International evaluation of current and future requirements for environmental engineering education

The field of environmental engineering is developing as a result of changing environmental requirements. In response, environmental engineering education (E3) needs to ensure that it provides students with the necessary tools to address these challenges. In this paper the current status and future development of E3 is evaluated based on a questionnaire sent to universities and potential employers of E3 graduates. With increasing demands on environmental quality, the complexity of environmental engineering problems to be solved can be expected to increase. To find solutions environmental engineers will need to work in interdisciplinary teams. Based on the questionnaire there was a broad agreement that the best way to prepare students for these future challenges is to provide them with a fundamental education in basic sciences and related engineering fields. Many exciting developments in the environmental engineering profession will be located at the interface between engineering, science, and society. Aspects of all three areas need to be included in E3 and the student needs to be exposed to the tensions associated with linking the three.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: current burden and future projections

Information about the comparative magnitude of the burden from various diseases and injuries is a critical input into building the evidence base for health policies and programmes. Such information should be based on a critical evaluation of all available epidemiological data using standard and comparable procedures across diseases and injuries, including information on the age at death and the incidence, duration and severity of cases who do not die prematurely from the disease. A summary measure, disability-adjusted life yrs (DALYs), has been developed to simultaneously measure the amount of disease burden due to premature mortality and the amount due to the nonfatal consequences of disease.

The wonderful possibilities of the future: Town planning and greater Brisbane

The 'greater city' movement in the 1920s in Australia was profoundly influenced by the growing town planning movement of the time. Brisbane was the only major metropolitan city in which local government amalgamations occurred, leading to a 'greater Brisbane' in 1925. The paper tries to identify reasons why, despite the close connection between the greater city movement and the early town planning movement, there was no formal town plan in place in Brisbane until 1965.

Present and future potential of pineapple biotechnology

Pineapple is an important crop for many countries in Central and South America as well as the Asia-Pacific region. Even though the history of the crop dates to pre-Colombian times there is a remarkable lack of commercial varieties with a single cultivar ‘Smooth Cayenne’ dominating the whole industry. Variety improvement is a very difficult task for pineapple breeders and very little progress has been made in this respect when compared to other crops more suitable to classical breeding approaches. This special characteristic makes pineapple specially suited for genetic engineering approaches that can transfer specific traits from other species into pineapple. In this presentation past and present efforts to use biotechnological methods for the improvement of pineapple will be reviewed. On-going biotechnology projects include control of flowering and control of ‘blackheart’ disease. The development of pineapple biotechnology, as with any other crop, is dependent on the availability of a number of molecular tools, which will also be discussed. For pineapple, these tools can be roughly classified into three different categories: (1) availability of useful genes (2) availability of suitable promoters and (3) availability of an efficient transformation method.