LSE renews its commitment to the Living Wage

LSE has signed the Living Wage Accreditation Licence Agreement this week. The School is only the second university institution to sign up for the accreditation.

Strategic Review update

Discussion groups are being held with staff and students as part of the Strategic Review process. There are five groups left to run on LSE's physical space, knowledge exchange and impact activities.

Jill Slattery

Jill, who works in ODAR's North American office, has lived and worked in New York City for 18 years and loves Miami: 'are there really any cons to visiting a small NYC on the beach?'

LSE Cities launches new interactive website to show how the financial crisis has affected European cities

LSE Cities has launched a new free online resource, supported by the Higher Education Innovation Fund, which shows the impact of economic recession and recovery in over 150 of Europe’s largest metropolitan areas.

Drawing on forecasting data previously unavailable to the public, the European Metromonitor features an interactive map, offering users the chance to browse data visualisations showing how the financial crisis has affected European cities.

The Academic Nominations Committee has appointed Dr Wendy-Sigle Rushton (pictured) of the Gender Institute as the next adviser to female students. Dr Rushton will succeed Dr Shani Orgad from 1 August 2013.

As adviser to female students, Dr Rushton will be available to discuss issues of concern to women students in the School and to offer advice and support to women students with personal problems.

LSE academic wins 4nations cup

Stavros Panageas (pictured), visiting professor in the Department of Finance and a member of LSE's Financial Markets Group, is part of the winning team at this year’s 4nations cup; an annual competition which sees the most promising young scholars in financial economics 'battle it out' in a day of mini seminars.

Stavros along with team mate Samuli Knupfer of the London Business School fought off stiff competition from the French, Swiss and Swedish teams to continue the UK’s winning streak.
 

Last week the LSE Review of Books held an awards ceremony to mark its first birthday and to celebrate publishing over 500 reviews of the latest social science books. Attendees included representatives from all major academic publishers and academic reviewers from many departments.

Winners from LSE included Flora Cornish of the Methodology Institute, Baran Doda of the Grantham Research Institute, Saji Professor of Economic History Janet Hunter, and PhD candidate Ioannis Papagaryfallou.

Dr Chaloka Beyani to report on displaced persons in Syria for the UN

The United Nations General Assembly has requested that Dr Chaloka Beyani (pictured), United Nations Special Rapporteur and senior lecturer in LSE's Department of Law, submit a written report to the General Assembly on the dire situation of internally displaced persons in the Syrian Arab Republic.

The request was made in the General Assembly's Resolution A/67/L.63, adopted on Wednesday 8 May, and Dr Beyani has 90 days to make his report.

His report will examine their safety and their basic rights and livelihoods, and will provide recommendations with a view to meeting assistance and protection needs and strengthening the effectiveness of the international response to displacement (paragraph 21).
 

Liz Chapman, director of Library Services, will feature in the Channel 4 documentary, Clare Balding’s Secrets of a Suffragette, on Sunday 26 May at 8pm.

In the film, Clare Balding (pictured) examines the story of Emily Davison, her death following the Derby and the Suffragette movement.

Nabila Ramdani (pictured), a PhD student in the Department of International History, won the International Media Awards Cutting Edge Prize on Saturday 11 May in a ceremony held in London at the Oxford and Cambridge Club.

The prize is awarded by the Next Century Foundation to journalists in recognition of their high standards of analysis and reporting on the Middle East and North Africa, often in conflict situations.

Nabila said: 'I am absolutely astonished but deeply honoured to receive this Award, being up against so many outstanding colleagues. Winning awards was never the reason why I went into journalism. But what an award means, of course, is that your work has been recognised by your peers and indeed the people who follow it. And for that, I am extremely grateful.' More
 

Congratulations to Cat Rawsthorne (pictured) for winning the LSE Volunteer of the Year award. Over the past year she has managed the LSE FoodCycle hub, recruiting almost 100 volunteers, has volunteered at YELP and sat on the Oxfam Youth Board. Well done to all the other students who were shortlisted as well.

Congratulations to IntoUniversity for winning the LSE Voluntary Organisation of the Year. Over the past year it has given LSE students many opportunities to really improve the communities they live in.

The winners were announced at the LSE Volunteer Centre and LSESU RAG volunteering celebration evening on Wednesday 8 May. You can view all of the photographs from the night on the LSE Volunteer Centre Facebook page.

We are currently undertaking a Web Review as part of the School-wide Strategic Review. The aim is to significantly improve the LSE website for all users, from the thousands of prospective students who log on each year, to current students and staff to alumni.

