Development and characterization of 10 polymorphic microsatellite loci for the blue shark, Prionace glauca, and their cross shark-species amplification.

Ten polymorphic nuclear microsatellite loci were developed from a microsatellite enriched genomic library of the blue shark, Prionace glauca. The utility of these markers for genetic studies of this globally distributed, heavily exploited, oceanic predator was assessed by screening 120 specimens sampled from six locations throughout the species’ range. Both moderately and highly polymorphic marker loci were identified. Three to 35 alleles were found to be segregating per locus (mean 10.1) with observed heterozygosities ranging from 24 to 91%. Evaluation of the cross-species amplification of these markers across 18 additional shark species indicates that these microsatellites are potentially useful for genetic studies of other species of conservation concern.

Towards accurate estimation of the proportion of true null hypotheses in multiple testing

Background

Biomedical researchers are now often faced with situations where it is necessary to test a large number of hypotheses simultaneously, eg, in comparative gene expression studies using high-throughput microarray technology. To properly control false positive errors the FDR (false discovery rate) approach has become widely used in multiple testing. The accurate estimation of FDR requires the proportion of true null hypotheses being accurately estimated. To date many methods for estimating this quantity have been proposed. Typically when a new method is introduced, some simulations are carried out to show the improved accuracy of the new method. However, the simulations are often very limited to covering only a few points in the parameter space.

Results

Here I have carried out extensive in silico experiments to compare some commonly used methods for estimating the proportion of true null hypotheses. The coverage of these simulations is unprecedented thorough over the parameter space compared to typical simulation studies in the literature. Thus this work enables us to draw conclusions globally as to the performance of these different methods. It was found that a very simple method gives the most accurate estimation in a dominantly large area of the parameter space. Given its simplicity and its overall superior accuracy I recommend its use as the first choice for estimating the proportion of true null hypotheses in multiple testing.

Education for global citizenship in a divided society? Young people's views and experiences

Global citizenship education has been suggested as a means of overcoming the limitations of national citizenship in an increasingly globalised world. In divided societies, global citizenship education is especially relevant and problematic as it offers the opportunity to explore identities and conflict in a wider context. This paper therefore explores young people's understandings of global citizenship in Northern Ireland, a divided society emerging from conflict. Results from focus groups with primary and post-primary pupils reflect some theoretical conceptualisations of global citizenship, including an awareness of global issues, understandings of environmental interdependence and global responsibility, though other elements appear to be less well understood. We argue that global citizenship education will fail to overcome engrained cultural divisions locally and may perpetuate cultural stereotypes globally, unless local and global controversial issues are acknowledged and issues of identity and interdependence critically examined at both levels.

The Economic Costs of Health Service Treatments for Asbestos-Related Mesothelioma Deaths

This article explores the complex and neglected picture of occupational and environmental disease healthcare costs specifically relating to asbestos. Diagnosed mesothelioma cases in Scotland in one calendar year were used to investigate the subject in greater depth. Data from UK sources on asbestos disease types recorded in 2000 and their disease treatment costs were obtained. Acute care economic costs of these diseases are estimated. One hundred and twenty diagnosed, recorded, and treated cases of asbestos-related diseases occurred in 2000 in Scotland. Mesothelioma accounted for 100 cases and directly cost Scottish National Health Service hospitals an estimated 942,038 pounds. The estimated UK figure in 2000 was at least 16,014,646 pounds because official figures for diagnosed and recorded deaths from mesothelioma are running at over 1700 a year with rises predicted for 2010 of 2000 deaths. By 2003, 50,000 people in the UK had died from diagnosed and recorded mesothelioma since records began. Earlier disease treatment costs would have been significantly lower than those in 2000 but, at 2000 prices, cost to the UK was roughly 471,019,000 pounds in acute hospital expenditure. Figures for primary care costs, including caregiver costs, are incomplete or unknown. These disease costs are substantial and have some international generalizability. Treatment patterns and costs vary greatly. Many lung cancer cases due to asbestos exposure occur globally for each mesothelioma case. Hence figures provided in this article are certain to be gross underestimates of the total health service and personal economic costs of asbestos illness and treatment in Scotland.

