Don't miss....

Former Prime Minister of Belgium, Herman Van Rompuy, will be at LSE on Friday 19 June discussing  'The EMU: a work in progress'.

Centre Buildings update

The East Building, Clare Market, The Anchorage and part of St Clement's are no longer available for use as they are now being prepared for demolition.

Dr Marianne Colbran

Before becoming an academic, Dr Colbran worked as a television scriptwriter for thirteen years, writing for programmes such as The Bill, Brookside and Casualty.

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LSE 120^th anniversary - Summer term 2015

Adrian Thomas, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, provides an update on the 120th anniversary celebrations taking place this term.

Did you know? LSE’s Bob McKenzie, Professor of Sociology, co-presented BBC election coverage across three decades in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. He popularised the use of the swingometer to show the national swing in votes and estimate seats for parties. This amazing example of LSE expertise in action is just one of the many reasons we are celebrating LSE’s history in this, our 120th year.

Lent term saw the launch of our 120th anniversary celebrations at the annual LSE Literary Festival. If you missed it, you can watch Mick Cox’s talk on the School’s history or the Ghosts of the Past online photo gallery online now in LSE history in multimedia.

Summer term will see huge change on campus as the Centre Buildings work begins, so this is a great time to remember our past in our buildings. Keep an eye out for historical campus tours and more on the LSE history blog - including an East Building farewell video blog.

We’ll also be remembering the contribution of our people, with July’s Alumni Reunion weekend having a special 120th anniversary theme. Look out for more information about a new LSE oral history project which will be launched very soon. In June, LSE will mark the centenary year of former academic and Nobel Laureate Arthur Lewis with an event and exhibition. If you need to get up to speed on Arthur Lewis and LSE, a blog and video are online now.

New Gearty Grilling online

A new Gearty Grilling video, part of the series of short video debates between Conor Gearty, director of the IPA and professor of human rights law, and leading researchers at LSE, is now online.

This week Chris Pissarides (pictured), Regius Professor of Economics and Nobel Prize winner, discusses the importance of effective policies to tackle low wages and unemployment. More
 

Library opens Exhibition Space

On Friday 1 May the Library opened its new Exhibition Space, a state of the art facility which showcases the best and most interesting items from the Library’s collections.

The Exhibition Space includes a video wall which projects images alongside two display cases to show collection items, and marks the final phase of the investment and building work which the School committed to in the transfer of the Women’s Library in 2013.

The Exhibition Space’s inaugural exhibition focuses on the subject of campaigning, and explores connections between The Women’s Library @ LSE collection and the Library’s collections by looking at campaigns for the vote, peace and for gay and women’s equality. Please visit the Library website for the Exhibition Space’s opening hours or find out more information on the Library’s blog.
 

Centre Buildings update

With six weeks until Houghton Street closes in mid-June the Centre Buildings project continues to gather momentum.

The East Building, Clare Market, The Anchorage and the eastern part of St Clement's are no longer available for use as they are being prepared for demolition. These buildings will be completely empty by Monday 15 June when our appointed demolition contractor, Cantillon, will start to set up their site.

IMT services based in St Clement's will be joining the rest of the division by moving to Aldwych House over the next month as the Centre Buildings works continue.

Staff and postgraduate students are reminded, if you need face-to-face IT support, please continue to visit the IMT walk in centre in St Clement's where you can get help with the following services:

• LSE account password reset (with valid LSE ID)
• New email account set-up (with valid LSE ID)
• Troubleshooting LSE owned Hardware such as laptops or phones
• Collection of new LSE equipment and software (support team will confirm when ready)
• Apple Hour (specialist help and support for both LSE and personal devices) 2-3pm Tuesday and 11am-12pm Thursday
• Laptop Surgery (advice and hands-on assistance connecting to LSE resources and the LSE network using personally owned equipment) 10am-4pm, weekdays during term time

Located in room S198, first floor of St Clements - the walk in centre will remain open from Monday to Friday, 9.30am-5.30pm until early June before being relocated to the first floor of the Library.

