Category Archives: Current Affairs

Free Times Newspaper Subscription for all Loughborough Students

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Loughborough University is partnering with The Times and Sunday Times to offer all students a complimentary subscription to the newspaper’s digital content.

For the next 12 months, students will have digital access to The Times website and its smartphone and tablet apps.

The newspaper will also be hosting a series of exclusive events over the next year featuring its journalists and key political figures.

As a subscriber, you’ll be able to access a number of benefits, including:

  • Smartphone and tablet apps with exclusive interactive features
  • Access to special events with journalists, movie previews and private views
  • Get Odean 2-for-1 cinema tickets every weekend
  • Exclusive access to Premier League and Premiership Rugby video highlights
  • Download a free ebook each month from Times+

To start your subscription, simply follow the instructions you will have been sent to your student email.

“It was all started by a Mouse…”

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Plastic Mickey Mouse figure from the Glud Museum, Denmark, reproduced under CC License

One of the most iconic characters of modern times celebrates their 90th birthday this very day – the one and only Mickey Mouse!

Created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks in 1928 for Steamboat Willie, one of the Disney Studios’ earliest sound animations, the character has gone on to appear in over 130 films and countless spin-offs in every conceivable medium – and became the figurehead of the Disney phenomenon. Walt Disney himself acknowledged the debt his studio owed to the lovable cartoon rodent – “it was all started by a mouse”, he declared in an interview in 1954!

We have a wide range of books about Walt Disney, his films and Mickey Mouse among our art and cinema books on Level 2.

You can also explore more about the history and influence of Disney (and Mickey!) at the British Film Institute website and our online art databases including Art Retrospective and Art & Architecture Source.

World Space Week 2018

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Boldly going where no one has gone before, it’s World Space Week, the annual celebration of mankind’s exploration of outer space.

Each year, the World Space Week Association (WSWA) selects a theme for the upcoming World Space Week (WSW) to provide a focus of the activities and events that take a place throughout the world, during 4th-10th October . The 2018 theme is Space Unites the World, which celebrates the role of space in bringing the world closer together.  The theme is inspired by UNISPACE+50, an historic gathering of world space leaders which will occur in 2018. UNISPACE+50 will promote cooperation between spacefaring and emerging space nations and help space exploration activities become open and inclusive on a global scale.

Launched specifically on 4th October by the UN General Assembly to mark the successful launch of Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, and the signing of the ‘Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies’ on October 10th 1967, World Space Week has been held every year since 1999, and seeks primarily to educate people about the positives of space exploration and encourage better public understanding and support for space programmes.

We have many and various astronomical and astronautic resources in the Library, including access to the  National Geophysical Data Centre database, which provides the latest satellite geophysical data from the Sun to the Earth and Earth’s sea floor and solid earth environment, including Earth observations from space, and the NASA Scientific & Technical Information database, which includes up-to-date information about NASA’s space projects. We also hold a good selection of books about space & space exploration in general.

To find out more about World Space Week, visit their website here:

http://www.worldspaceweek.org/

Stephen Hawking 1942-2018

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Visionary scientist Stephen Hawking has died aged 76.

Famed for his study of black holes and relativity, he wrote several best-selling science books including most notably A Brief History of Time, which sold over ten million copies worldwide.

At the age of 22 he was given only a few years to live after being diagnosed with a rare form of motor neurone disease, which left him confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak except through a voice synthesiser, but he defied the odds and overcame his disability to become the scientist widely regarded as the greatest since Albert Einstein.

He gained immense popularity outside the academic world, including appearances in popular TV shows including The Simpsons and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In 2014, he was portrayed by Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, a dramatic reconstruction of his early life and struggles.

We have several works by and about Stephen Hawking in the Library, including A Brief History of Time – you can find them here – http://bit.ly/2p8Nfqi

Online Daily Newspaper Access

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While our daily newspaper deliveries have been temporarily suspended, what better time to remind people that you can still catch up with the latest news via Nexis UK.

The Nexis UK database provides a wide range of UK, European and U.S. newspapers online, on the day of publication. You can find all of the UK national papers as well as a wide range of regional titles.

