Forecasting the future: an overview of the strategic planning of the Bournemouth and Poole conurbation

An important part of strategic planning’s purpose should be to attempt to forecast the future, not simply to belatedly respond to events, or accept the future as inevitable. This paper puts forward a conceptual approach for seeking to achieve these aims and uses the Bournemouth and Poole area in Dorset as a vehicle for applying the basic methodology. The area has been chosen because of the significant issues that it currently faces in planning terms; and its future development possibilities. In order that alternative future choices for the area – different ‘developmental trajectories’ – can be evaluated, they must be carefully and logically constructed. Four Futures for Bournemouth/Poole have been put forward; they are titled and colour-coded: Future One is Maximising Growth – Golden Prospect which seeks to achieve the highest level of economic prosperity of the area; Future Two is Incremental Growth – Solid Silver which attempts to facilitate a steady, continuing, controlled pattern of the development for the area; Future Three is Steady State – Cobalt Blue which suggests that people in the area could be more concerned with preserving their quality of life in terms of their leisure and recreation rather than increasing wealth; Future Four is Environment First – Jade Green which makes the area’s environmental protection its top priority even at the possible expense of economic prosperity. The scenarios proposed here are not sacrosanct. Nor are they simply confined to the Bournemouth and Poole area. In theory, suitably modified, they could use in a variety of different contexts. Consideration of the scenarios – wherever located - might then generate other, additional scenarios. These are called hybrids, alloys and amalgams. Likewise it might identify some of them as inappropriate or impossible. Most likely, careful consideration of the scenarios will suggest hybrid scenarios, in which features from different scenarios are combined to produce alternative or additional futures for consideration. The real issue then becomes how best to fashion such a future for the particular area under consideration

Building a left coast: the legacy of the California Popular Front and the challenge to Cold War liberalism in the post-world war two era

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

Asparagus: a horticultural ballet

Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet was a live performance and film narrating the rise of capital in the medium of asparagus. The project stemmed from an obscure reference to an art piece of the same name by Waw Pierogi of the band xex. However, the its re-enactment had little to do with the original exploration of the growth and branching patterns of the asparagus plant. Instead, a rigid choreography inspired by Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet and based on Karl Marx's Capital dictated the movements of six performers in asparagus costumes. Bringing together the organic and the geometric, the ballet investigated the transition from the Fordist assembly line to immaterial labour through a reanimation of modernist abstraction. Being itself the story of abstraction, Capital shows how human relationships are replaced by those between commodities in the joyless grind of endless accumulation. This process results in the transcendent mythical figure of capital, which frames, transfigures and even produces the natural world. Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet was produced in collaboration with Montreal based band Les Georges Leningrad and commissioned by The Showroom Gallery, London. It was presented live at Conway Hall in London on 6.3.07 and at the Montreal Biennale at SAT on 12.5.07. The performance was accompanied by a film at the Showroom gallery and preceded by a production residency at the Pump House Gallery. The film has subsequently been shown at The Golden Thread Gallery, Bluecoat Liverpool and as part of A-Lot-Ment in Portsmouth. Props from Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet, were included in The Eagle Document at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London.

A genetic linkage map of an apple rootstock progeny anchored to the Malus genome sequence

An apple rootstock progeny raised from the cross between the very dwarfing ‘M.27’ and the more vigorous ‘M.116’ (‘M.M.106’ × ‘M.27’) was used for the construction of a linkage map comprising a total of 324 loci: 252 previously mapped SSRs, 71 newly characterised or previously unmapped SSR loci (including 36 amplified by 33 out of the 35 novel markers reported here), and the self-incompatibility locus. The map spanned the 17 linkage groups (LG) expected for apple covering a genetic distance of 1,229.5 cM, an estimated 91% of the Malus genome. Linkage groups were well populated and, although marker density ranged from 2.3 to 6.2 cM/SSR, just 15 gaps of more than 15 cM were observed. Moreover, only 17.5% of markers displayed segregation distortion and, unsurprisingly in a semi-compatible backcross, distortion was particularly pronounced surrounding the self-incompatibility locus (S) at the bottom of LG17. DNA sequences of 273 SSR markers and the S locus, representing a total of 314 loci in this investigation, were used to anchor to the ‘Golden Delicious’ genome sequence. More than 260 of these loci were located on the expected pseudo-chromosome on the ‘Golden Delicious’ genome or on its homeologous pseudo-chromosome. In total, 282.4 Mbp of sequence from 142 genome sequence scaffolds of the Malus genome were anchored to the ‘M.27’ × ‘M.116’ map, providing an interface between the marker data and the underlying genome sequence. This will be exploited for the identification of genes responsible for traits of agronomic importance such as dwarfing and water use efficiency.

Not all sigmodontine rodents in the sugarcane fields in costal Veracruz, Mexico, are pests

Rats and mice have traditionally been considered one of the most important pests of sugarcane. However, "control" campaigns are rarely specific to the target species, and can have an effect on local wildlife, in particular non-pest rodent species. The objective of this study was to distinguish between rodent species that are pests and those that are not, and to identify patterns of food utilization by the rodents in the sugarcane crop complex. Within the crop complex, subsistence crops like maize, sorghum, rice, and bananas, which are grown alongside the sugarcane, are also subject to rodent damage. Six native rodent species were trapped in the Papaloapan River Basin of the State of Veracruz; the cotton rat (Sigmodon hispidus), the rice rat (Oryzomys couesi), the small rice rat (O. chapmani), the white footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus), the golden mouse (Reithrodontomys sumichrasti), and the pigmy mouse (Baiomys musculus). In a stomach content analysis, the major food components for the cotton rat, the rice rat and the small rice rat were sugarcane (4.9 to 30.1 %), seed (2.7 to 22.9%), and vegetation (0.9 to 29.8%); while for the golden mouse and the pigmy mouse the stomach content was almost exclusively seed (98 to 100%). The authors consider the first three species to be pests of the sugarcane crop complex, while the last two species are not.