As part of the Email and Data Storage Programme, the existing in-house email service is being upgraded with new software, new servers and with increased mailbox size for staff, in order to provide an improved and more resilient service.

Information Management and Technology will start making School-wide changes on Tuesday 28 May, and will continue with migration of mailboxes across the School.

Strategic Review discussion groups

As part of the Strategic Review process, a set of 10 discussion groups are being held with staff and students from around the School during the summer term.

The groups are focusing on five key questions that the Review aims to consider. These topics include LSE’s structure and composition, its place in the world, and the future of teaching and learning in the UK and overseas. We are half way through the groups, and the contributions from all participants have been thoughtful, considered and engaged.

There are five groups left to run, looking at the use of LSE’s physical space, and how the School can support knowledge exchange and impact activities, so if you would like to participate, contact Jane Tinkler at j.tinkler@lse.ac.uk
 

Staffing changes in the Directorate Support Team

The Directorate has welcomed several new members of staff recently.

Dominika Mazurek has joined in the new post of executive assistant to the Director. Dominika, who previously spent over a decade at the BBC and latterly three years as executive assistant to the CEO and chairman of the British Library, will oversee Professor Craig Calhoun's diary and travel plans.

Nita Khambatta is the new administrative assistant to the Director. Nita has moved over to Columbia House after three and half years in the Estates Division, most recently as financial administrator.

Both Dominika and Nita monitor the Directorsoffice@lse.ac.uk  mailbox.

Johannes Rieken and Benjamin Mueller join the Directorate as research assistants. Both are current LSE PhD students who will be working two days a week with James Strong, executive officer to the Director, doing background research and helping with the analysis of responses to the various consultation mechanisms.

For the Pro-Directorate team, Yaina Bryan has joined as PA to Professor George Gaskell. Yaina has held the role on a temporary basis since February and we are very pleased that she has become a permanent member of staff. Lizzie Andrew will now work solely for Professor Paul Kelly, while Geri Miric continues to look after Professor Stuart Corbridge. The team work closely together, so if you have trouble contacting the right PA for the Pro-Director you are trying to reach, do consider speaking to one of the others.
 

New incentives schemes have recently been introduced to encourage greater grant-winning. Grantholders will be given personal financial rewards (PFR) equivalent to the value of the grant funding provided to cover their salaries, which they may use as a salary supplement (capped at 33.3 per cent of base salary), for teaching buy-out or to support other research activities. Around £1.8 million per annum will be distributed among around a hundred grant-holders, with figures as much as £100,000+ in some cases and an average of £15,000.

Departments and research centres will receive a share of net overhead income to support their research activities through Research Infrastructure and Investment Funding (RIIF) amounting to £1.5 million this year.

PFRs will be paid monthly in arrears backdated to April 2013. RIIF funds will be paid annually in arrears, and will be backdated to the beginning of 2012-13. Kerry Fyffe will contact all grantholders with PFRs and departments and centres with RIIF funds.

The new RCUK Policy on Open Access requires research papers or conference proceedings derived from research that is funded wholly or in part by the Research Councils to be published in journals that:

• either provide immediate, unrestricted access to the final version of the paper via its own website, using a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence - this is referred to as the gold route to open access and may involve payment of an article processing charge (APC) to the publisher.
• or permit the deposit of the final accepted manuscript in a repository such as LSE Research Online - this is the green route to open access and does not involve payment of an APC.

LSE encourages authors to comply with the RCUK Policy by choosing the green route wherever possible, depositing copies of research papers in LSE Research Online. Ask the publisher, check your agreement and contact us to see how long an embargo there is on your route to green open access. If this embargo meets the requirement of your RCUK funder, the gold route need not apply.

What copyright licence will be on your published article? RCUK requires a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence on all its funded open access publications. For items which do not have a green option, the LSE Institutional Publication Fund is available and more information can be found in the RCUK Open Access policy FAQs.

Teaching Symposium 2013, on Wednesday 29 May, presents a great opportunity to hear the latest thinking on teaching and learning strategy and practice at LSE.

The day’s events include Professor Craig Calhoun’s keynote address, discussions led by the School’s deans and the pro-director for teaching and learning, and an informal breakfast session with some of LSE’s teaching prize winners.

The toilet refurbishment works taking place in the Library are now approaching a stage where the contractors must cut through the floor. Unfortunately this will involve some noise disruption.

The works will take place on Thursday 23 May between 7am and 9am. The areas that are expected to be affected are the Library’s lower ground floor, ground floor and first floor. The Library apologises for any inconvenience this may cause.
 

