weeks after the shoot.

The third webinar for managers, entitled 'High performance, flexible teams', will be held at 10am on Wednesday 30 November.

This webinar will explore how to manage, motivate and build high performance into everything the team does. The webinar will be presented by Liz Morris of Working Families.

Philosoverse is a student publication, supported by the LSE Department of Philosophy, which blends the disciplines of poetry and philosophy.

The second edition will be published in March 2012 to coincide with the LSE Literary Festival. The theme of this edition will be the relevance of geographical perspectives on the history of ideas.

The editors are looking for submissions of short, four-line poems as well as free form poetry on the theme above. The deadline for submission is Saturday 7 January.

More for less - take advantage of special offers for LSE staff

This week's offer is for Corinne & Co salon, based in the InterContinental Hotel on Park Lane. LSE staff and their family members can get a hair and beauty experience, normally priced at £400, for just £55.

To activate your discount, contact Marc and his team on 020 8208 3132 (weekdays, 9am-9pm or weekends, 10am-6pm), or email marc@ineedpampering.com. More information can be found here.

This week's picture features the main entrance of the Old Building. Taken at night, the photo shows some of the campus improvements that were completed on the entrance by the Estates Division in February of this year.

For more images like this, visit the Photography Unit.

Live Webcast - Social Business: to solve society's most pressing problems
On: Thursday 24 November at 5pm in the Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Muhammad Yunus (pictured), founder of Grameen Bank and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Herd Behaviour and Keeping up with the Joneses
On: Monday 28 November at 6.30pm in the Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick University, a visiting fellow at IZA Bonn and an editor of the journal Science.

For Love and Money: the distinctive features of care work
On: Tuesday 29 November at 6.30pm in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Professor Nancy Folbre, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Thawing Planet: climate change, resources, and management of the Arctic
On: Wednesday 30 November at 4pm in the Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Jonas Gahr Støre (pictured), Norwegian minister of foreign affairs.

Event Rescheduled - Arab Nationalism, Islamism and the Arab Uprising
On: Wednesday 30 November at 6.30pm in the New Theatre, East Building
Speaker: Professor Sadik Al Azm, emeritus professor of modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus.

On: Friday 25 November from 1-5.30pm in the Morishima Conference Room, Lionel Robbins Building

Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism shaped a generation of activists and scholars. But what are its lessons today? Must parliamentary politics undermine extra-parliamentary movements? And can Labour ever move us beyond capitalism?

Speakers will include:

• Tariq Ali
• Robin Archer
• Robin Blackburn
• Hilary Wainwright

The conference is open to staff, researchers and research students but places are limited. To find out more or to book a place, email sociology.events@lse.ac.uk.

The conference will be followed by a public lecture which is free and open to all:

Whatever Happened to Parliamentary Socialism: taking Ralph Miliband seriously today
On: Friday 25 November from 6.30-8pm in the Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House
Speaker: Professor Leo Panitch, Distinguished Research Professor at York University, Canada

Come and watch our talented staff and students perform at the LSE Chill open performance evening. The next session is this Friday (25 November) from 5.30pm in the 4th Floor Café Bar.

The line up for the evening is as follows:

6-6.30pm The Agents Improvocateurs
The Agents Improvocateurs are an improvisation comedy group brought together by members of the LSESU Drama Improvisation troupe. There’s no script, just laughs - if you’ve ever seen the show Whose Line is it Anyway? then you’ll know what to expect.

6.45-7.15pm Komal Shakeel
Komal, an MSc student at LSE, is Pakistani by birth and will be performing an eclectic mix of vocals from Pakistani pop ballads to some classic American and British hits.

7.30-8pm The Teeside Specials
The Teeside Specials is a three piece pop rock band that has played at a number of LSE events this year, including the first LSE Chill. They will be playing a great new acoustic set.

Lionel Robbins: a life

On: Wednesday 30 November at 6.30pm in the Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Susan Howson, University of Toronto

To celebrate the launch of her biography of Lionel Robbins, the Department of Economics and the LSE Library's Archives Division present this public lecture by Professor Susan Howson.

A true 'renaissance man', Lionel Robbins (pictured) made major contributions to his academic discipline and applied his skills as an economist not only to practical problems of economic policy and of higher education, but also to the administration of the visual and performing arts that he loved deeply.

The lecture will focus on some of his accomplishments outside pure economics, demonstrating why he was such an important figure in the intellectual and cultural life of Britain in the twentieth century.

This event is free and open to all, with no ticket required. More
 

Inform seminar - Legal Cases Involving Minority Religions

On: Saturday 3 December from 9.30am-5pm in the Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building

At this seminar, speakers from a variety of different perspectives will discuss how different states and different judiciaries have responded to minority religions. Speakers will include Professor Eileen Barker, chair and honorary director of Inform, François Bellanger, president of the Information Centre on Beliefs in Geneva, Philip Katz QC and others.

Tickets are still available and cost £48 (£28 students/unwaged). A buffet lunch, tea and coffee are included. To book your ticket or for more information, visit www.inform.ac/node/1544. If you have any questions, contact Sibyl Macfarlane at Inform@lse.ac.uk or call 020 7955 7654.
 

Conservative Leadership - What Works and What Doesn't
Recorded: Monday 14 November, approx 76 minutes
Speaker: Robin Harris
Click here to listen

Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman in conversation with Richard Layard
Recorded: Tuesday 15 November, approx 79 minutes
Speakers: Professor Daniel Kahneman and Professor Lord Richard Layard
Click here to listen

Courses scheduled for next week include:

• Writing for the media
• Writing journal articles
• Excel 2010: pivot tables
• Outlook 2010: outlook for business
• Word 2010: format an academic paper
• One-to-one IT training
• Performance Development Review: making it happen and doing it well
• Project management
• Facebook - myths and facts
• Moodle basics training
• Using blogs, wikis and other social media for teaching

Below are some of the vacancies currently being advertised to internal candidates only, as well as those being advertised externally.

• Foundation partnerships manager, ODAR: major gift fundraising
• Graduate admissions administrators, Academic Registrar's Division
• HR consultant (organisational lifelong learning), HR specialists
• HR partner, HR partners
• Head of finance, Residential and Catering Services Division
• LSE fellow in risk and regulation, Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation
• Lecturer in environment, Geography and Environment
• Research economist, Spatial Economics Research Centre
• Research officer, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion
• Research programme administrator, Government
• Senior maintenance technician/approved shift electrician, Estates: facilities and projects
• TLC administrator, Teaching and Learning Centre
• Tenure-track lecturer in political theory, Government

Nicole wants to hear from you!

Do you have some news, an achievement, or an aspect of LSE life that you would like to share? If so, then I would love to hear from you, contact me at n.gallivan@lse.ac.uk or on ext 7582.

The next edition of Staff News is on Thursday 1 December. Articles for this should be emailed to me by Tuesday 29 November. Staff News is emailed every Thursday during term time and fortnightly during the holidays.