Professor Mark Harvey has been invited to be a Visiting Scholar at the National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan to facilitate collaborative research on sustainable consumption and bottled water, with Dr William Li, a graduate from the Department of Sociology.
The collaboration stemmed from a job posting to the Department’s Twitter and Facebook feeds for a research officer to support Professor Harvey’s ESRC funded project on bottled water. Read the rest of this entry »
Mark Harvey and Felix Behling‘s work on false employment in the construction industry is gathering media attention:
These tax-evasive labour practises practices are estimated to cost the UK tax payer conservatively £1.7 billion per year.
A number of papers have recently been published by CRESI staff and colleagues on the issue of bio-fuels.
The first, by Sarah Pilgrim and Mark Harvey reports a series of interviews with staff at a number of NGOs (Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF, RSPB, Friends of the Earth) and suggests that in many cases the development of NGO policy has been driven more by narrow political opportunities for influence than by broader and more coherent policy responses to global climate change or economic development, or indeed rigorous assessment of the scientific evidence. Read the rest of this entry »
Writing in the 29th October 2010 issue of Science Mark Harvey and co-authors outline how the development of powerful, high-throughput technologies, together with globalization of scientific research, presents the biomedical research community with unprecedented challenges for the management, archiving, and distribution of data and bioresources. In this context scientific progress depends on efficient and open sharing to generate maximum value.
They suggest that despite this the provision of public funding for these long-term repositories does not fall into the traditional model of science funding and so although funding agencies may exhort their experimental investigators to develop a “dissemination plan” for the data and bioresources they develop, in reality, such requirements are often not fulfilled with few if any consequences. Read the rest of this entry »
Members of CRESI have recently finished consultancy work for Essex County Council to investigate the causes of NEET status in the region, that is those who are Not in Education, Employment or Training. Dr Paul Stoneman employed latent class analysis to uncover typologies of unemployed young people in the region and, along with Dr Darren Thiel, reviewed the knowledge base on the causes of youth unemployment. Their work will provide the basis for more in-depth research which aims to track secondary school students and NEETs to gain a better understanding of the pathways to NEET status.
Mark Harvey‘s research featured at a Westminster Energy, Environment & Transport Biofuel seminar at the Royal Society on 22nd July 2010.
“Mark echoed what other speakers also noted that in order to deliver a transition to sustainable transport energy strong, long-term strategic political direction is required, together with strong state support and steering from basic science to commercialisation. ‘Market signals will not drive radical, comprehensive or urgent technological change,’ he added.” Read more coverage of the seminar from the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI).
CRESI’s Prof. Diane Elson‘s work featured recently in two panel sessions at the United Nations as part of the 54th Annual UN Commission on the Status of Women (March 1-12, 2010).
The first, “Vision for A Better World: From Economic Crisis to Equality” centred on the contributions of the Casablanca Dreamers, an international group of female activists and thinkers established in 2007 with the aim of empowering women in the developing world in order to help them overcome poverty.
Speaking to MediaGlobal, Diane who is a member of the Casablanca Dreamers criticised the response of many governments to the current economic crisis Read the rest of this entry »
More than 30 years ago Miriam Glucksmann left her academic job to take up a job on an assembly line at a motor mechanics factory in London. A new updated edition of the influential book, Women On The Line, that resulted from Miriam’s experiences has just been published. Listen to Miriam talking about the book on Radio 4′s Thinking Allowed.