This year's Senior Common Room (SCR) Strawberry Tea will be held on Wednesday 12 June at 4pm-6pm in the SCR.

The Strawberry Tea is an opportunity for SCR members to invite their LSE friends and colleagues, past and present, to join them and relax at the traditional occasion for saying farewell to members of the SCR who are leaving the School to begin their retirement.

Any member of staff may attend the Strawberry Tea. Details and the booking form are on the SCR website.
 

Shortcut for reopening frequently used files and programs in Windows 7

Windows 7 (and Windows 8, too) includes a great time-saving feature called ‘pinning’ files and programs to the Task Bar. This allows you to open files, and the program for editing them, directly from the Task Bar at the bottom of the screen. (By default, Windows Explorer is already ‘pinned’ there next to the Start button.)

1. First, the program must be pinned to the task bar. Open the program, right click on its icon in the taskbar and select Pin this program to the taskbar. Henceforth this icon will remain on the Task Bar even when the program is closed. Click the icon to reopen the program at any time.
2. Open Windows Explorer and find the file you want to pin to the taskbar.
3. Click and drag the file’s icon onto the relevant program icon in the taskbar. When a box appears saying Pin to Word 2010 (or the relevant program), release the mouse button.
4. To open both the file and the program, right click on the relevant program icon in the Task Bar and select the file name.

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

INeedPampering.com is offering LSE staff 80 per cent off hair and beauty treatments at two London salons.

Beauty offer: £300 worth of beauty therapy treatments for just £59.99 at Top to Toe Beauty Salon, located at 387 Kentish Town Road, London, NW5 2TJ. To take advantage of this offer, click here and apply the discount code T2T33 at the checkout.

Hair offer: £300 worth of hair-cuts/colour and other services for just £79.99 at Corinne and Co Hair Salon, located at The InterContinental Hotel on Park Lane, London, W1J 7QW. To take advantage of this offer, click here and apply the discount code CC80 at the checkout.

This week's picture features the red stair treads in the internal stairwell of the newly renovated 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields building.

For more images like this, visit the Photography Unit.

Public policy towards wealth gap 'incoherent and contradictory'

Household wealth in Great Britain amounts to £5.5 trillion, even excluding pension rights - four times national income. It is far more unequally distributed than incomes or earnings. Official figures show that the top tenth of households owned 850 times the total wealth of the bottom tenth in 2008-10, if pension rights are added in. The top 1 per cent had 14 per cent of the total - an average of more than £5 million for each household.

Yet the results of a three year research programme presented in a new book by LSE academics finds that tax, benefit, care, housing, and education policies are inconsistent and fail to narrow the wealth gap. The research was funded by the Nuffield Foundation with support from the Economic and Social Research Council.

'Looking across tax and social policies, it is hard to discern a consistent pattern for the treatment of wealth and savings,' said Professor John Hills, director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at LSE. More
 

Management targets that direct nurses and doctors to treat care and compassion as a low priority, poor working relationships and culture which results in healthcare staff being unable (or unwilling) to prevent poor care, and overwhelming workloads which can cause staff burnout and compassion fatigue are key cause for ‘patient neglect’ academics at LSE have found.

‘Patient Neglect in Healthcare Institutions’, published in the BMC: Health Service Research journal, is the first systematic literature review on the nature, frequency and causes of patient neglect in hospitals.

Cooking as a Political Act
On: Thursday 30 May at 6.30pm in the New Theatre, East Building
Speaker: Professor Michael Pollan, professor of journalism at Berkeley and one of Time Magazine’s one hundred most influential people in the world.

From Response to Resilience: the role of the engineer in disaster risk reduction
On: Tuesday 4 June at 6.30pm in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Jo da Silva (pictured), founding director of Arup International Development.

France's Place in Europe - One Year into the Socialist Presidency
Date: Wednesday 5 June at 6.30pm in the Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Jean-François Copé, founder of think tank Generation France and leader of the French opposition.

LSE Chill is back for its final show of the academic year on Friday 24 May from 6pm in the 4th Floor Café, Old Building.

The session is open to all and will feature some dynamic acts, so why not take a break from studying and chill. LSE Chill is now generously sponsored by Peer Support.

The line-up for the evening is as follows:

6-6.30pm Monika and Jon
Monika and Jon are two LSE graduates bringing some music into their hectic student lives. They will be playing acoustic covers (vocals and guitars) of their favourite songs.

6.45-7.15pm The Inheritors
The Inheritors, in their various incarnations, have been playing a mixture of original, melodic pop for about two years. They will be performing songs from their two, soon-to-be released albums.