Development of a dense SNP-based linkage map of an apple rootstock progeny using the Malus Infinium whole genome genotyping array

Background A whole-genome genotyping array has previously been developed for Malus using SNP data from 28 Malus genotypes. This array offers the prospect of high throughput genotyping and linkage map development for any given Malus progeny. To test the applicability of the array for mapping in diverse Malus genotypes, we applied the array to the construction of a SNPbased linkage map of an apple rootstock progeny. Results Of the 7,867 Malus SNP markers on the array, 1,823 (23.2 %) were heterozygous in one of the two parents of the progeny, 1,007 (12.8 %) were heterozygous in both parental genotypes, whilst just 2.8 % of the 921 Pyrus SNPs were heterozygous. A linkage map spanning 1,282.2 cM was produced comprising 2,272 SNP markers, 306 SSR markers and the S-locus. The length of the M432 linkage map was increased by 52.7 cM with the addition of the SNP markers, whilst marker density increased from 3.8 cM/marker to 0.5 cM/marker. Just three regions in excess of 10 cM remain where no markers were mapped. We compared the positions of the mapped SNP markers on the M432 map with their predicted positions on the ‘Golden Delicious’ genome sequence. A total of 311 markers (13.7 % of all mapped markers) mapped to positions that conflicted with their predicted positions on the ‘Golden Delicious’ pseudo-chromosomes, indicating the presence of paralogous genomic regions or misassignments of genome sequence contigs during the assembly and anchoring of the genome sequence. Conclusions We incorporated data for the 2,272 SNP markers onto the map of the M432 progeny and have presented the most complete and saturated map of the full 17 linkage groups of M. pumila to date. The data were generated rapidly in a high-throughput semi-automated pipeline, permitting significant savings in time and cost over linkage map construction using microsatellites. The application of the array will permit linkage maps to be developed for QTL analyses in a cost-effective manner, and the identification of SNPs that have been assigned erroneous positions on the ‘Golden Delicious’ reference sequence will assist in the continued improvement of the genome sequence assembly for that variety.

Piezotolerant small-colony variants with increased thermotolerance, antibiotic susceptibility, and low invasiveness in a clonal Staphylococcus aureus population

Following a pressure treatment of a clonal Staphylococcus aureus culture with 400 MPa for 30 min, piezotolerant variants were isolated. Among 21 randomly selected survivors, 9 were piezotolerant and all formed small colonies on several agar media. The majority of the isolates showed increased thermotolerance, impaired growth, and reduced antibiotic resistance compared to the wild type. However, several nonpiezotolerant isolates also demonstrated impaired growth and the small-colony phenotype. In agglutination tests for the detection of protein A and fibrinogen, the piezotolerant variants showed weaker agglutination reactions than the wild type and the other isolates. All variants also showed defective production of the typical S. aureus golden color, a characteristic which has previously been linked with virulence. They were also less able to invade intestinal epithelial cells than the wild type. These S. aureus variants showed phenotypic similarities to previously isolated Listeria monocytogenes piezotolerant mutants that contained mutations in ctsR. Because of these similarities, possible alterations in the ctsR hypermutable regions of the S. aureus variants were investigated through amplified fragment length polymorphism analysis. No mutations were identified, and subsequently we sequenced the ctsR and hrcA genes of three representative variants, finding no mutations. This work demonstrates that S. aureus probably possesses a strategy resulting in an abundance of multiple-stressresistant variants within clonal populations. This strategy, however, seems to involve genes and regulatory mechanisms different from those previously reported for L. monocytogenes. We are in the process of identifying these mechanisms.

Auditory distraction eliminates retrieval induced forgetting: implications for the processing of unattended sound

The Retrieval-Induced Forgetting (RIF) paradigm includes three phases: (a) study/encoding of category exemplars, (b) practicing retrieval of a sub-set of those category exemplars, and (c) recall of all exemplars. At the final recall phase, recall of items that belong to the same categories as those items that undergo retrieval-practice, but that do not undergo retrieval-practice, is impaired. The received view is that this is because retrieval of target category-exemplars (e.g., ‘Tiger’ in the category Four-legged animal) requires inhibition of non-target category-exemplars (e.g., ‘Dog’ and ‘Lion’) that compete for retrieval. Here, we used the RIF paradigm to investigate whether ignoring auditory items during the retrieval-practice phase modulates the inhibitory process. In two experiments, RIF was present when retrieval-practice was conducted in quiet and when conducted in the presence of spoken words that belonged to a category other than that of the items that were targets for retrieval-practice. In contrast, RIF was abolished when words that either were identical to the retrieval-practice words or were only semantically related to the retrieval-practice words were presented as background speech. The results suggest that the act of ignoring speech can reduce inhibition of the non-practiced category-exemplars, thereby eliminating RIF, but only when the spoken words are competitors for retrieval (i.e., belong to the same semantic category as the to-be-retrieved items).