CK2702BlogPreservingCommercialideasMawroskivLightstormPlease find attached a Note on the above case heard in the District Court of California and some of the issues that are worth noting, in relation to the protection of ideas of all sorts – literary and dramatic, commercial and scientific.
The Economic and Social Research Council is, once again, offering its PhD students internships at policymaking organisations.
“Sitting in a university staring at statistical software all day, we can easily lose track of the reason many of us got into research in the first place—to try to answer important policy-related questions,” says social scientist Michael Sanders.
Sanders spent six months of last year working at the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team as part of the 2012 ESRC internship scheme before heading back to the University of Bristol’s Centre for Market and Public Organisation, where he is working on his PhD.
The 2013 scheme is looking for ESRC-funded PhD students to apply for internships at organisations including the Cabinet Office, the Office for National Statistics and the Scottish Government.
“We encourage all our researchers to make a difference, and one way of doing this is to engage with policymakers and practitioners in business and the public sector,” says Dawn Woodgate, head of postgraduate training and career development at the ESRC.
Sanders says he found spending time with policymakers helped him to focus on which research questions were most likely to help people, and how to communicate them to a non-academic audience, such as civil servants. He also had the opportunity to learn about research techniques from his hosts.
“I got first-hand experience in designing and running randomised controlled trials, which would have been much harder to get otherwise,” he says.
Katie Adolphus, A PhD student at the University of Leeds’ Institute of Psychological Sciences, says her placement at the British Heart Foundation opened her eyes to a career in policy. “I made contacts within the British Heart Foundation, and I also worked with partner charities such as Diabetes UK and Cancer Research UK, so I think I definitely made some contacts.”
The 95 internships on offer this year include participating in film campaigns about human trafficking, exploring the use of the police service’s social-media platform, and working with the Met Office to estimate the socio-economic benefits of reducing food waste through enhanced seasonal weather forecasts.
The deadline for applications is 8 March.
The HS&DR Programme aims to produce rigorous and relevant evidence on the quality, access and organisation of health services, and is now accepting applications to its researcher-led workstream. The closing date for applications is Wednesday 22 May 2013, by 1pm.
Under the researcher-led workstream, the HS&DR Programme will fund research to improve the quality, effectiveness and accessibility of the NHS. This includes both primary research and evidence syntheses, depending on the existing research and the most appropriate way of responding to important knowledge gaps. The aim is to fund research that will lead to improvements in health services that will be of greatest benefit to the NHS and to patients.
For more information and to access the application form and guidance notes, please click here
Contact us
tel: 023 8059 4304
email: hsdrinfo@southampton.ac.uk
web: www.netscc.ac.uk/hsdr
On 25 February the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) will launch a call for retail-themed KTPs as part of its £2.5 million Retail Sector Initiative, funding collaborative research and knowledge exchange activities in the sector. Their recent announcement states that—”Understanding the behaviours of individual people, communities and organisations is key to understanding the challenges now facing the retail sector”. They particularly welcome, therefore, proposals in the following areas:
1) the changing nature of the UK high street and changing retail spaces
2) e-commerce, m-commerce and omni-channel retailing
3) consumer (including ‘big’) data
For more information please see the following link to the pre-call announcement on the ESRC website:
The ESRC are holding a launch event for the Retail Sector Initiative on 28 February 2013, further information about this event is available at the following link:
A full briefing document will be available next week.
Contact Dominic Collins: d.collins@staffs.ac.uk , ext. 3404, for further information.
Please see the attached Blog reporting on the recent ECD visit to Brasov in order to establish important links with Brasov Romania in place of the regular legal information posting.
The Business, Innovation and Skills Committee will take further evidence from Lord Heseltine on Tuesday 12 February at 9.30am
The session will allow the Committee an opportunity to question Lord Heseltine on matters arising from the publication of his Report, No Stone Unturned in Pursuit of Growth, including the localism agenda, economic growth, industrial strategy, Local Enterprise Partnerships and the Regional Growth Fund.
Image: PA
The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has announced its high-level funding decisions, following the annual grant letter from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills on 14th January. Allocations to individual universities and colleges will be announced on 21 March. The HEFCE Board agreed £4.47 billion for distribution for the 2013-14 academic year. This breaks down as follows:
The full press release and links to further information on student number allocations is available at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2013/name,76482,en.html.
The European Commission today set out its first comprehensive strategy to prevent and respond to cyber disruptions and attacks. The new cybersecurity strategy along with a proposal on Network and Information Security aims to prevent and fight cybercrime, strengthen the security and resilience of networks and information security systems, and helps establish a more coherent European cybersecurity policy.
The international dimension also features prominently with the objective of establishing a coherent international cyberspace policy. At bilateral level, the document underscores that cooperation with the United States is particularly important and will be further developed, notably in the context of the EU-U.S. Working Group on Cybersecurity and Cybercrime.
“For cyberspace to remain open and free, the same norms, principles and values that the EU upholds offline, should also apply online,” said EU High Representative Catherine Ashton.
Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice President for the Digital Agenda, said, “The more people rely on the Internet, the more people rely on it to be secure. A secure internet protects our freedoms and rights and our ability to do business.”
The new EU cyber strategy comes on top of recent key advances in protecting citizens from online crimes, including establishing a European Cybercrime Center, proposing legislation on attacks against information systems, and the launch of a Global Alliance to fight child sexual abuse online
You can read the strategy Here
Horizon 2020 is the successor research and innovation funding programme to Framework Programme 7. Horizon 2020 will operate from 2014-2020 with a proposed overall budget of €80 billion. This programme will support three pillars of activity – Excellent Science, Industrial Leadership and Societal Challenges.
Each legislative part of Horizon 2020 implementation must be approved by the European Parliament, Council and Commission. These discussions are scheduled to be completed by summer 2013, before the end of the Irish presidency. Current issues to be resolved include the rules and rates for cost reimbursement, the detailed structured for the societal challenges pillar and widening the participation potential across all member states. Once these issues have been resolved the first calls are expected in early 2014.
This all depends on the budget negotiations, which are part of the overall EU budget for 2014-2020 (the Multi-Annual Financial Framework), subject for the summit meetings this week. Our UKRO annual visit on 13th February will provide more detailed information following on from these budget discussions. To register for this event contact externalprojects@staffs.ac.uk.
This report aims to establish what a well performing UK Catapult centre looks like, reviewing evidence from similar initiatives in other European countries. 32 international technology and innovation centres were surveyed to provide the evidence base for this report.
The research was carried out by the Big Innovation Centre between May 2012 and January 2013 with support from the Technology Strategy Board, the Institution for Engineering and Technology (IET) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).