1 December – 18:00-20:00 – The Business of Inclusion in Football

Venue: B20 Torrington Square

Booking: None rquired

Join the Birkbeck Sport Business Centre and a special panel of senior figures from professional football for an evening of discussion and debate on how football takes its next steps on its journey to be the game that is truly ‘for everyone’.

The panel consists of senior executives from organisations who have taken the lead on inclusion in football and who will be vital in maintaining the momentum and taking football into the next era.

The evening will take as its particular focus inclusion for people from the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGB&T) communities.

1 December – 18:00-19:30 – [Oracle Talk] CSI Kernel: Finding a Needle in a Multiterabyte Haystack

Venue: B30 Malet Street

Booking: None required

In 1990, a typical Sun system had a single 10mhz cpu and 4MB of memory and might have run in the region of 30-50 processes. Today Oracle ships systems with 512 cpu’s and 4TB of memory and such systems have a few 100,000 processes at most. The roadmap suggests that by 2015 this will rise to cpu counts around 13,000 and 150TB of memory to serve workloads in excess of 1 million processes.

Like C.S.I., when a system fails a post-mortem is required.  A crash dump is the body, an image of the system memory at the time of failure. This talk looks at technical, logistical and tools challenges of diagnosing system failure after the fact when the body is 4TB in size and the challenges of scaling post-mortem failure diagnosis to ever larger configurations.

Dr Clive King is a Senior Staff Engineer in Oracle Solaris Engineering. He has worked for Sun — Oracle for 15 years in a variety of support, professional services and kernel engineering roles. His particular areas of focus are system performance, scalability and root causing system failures. He teaches problem solving, risk management and root cause analysis within Solaris Engineering.

He is a BCS examiner for a professional examination, a BCS academic panel member and has been a PhD external examiner. Outside work, he splits his time between family and mountain running.

There is an IEEE software paper on which the talk is based. Tim will give a few examples from his wider experience as well.

2 December – 09:15-17:30 – ‘On the Street Where you Live’: Bourdieusian analysis of socio-spatial hierarchy

Venue:  BSA meeting room in Imperial Wharf London

Booking: http://portal.britsoc.co.uk/public/event/eventBooking.aspx?id=EVT10395 – cost from £28

Key Note Speakers: Dr Paul Watt (Birkbeck) Dr Michaela Benson (Goldsmith) Dr Tracey Jensen (UEL) Dr Simon Harding (Middlesex University) and Stephen Crossley (Durham)

The relations between the social world and urban space have been of interest to sociologists since the Chicago School’s human ecology tradition. In today’s globalised world, urbanisation is increasingly manifesting itself in people’s everyday lives, expressed through the diverse social, cultural and political space in which class, cultural and gender differences are continuously produced, contested and reworked. The move towards austerity in UK government’s fiscal policy, the weakening of state planning for urban growth and changes in residences from state property to private property has resulted in escalating house prices and the gentrification of traditionally ‘no go’ areas for the middle-class. Social divisions and sociocultural relationships are becoming ever more spatially generated.

2 December – 13:00-14:30 – Studying Women’s Movements in Comparative Perspective: A New Measurement from the Research Network on Gender and Politics (RNGS) Project

Venue: Paul Hirst Seminar Room, Department of Politics, Birkbeck, 10 Gower Street

Booking: j.hansson@bbk.ac.uk

Speaker: Prof. Amy G. Mazur, Washington State University; and visiting professor at Birkbeck during the fall of 2014.

Scholars of women’s movements have thus far not had access to enough conceptual tools that permit systematic comparison across a variety of temporal, sectoral and cultural contexts in order to construct sound theory about movements themselves as well as their social and political impacts. This presentation will offer a way of comparing variations in women’s movement strength through conceptualization that builds from research on gender equality policy, state feminism, women’s movements, and social movements. This approach involves careful definition of movements and movement strength as well as the specification of their dimensions for empirical observation through description, comparison and assessment of change. Using data from the RNGS project about women’s movements from the 1970s to the early 2000s in 13 Western democracies, the talk will illustrate how this approach can advance the study of and theorizing about women’s movements both as drivers and outcomes.

2 December – 18:00-20:00 – Global PA Association Launch

Venue: Keynes Library, 46 Gordon Square

Booking: enquiries@globalpa-association.com

We are pleased to invite Personal Assistants interested in furthering their careers to the launch event of the Global PA Association. Drinks and canapes will be served from 6pm.

Guest speakers include:

Pia Larsen – Director of Procurement and Supply Chain, UCLH

Katrina Arratoon – Executive PA Magazine ‘PA of the Year’

Paula Moio – BBC

Michelle Barber – Network Rail

Please email Rosemary Parr to book your place in advance.

3 December – 16:00-17:00 – THE TRANSPORT INTERNET SEMINAR

Venue: Imperial College London

Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-transport-internet-foodtubes-electric-cargo-capsule-pipelines-tickets-12509194337

The Transport Internet & Foodtubes Project Team are presenting and discussing this planet saving project with scientists engineers and students at Imperial College London, at 4 pm to 5 pm on Wednesday 3rd December 2014. Dave Wetzel who was Vice-Chairman of Transport for London will describe the impact on cities and citizens, Noel Hodson will outline the new project as a basis for a new global transport industry and new jobs, and Professor Taylor will respond to technical questions from the audience.

We invite Engineering under-graduates, graduates, tutors and all those who are concerned about environmental issues and commerce – governments, banks, pipeline companies, freight companies, food companies, civil engineers, architects, media and concerned citizens etc. to attend.

5 December – 18:00-21:00 – Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image Guilt Screening-The Last of England

Venue: Birkbeck Cinema, Gordon Square

Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bisr-guilt-screening-tickets-12951382935

The Last of England
Derek Jarman, UK, 1987, 87 minutes
Presenter: James Brown

The Last of England is preoccupied with stray beauty and with violence.

Jarman appears in his warehouse studio, assembling a scrapbook. The film takes shape around him. Jarman conjures a vision of England out of his own Super 8 footage and home movies shot by his father and grandfather.

The Last of England is personal and poetic. Yet it is also a scathing critique of social and political reality. Echoing T.S. Eliot, Jarman writes, ‘My world is in fragments, smashed in pieces so fine I doubt I will ever re-assemble them’. Yet the film has the force of an indictment.