Please note Reprographics will continue to be located in the Old Building and the Service Desk will remain in St Clements until the end of May before also relocating to the third floor of Aldwych House.

If you have any questions regarding our move or experience any disruption to your IT services, please contact us on:

• it.servicedesk@lse.ac.uk 020 7107 5000 (staff and post graduate research students)
• it.helpdesk@lse.ac.uk 020 7955 6728 (taught students)
   

Free copies of Microsoft Office software

All staff are now eligible for free copies of Microsoft Office software on as many as five PCs, five Macs and five Tablets

Using your LSE email address and password, you can log in to Office 365 and download Office software onto your personal devices. The Office suite includes:

• Word
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• Outlook
• OneNote
• Publisher
• Lync
• Access

To get your free copies, please visit https://portal.office.com/Home
For more information, see https://lse.ac.uk/imt/office365pro

USS pension scheme consultation

As staff will be aware, the consultation is underway regarding changes to the USS pension scheme.

We are holding presentations to provide further information on the proposals and to answer any questions regarding the proposed changes:

• Wednesday 13 May at 12 noon in the Old Theatre, Old Building
• Wednesday 20 May at 3.30pm in NAB.LG.01, New Academic Building

It is expected that these sessions should last no longer than an hour and no booking is required.

The full consultation document, detailing the changes, is available on the USS consultation website as well as interactive modelling tools and other information. Printed copies of the consultation document are available from the Pension Team on request by emailing hr.pensions@lse.ac.uk.

Need a nursery?

Do you have young children (three months to five years) and need a nursery near the School?

If so, please take the very short survey at surveymonkey.com/s/Y9JBLN2. We are particularly keen to hear from staff and students who could use the LSE Nursery but don’t.
 

Wellbeing Stall - de-stressing

The Student Wellbeing Service will be running another Wellbeing Stall outside the Saw Swee Hock Student Centre on Friday 15 May from 11am-2pm, looking at ways to de-stress.

Staff from the Disability and Wellbeing Service, Residential Services and Fitness First will be joined by LSESU officers, peer supporters, and student counsellors to help people think of things that they can do to help them de-stress.

Free 10 minute massages will be available plus staff from Fitness First will be carrying out a fitness demo and providing nutritional advice.

LSE Methods Summer Programme 17-28 August 2015

Intensive courses in social research methods for students, academics and professionals. Fifteen per cent discount for LSE staff, students, and alumni.

For more information and to apply, please visit lse.ac.uk/methods.
 

LSE Perspectives

The latest LSE Perspectives gallery is available online. Each month LSE Arts selects 12 photos to feature in this gallery, which features scenes from across the world.

Running short of space on your H: drive? Consider moving email you’ve archived there back into your enlarged email account.

Until recently, archiving email was good practice because each user’s email account size was quite limited. By default, archives were stored on the user’s H: drive. Now that all staff and students have 50GB of email storage space, you may find it helpful to transfer archived messages back into your email account.

You can move or work with your email archive in the same way you would any email folder. (Do make time to remove clutter before moving your archive. If you store large attachments in your mail folder, even 50 GB will fill up sooner than you expect!) If you’re unsure of how to do this, please see our guide Adding Archived email back to your Mailbox after being migrated to Office365.

Two bedroom apartment available in Stratford

Spacious, fully furnished, two bedroom apartment in Stratford, with a balcony, is available to let from 1 June or the last week of May.

The flat is modern (in an apartment block built in 2008 with an entry-phone system), with a fully fitted open-plan kitchen and in an excellent condition. The two, double bedrooms are equal size. The apartment is quiet, bright, warm and energy-efficient. It uses gas central heating.

It is located within a 10-15-minute walk to Stratford station and Westfield, and a five minute walk to West Ham Park which has excellent tennis courts. All major supermarkets are within walking distance. You can be at LSE within 40-45 minutes door-to-door.