7.30-8pm Sneha Sundaram and Ed Bayes
Sneha and Ed will play some of their favourite, folksy songs and some originals.

Podcasts of public lectures and events

Does Market-led Development have a Future?
Speakers: Dr Ha-Joon Chang and Professor Danny Quah
Recorded: Wednesday 15 May, approx. 91 minutes
Click here to listen

Who Owns the 'One Nation' and What Does It Stand For?
Speakers: Lord Glasman and Michael Gove
Recorded: Wednesday 15 May, approx. 64 minutes
Click here to listen

Anthropology and Emotion
Speaker: Dr Andrew Beatty
Recorded: Thursday 16 May, approx. 59 minutes
Click here to listen

Training and development opportunities for staff

Courses scheduled for next week include:

• Twitter and Hashtags: participating online at conferences and events

• Software Surgery

• From Publication to Impact: Anne Will-Harzing

• One-to-one IT Training

• Moodle Next Steps Training

• Great Ideas for Bringing Lectures to Life

These are just some of the events running next week. To receive a monthly list of all events, subscribe to the staff training and development email by clicking here. To find out more about training and development across the School and for links to booking pages, see lse.ac.uk/training.
 

From Publication to Impact: using Google Scholar and Publish or Perish to measure research impact
On: Wednesday 29 May at 3pm. Location to be confirmed
Speaker: Anne-Wil (pictured), professor in international management at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

This presentation will show how online access of the academic literature through Google Scholar can be used to develop sophisticated metrics of academic research impact. We review various measures of research impact, but focus mainly on citation analysis.

First, we will discuss why every academic should be interested in citation analysis. Subsequently, we review why it is important to complement the traditional subscription-based source of citation data, Thomson ISI’s Web of Science or Scopus, with Google Scholar. In the second part of the presentation, we will cover the use Google Scholar as a source for citation analysis in some detail. It will show how to track your own citations, which citation metrics to use and how to present your case. This part of the presentation will involve a demonstration of the use of the software program 'Publish or Perish'.

On: Thursday 13 June from 3.30-5pm.

One in seven employees in any workforce is caring for someone who is ill, frail or has a disability. Caring for adults is different from childcare, it can happen without warning and/or the need for care may be time limited or long-term. Caring for adults may also be at a distance, and the carer may not even recognise themself as a carer.

As part of Carers Week, a UK-wide annual awareness campaign which takes place Monday 10 to Sunday 16 June, HR is holding a workshop on Balancing Work and Being the Carer of an Adult.

Balancing Work and Being the Carer of an Adult: a workshop for staff or partners of staff who are carers of an ill, elderly or disabled family member, friend or partner will be held on Thursday 13 June from 3.30-5pm.

The workshop includes practical tools and insights for staff and partners of staff who are carers of an ill, elderly or disabled family member or friend.

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

• Assistant space planning manager, Estates: planning
• Course tutor, Department of Methodology
• LSE postdoctoral fellowship in political science, Government
• LSE fellow in economic geography, Geography and Environment
• LSE fellow in economics, Economics
• LSE fellow in human geography, Geography and Environment
• Learning technologist (media specialist), Centre for Learning Technology
• Library assistant, Library: academic services
• Library assistant (research support), Library: academic services
• MSc and external relations assistant (part-time), European Institute
• Marketing and recruitment manager, Summer School and Executive Programmes
• Post-doctoral research assistant (empirical analysis of climate change policies), Grantham Research Institute
• Post-doctoral research assistant (trade and competiveness), Grantham Research Institute
• Research officer (ESRC), Statistics
• Senior library assistant (cataloguing and metadata), Library: collections services
• Senior library assistant (digital library), Library: collections services
• Senior subwarden (Bankside House), Residential and Catering Services Division
• Subwarden (multiple vacancies, various locations), Residential and Catering Services Division
• Web, events and communications assistant, International Development

A long serving member of Library staff, Barbara Humphries (pictured), will retire on Friday 31 May.

Barbara has worked in the LSE Library since February 1979. Starting her career in cataloguing and later in serials, more recently Barbara has worked for a number of years in Collection Development, selecting books in all subjects published in the UK and in Spanish and Portuguese.

Two very successful projects to digitise and promote many of the Library’s historical pamphlets owe much to Barbara’s efforts and expertise. Also an expert in labour history and business information, Barbara has served the Department of Management as their academic support librarian.

She will be missed by many across the School and, not least, by her colleagues in the Library, who wish her a long and happy retirement.