Methods in wind power prediction & forecasting

Globally on-shore wind power has seen considerable growth in all grid systems. In the coming decade off-shore wind power is also expected to expand rapidly. Wind power is variable and intermittent over various time scales because it is weather dependent. Therefore wind power integration into traditional grids needs additional power system and electricity market planning and management for system balancing. This extra system balancing means that there is additional system costs associated with wind power assimilation. Wind power forecasting and prediction methods are used by system operators to plan unit commitment, scheduling and dispatch and by electricity traders and wind farm owners to maximize profit. Accurate wind power forecasting and prediction has numerous challenges. This paper presents a study of the existing and possible future methods used in wind power forecasting and prediction for both on-shore and off-shore wind farms.

Discovery and evolving history of two genetically related but phenotypically different viruses, porcine circoviruses 1 and 2

Porcine circoviruses (PCVs) belong to the genus Circovirus, family Circoviridae. and are the smallest non-enveloped, single stranded, negative sense, circular DNA viruses that replicate autonomously in mammalian cells. Two types of PCV have been characterised, PCV1 and PCV2 and these two viruses show 83% sequence identity at open reading frame (ORF) 1 and 67% identity at ORF2. PCV1 is a nonpathogenic virus of pigs. In contrast, PCV2 has emerged as a major pathogen of swine around the world. The discovery of PCV1 and how the subsequent studies on this virus eventually led to the recognition and characterisation of PCV2, and the disease scenarios associated with PCV2, serve as a model of how multidisciplinary collaboration among field veterinarians, diagnosticians and researchers can lead to the rapid characterisation and control of a globally important emerging disease. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

'Mining money': science, legal technologies & working the borderlands of global finance

This paper explores the roles of science and market devices in the commodification of ‘nature’ and the configuration of flows of speculative capital. It focuses on mineral prospecting and the market for shares in ‘junior’ mining companies. In recent years these companies have expanded the reach of their exploration activities overseas, taking advantage of innovations in exploration methodologies and the liberalisation of fiscal and property regimes in ‘emerging’ mineral rich developing countries. Recent literature has explored how the reconfiguration of notions of ‘risk’ has structured the uneven distribution of rents. It is increasingly evident that neoliberal framing of environmental, political, social and economic risks has set in motion overflows that multinational mining capital had not bargained for (e.g. nationalisation, violence and political resistance). However, the role of ‘geological risk’ in animating flows of mining finance is often assumed as a ‘technical’ given. Yet geological knowledge claims, translated locally, designed to travel globally, assemble heterogeneous elements within distanciated regimes of metrology, valuation and commodity production. This paper explores how knowledge of nature is enrolled within systems of property relations, focusing on the genealogy of the knowledge practices that animate contemporary circuits of speculative mining finance. It argues that the financing of mineral prospecting mobilises pragmatic and situated forms of knowledge rather than actuarially driven calculations that promise predictability. A Canadian public enquiry struck in the wake of scandal associated with Bre-X’s prospecting activities in Indonesia is used to glean insights into the ways in which the construction of a system of public warrant to underpin financial speculation is predicated upon particular subjectivities and the outworking of everyday practices and struggles over ‘value’. Reflection on practical investments in processes of standardisation, rituals of verification and systems of accreditation reveal much about how the materiality of things shape the ways in which regional and global financial circuits are integrated, selectively transforming existing social relations and forms of knowledge production.

Children, the environment and participatory planning

Public participation in the planning system is well established in both academic and practice based research. The failure to engage the 'public' effectively has resulted in costly and unpopular decisions and produced a debate about how, when and with whom to participate. Children have tended to be marginal or ignored in land use planning but this paper suggests that, given the right techniques, they can be articulate, reasonable and clear thinkers about the type of environment they live in and how it should change. It draws on Mental Mapping and Environmental Affordance methodologies to show how eleven year old children can read their neighbourhood, identify barriers and highlight the benefits they extract from a deeper cognitive understating of their place. The paper concludes by suggesting that these techniques are transferable globally, especially where literacy and numeracy is weak and where planners reliance on formalised consultations reflect the interests of state and economic elites rather than the wider population.