Rent is £1,500 pcm. Please contact Piotr Fryzlewicz at p.fryzlewicz@lse.ac.uk for more information.

Will it be all change at Westminster?

For more images like this, visit the Photography Unit.

Using the internet helps people benefit financially in the ‘real world’, but not necessarily socially, according to research from LSE, the University of Oxford and the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

The ‘From digital skills to tangible outcomes’ project looked at the tangible benefits people gain from using the internet and which groups of people profit, through a series of in-depth interviews and surveys in the UK and the Netherlands.

The researchers found that 47 per cent of people questioned said that their internet use had translated into an economic benefit. In contrast, only 24 per cent said that the internet had improved their social lives offline.

Two new impact case studies have been added to the impact website:

Shaping the debate on the future of human rights
LSE research by Professor Francesca Klug (pictured), Director of the Human Rights Futures Project, shaped discussions and influenced policy makers during political and legal debate about the Human Rights Act.

Regulating the news media to balance press freedom with individual rights
Research by Dr Damian Tambini (pictured), Senior Lecturer in the Media and Communications Department and Director of the Media Policy Project, influenced the Leveson Inquiry and other media entities around proposed changes in press culture and regulation.

To access and search all 70 impact case studies, click here. You can access and view the 25 research impact videos here.

New LSE event - The EMU: a work in progress

On: Friday 19 June from 6.30-8pm in the Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Herman Van Rompuy (pictured)

Herman Van Rompuy is a Belgian politician who formerly served as Prime Minister of Belgium and then as the first President of the European Council in the European Union.

Dealing with China
On: Monday 11 May at 6pm. The venue will be confirmed to ticketholders
Speaker: Hank Paulson (pictured)

The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian traditions and a sustainable future
On: Monday 11 May at 6.30pm in the New Theatre, East Building
Speaker: Professor Prasenjit Duara

The Election and the Left
On: Tuesday 12 May at 6.30pm in the Old Theatre, Old Building
Speakers: Professor John Curtice, Polly Toynbee (pictured), and Hilary Wainwright

The Moral Challenge of Robust Cultural Pluralism
On: Thursday 14 May at 6.30pm in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Professor Richard A Shweder

Decolonising Gender
On: Monday 18 May
Speaker: Professor Raewyn Connell
Ticket release date: Monday 11 May

On: Monday 11 May from 6.30-8pm in the Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Paul Kennedy (pictured), J Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Director of International Security Studies at Yale, and Distinguished Fellow of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.

The rise of the West was by no mean inevitable. But a number of crucial changes from the explosion of sea-faring in the 16th century through the spread of the steam engine to the incredible surge in American industrial productivity in the years before World War I made it both unstoppable and irreversible. Taken together these underlying tectonic shifts - occurring below the surface of what Fernand Braudel has termed ‘the history of events’ - transformed the global system and paved the way for the creation of what was to become the modern world.

On: Monday 11 May from 6.30-8pm in the Peacock Theatre, Portugal Street

Paul Dolan (pictured), Professor of Behavioural Science at LSE and bestselling author of Happiness by Design, will host an engaging and personal account of his experience living as a stammerer at a fundraising evening for Action for Stammering Children.

Paul will be joined by Elaine Kelman who runs the Michael Palin Centre where Paul received transformative therapy for his stammer. The Centre is supported by Action for Stammering Children, who, along with the British Stammering Association, will benefit from the proceeds from the ticket sales.

There will be a live Q&A session with the whole audience and a book signing at the end.

On: Monday 11 May from 6-7.30pm in the Cañada Blanch Room, Cowdray House
Speaker: Dr Andrea Lorenzo Capussela, author.

The West went to war for Kosovo, administered it for nine years, made it independent, supervised it for four years, and gave it unprecedented amounts of aid. The aim was to erect a stable and well-governed democracy. The outcome is a poor, ill-governed and still fragile state, threatening Europe’s internal security and the stability of the Balkans.