Nexis UK can be found via the Library Catalogue, you just need your Athens username and password.

http://www.lexisnexis.com/uk/nexis/auth/athensredirection.do

Congratulations to Kazuo Ishiguro

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Congratulations to British author Kazuo Ishiguro, who was today announced as the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Best known for the 1989 Booker Prize winning novel The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan in 1954 but emigrated with his family to England in 1960. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982) actually started life as his masters thesis! He has published 8 novels in total so far, and two – Remains of the Day (1993) and Never Let Me Go (2010) – have been successfully adapted for cinema.

The Library holds copies of several of his novels among our literature section on Level 2, along with a broad spectrum of representative and critical works of the greatest authors of all time.

I, Daniel Blake: Film Screening and Discussion

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The Edward Herbert Building is hosting a free screening of the film, I, Daniel Blake, followed by a discussion led by CPWS researchers, next Wednesday (3rd May) at 6pm.

I, Daniel Blake is an important and powerful film about the nature of work and life on benefits in contemporary Britain. Directed by Ken Loach and starring Dave Johns as the title character, it won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Festival.

The event is organised and sponsored by the Centre for Professional Work and Society (CPWS), in the School of Business and Economics at Loughborough University.

The screening is free, but booking is necessary. To attend, visit the link below:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/i-daniel-blake-film-screening-and-discussion-tickets-32913947503

Woman(kind)ness, Strength and Resilience: A Celebration of Women Worldwide

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Next Monday sees the start of a week-long series of events on campus as part of the International Women’s Day initiative, raising awareness for women’s roles in different sociocultural environments, highlighting gender inequalities, and proposing creative ways towards gender equity and equality.

In collaboration with Charnwood Arts, Living Without Abuse-Loughborough, and Human Rights and Equalities Charnwood, the week includes photo and art exhibitions, crafts, theatre performances, and science-based public talks aiming to celebrate women worldwide, beginning on Monday 6th March.

Full details of the programme of events can be found via the link below:

https://www.internationalwomensday.com/Activity/7669/Woman-kind-ness-Strength-and-Resilience-A-celebration-of-women-worldwide-2017

On the Radar – Syncopolitics

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Join Dr Fred Dalmasso of the School of Arts, English & Drama next week for a lively discussion on the notion of ‘syncopolitics’

Dr Dalmasso has coined the term syncopolitics in response to Catherine Clément’s seminal book, Syncope – the Philosophy of Rapture, where she stresses that “syncope is spectacle, it shows off, exposes itself, smashes, breaks, interrupts the daily course of other people’s lives, people at whom the raptus is aimed.” Dr Dalmasso will look in particular at how the image of syncope and the syncope of the image might radically displace or dissolve the self and thus offer strategies of resistance against norms through renouncement or disappearance; a recess of the image that he considers as a sine qua non condition for thinking politics as what can only happen within a horlieu (an out-place or non-place) of representation: a syncopolitics that resonates with what Badiou calls inexist[a]nce.

The discussion will be taking place in the Radar ArtSpace in the Edward Barnsley Building on Wednesday 15th February between 2-3pm. Entrance is free but booking is required – please email aed.research@lboro.ac.uk if you would like to attend.

Database Trial – BBC Monitoring

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bbcWe’ve gone global with this month’s trial resource, which is likely to prove of great interest to anyone with an interest in current affairs.

BBC Monitoring is a division of the BBC World Service Group that provides Open Source information services for governments, NGOs, analysts, academics, multinationals and international organisations. Many of BBCM’s staff have strong academic backgrounds and its operations are based on round-the-clock monitoring of TV, radio, press, internet, news agency and social media sources.

BBCM analysts are located in the UK and worldwide and its main focus areas are geopolitics, terrorism and security-related issues, and the media & sociological impact of major world and regional events. BBCM has particular expertise in the Russian sphere, the Middle East, Iran, Central Asia and Africa, as well as opening a new office in Miami to increase the quality and quantity of coverage for Latin America. The BBC Monitoring portal contains c.4 million stories and 5,000 reports, an archive back to 1996, as well as up-to-date government lists and reference material.

To begin searching go to https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/#/login

Click on the Login box

Click on ‘Login via Academic Institution’

Click on ‘Loughborough’

Login with your Loughborough University username and password (not Athens)

The trial will run until January 31st 2017 – please note that not all content is accessible to trial users.

We welcome feedback – good or bad – on this trial, please contact Steve Corn ( s.c.corn@lboro.ac.uk )with your comments.