The Great Disruption - LSE Entrepreneurship event with Adrian Wooldridge, management editor of The Economist

On: Tuesday 12 May from 6.30pm in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

Disruptive forces have reshaped our world faster than ever before. New technologies are shaking industries to their foundations. Emerging countries are gathering strength. A new generation of entrepreneurs are experimenting with powerful combinations of new technologies and new business models.

Adrian Wooldridge (pictured), The Economist’s management editor and author of the Schumpeter column, will talk about how we can understand this new world order, and discuss how we can cope with the downsides while exploiting the upsides.

The Colombian Transition: peacemaking and peace building in context

On: Tuesday 12 May from 6.30-7.45pm in the Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Sergio Jaramillo Caro, High Commissioner for Peace of the Government of Colombia.

This event expects to discuss the current status and prospects of the peace negotiations and the future implementation of the agreements. It is also part of an important and interdisciplinary effort made by LSE, through LSE IDEAS, to further engage with the Colombian peace process and its future implementation along with the regional impacts of such enterprise.

Mr Jaramillo Caro will give a first-hand account of the current condition and future prospects of the peace negotiations and emphasise the need to implement a comprehensive model of territorial peace that combines peace building and transitional justice. Mr Jaramillo will reflect on the dilemmas of peacemaking and peace building in the Colombian context.

This event is free and open to all with no ticket or pre-registration required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. More
 

On: Wednesday 13 May from 6.30-8.30pm in room 32L.G03, 32 Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Speakers: Dr Tasha Fairfield, Dr Robert Falkner, and Professor David Soskice

Inequality and taxation are fundamental problems of modern times. How and when can democracies tax economic elites? This new book develops a theoretical framework that refines and integrates the classic concepts of businesses' instrumental (political) power and structural (investment) power to explain the scope and fate of tax initiatives targeting economic elites in Latin America after economic liberalisation. The book's in-depth analysis and close attention to policymaking processes contribute insights on business power and prospects for redistribution in unequal democracies.

Encountering the Past in Turkey

On: Monday 11, Tuesday 12 and Wednesday 13 May (Monday 6-8pm, Tuesday 10am-6.30pm, and Wednesday 9.30am-1.15pm) on the LSE campus.

This three day conference, organised by LSE Contemporary Turkish Studies, explores how, why, under what conditions, and among which groups did willingness to confront the Armenian Genocide and other violent episodes in Turkish history came into being.

What kinds of strategies are used by different groups to promote coming to terms with the past as well as avoiding it? What transformative power can we expect from this numerically limited but strongly articulated movement? What are the implications of encountering the past for contemporary dynamics in Turkey? By doing so, it is hoped that the conference will contribute to promoting acts of reconciliation that have begun in Turkey.

The conference will feature several prestigious speakers and moderators, including Professor Marc David Baer.

On: Tuesday 19 May from 6.30-8pm in the Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Joseph E Stiglitz (pictured)

Why has inequality increased in the Western world and what can we do about it? In this new book, The Great Divide, Joseph Stiglitz expands on the diagnosis he offered in his best-selling book The Price of Inequality and suggests ways to counter this growing problem.

Professor Stiglitz argues that inequality is a choice: the cumulative result of unjust policies and misguided priorities. Ultimately, he believes our choice is not between growth and fairness; with the right policies, we can choose both.

The Value of Values to Build a World for the Common Good

On: Wednesday 20 May at 7pm in the Alumni Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Professor Kamran Mofid (pictured), Founder of Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative.

What would a world without poverty, hunger or injustice look like, and how could it function? Impossible dream? Professor Mofid will explain why he believes we already have the means to create a society that can support everyone’s needs.

For more information, click here. This event is free and open to all but registration is required. To register, email lecture@worldfaiths.org with your name and a note of how many people will be attending.
 

On: Monday 8-Wednesday 10 June from 11am-6pm at William Goodenough House, Mecklenburgh Square, London, WC1N 2AJ

Public Walkabout and Q&A with photographer Yusuf Agherdien
On: Thursday 11 June from 11am-12.30pm (booking is essential via Eventbrite)

Podcasts of public lectures and events

Integrating Financial Stability and Monetary Policy Analysis
Speaker: Øystein Olsen
Recorded: Monday 27 April, approx. 89 minutes

Is Politics Based on Morality?
Speakers: Dr Fabienne Peter, Professor Catherine Rowett, and Dr Stephen de Wijze
Recorded: Monday 27 April, approx. 94 minutes

Inequality: what can be done?
Speakers: Professor Sir Tony Atkinson, Tom Clark, and Professor Baroness Lister
Recorded: Thursday 30 April, approx. 80 minutes

Academic Development Programme Training Sessions

The Research Division would like to invite LSE academics and professional staff interested in research funding or already with an award to attend the following events.

What is Horizon2020?
Monday 11 May from 12-1.30pm
Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over seven years (2014-20). This session covers the Horizon2020 schemes, how they work, what they fund, and what to apply for. It will also outline upcoming calls in 2015. Lunch will be served.

Funding for seminars/networks/international workshops
Wednesday 20 May from 12.30-2 pm.
This session is about exploring different funding opportunities that fund workshop organisation, networking activity and collaborative actions. Examples include Leverhulme Trust International Networks grants, AHRC Research Networks, COST Actions, and Horizon2020 Coordination Actions. The session will be run by our Research Development Manager. A sandwich lunch will be served.

Excel Training for Centre Managers
Thursday 21 May from 12-1.30pm
This workshop is aimed at departmental/centre managers and other professional services staff who manage externally funded research grants. Find out what examples of spreadsheets are used by centre managers to manage their budgets, expenditure, and HR commitments. Come and learn tips and tricks and see how other professional services staff use Excel to meet their needs and share your experiences.

Funding Clinic
Wednesday 27 May from 2-4pm
A number of funding clinics will run throughout the term, with a small group of academics, around a table discussing the particulars of, for example, a specific funding scheme, specific application systems, specific research questions and themes. This clinic will focus on Economic and Social Research Council Standard Research Grants that have no deadlines. Run by LSE's Research Development Manager, the group will discuss their proposal ideas, the funding scheme, and the application system with examples from previously successful applications.

All training sessions are delivered to you by the Research Division in partnership with the Teaching and Learning Centre. For more information, email researchdivision@lse.ac.uk. For the list of upcoming events, click here. For daily updates, follow us on Twitter @LSE_RD.
 

Below are some of the vacancies currently being advertised at LSE.

• Administrator (internal only), South Asia Centre
• Course Convenor, Sociology
• Employer Engagement Adviser, LSE Careers Service
• HPC Service Coordinator, Information Management and Technology
• HPC Systems Support Analyst, Information Management and Technology
• Income Projects Administrator, Finance Division
• Institute Manager, International Inequalities Institute
• Fellow in Environment, Geography and Environment
• Fellow in Government (internal only), Government
• Fellow in Management (Decision Science), Management
• Fellow in Management (Human Resource Management, Employment Relations, or Organisational Behaviour), Management
• Fellow in Management (Information Systems), Management
• Fellow in Management (Operations Research), Management
• Fellow in Management (Public Management and Governance), Management
• Fellow in Media and Communications, Media and Communications
• Fellow in Migration and European Politics, Government
• Fellow in Qualitative Methodology, Methodology
• Fellow in Sociology, Sociology
• LSE100 Course Manager (internal only), LSE 100
• MSc Management and Exchanges Programme Coordinator, Management
• National Bank of Greece Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, Hellenic Observatory
• Policy Analyst and Research Advisor Research Officer, Grantham Research Institute
• Programme Portfolio Director, Management
• Residence Summer Assistants, Residential and Catering Services Division
• Senior Executive Officer, Directorate

Congratulations Joe

Congratulations to Joe Meegan of the Geography and Environment and Finance departments, who recently ran the Shakespeare Marathon in Stratford completing it in a time of three hours 15 minutes, smashing his previous personal best by around half an hour.