Environmental context determines multi-trophic effects of consumer species loss

Loss of biodiversity and nutrient enrichment are two of the main human impacts on ecosystems globally, yet we understand very little about the interactive effects of multiple stressors on natural communities and how this relates to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Advancing our understanding requires the following: (1) incorporation of processes occurring within and among trophic levels in natural ecosystems and (2) tests of context-dependency of species loss effects. We examined the effects of loss of a key predator and two groups of its prey on algal assemblages at both ambient and enriched nutrient conditions in a marine benthic system and tested for interactions between the loss of functional diversity and nutrient enrichment on ecosystem functioning. We found that enrichment interacted with food web structure to alter the effects of species loss in natural communities. At ambient conditions, the loss of primary consumers led to an increase in biomass of algae, whereas predator loss caused a reduction in algal biomass (i.e. a trophic cascade). However, contrary to expectations, we found that nutrient enrichment negated the cascading effect of predators on algae. Moreover, algal assemblage structure varied in distinct ways in response to mussel loss, grazer loss, predator loss and with nutrient enrichment, with compensatory shifts in algal abundance driven by variation in responses of different algal species to different environmental conditions and the presence of different consumers. We identified and characterized several context-dependent mechanisms driving direct and indirect effects of consumers. Our findings highlight the need to consider environmental context when examining potential species redundancies in particular with regard to changing environmental conditions. Furthermore, non-trophic interactions based on empirical evidence must be incorporated into food web-based ecological models to improve understanding of community responses to global change.

Imported and translated landscapes: Buenos Aires nineteenth-century waterfront parks

The study of urban and landscape history has recently questioned the peripheral condition of certain areas and re-examined them as valuable parts of an international network . In such a framework cities are not only recipients of foreign influences but active agents in their own urban transformations. Meanwhile, the regeneration of urban waterfronts appears increasingly in the spotlight globally , but the re-use of the waterfront as public space began more than a century ago.

Buenos Aires is an example of a ‘peripheral’ city, in which waterfront parks at the end of the nineteenth century were the product of international influences combined with local conditions, needs and expertise. Buenos Aires developed a continuous increase and diversity of leisure waterfront space, making it different from most European or ‘central’ cities. This paper will analyse the process of translation of landscape design on Buenos Aires’ waterfront while outlining the significance of waterfront parks to the city and its growing urban population.

Doping, sport and the law: time for repeal of prohibition?

This article concerns the legal issues that surround the prohibition of doping in sport. The current policy on the use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sport is underpinned by both a paternalistic desire to protect athletes’ health and the long-term integrity or ‘spirit’ of sport. The policy is put into administrative effect globally by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which provides the regulatory and legal framework through which the vast majority of international sports federations harmonise their anti-doping programmes. On outlining briefly both the broad administrative structures of international sport’s various anti-doping mechanisms, and specific legal issues that arise in disciplinary hearings involving athletes accused of doping, this article questions the sustainability of the current ‘zero tolerance’ approach, arguing, by way of analogy to the wider societal debate on the criminalisation of drugs, and as informed by Sunstein and Thaler’s theory of libertarian paternalism, that current policy on anti-doping has failed. Moreover, rather than the extant moral and punitive panic regarding doping in sport, this article, drawing respectively on Seddon’s and Simon’s work on the history of drugs and crime control mentality, contends that, as an alternative, harm reductionist measures should be promoted, including consideration of the medically supervised use of certain PEDs.

A conceptualization of the determinants of small business website adoption

As evidence mounts on the importance of small businesses and the opportunities presented by website adoption globally, it becomes important to understand the key issues that determine website adoption. However, the extant literature relating to small business website adoption is fragmented and fails to provide an understanding of what determines adoption.Therefore the key contribution of this article to current knowledge is the development of a conceptualization, supported by the literature, that will provide an interpretation of what determines small business website adoption. Critically, this is the first article to incorporate the important role that the small business marketing context plays within Internet technology adoption. The article develops nine hypotheses, which relate to the critical interactions and integration, within and between four determinant groupings underpinning the conceptualization.The nine hypotheses will guide and direct future research towards generating an empirically based understanding of what determines small business website adoption.

Missions and Institutions: Henri-Philippe Junod, Anthropology, Human Rights and Academia between Africa and Switzerland, 1921–1966

Drawing on a cultural, transnational and genealogical approach, this article studies the work of a Swiss missionary, Henri-Philippe Junod, between Europe and Africa. It tries not to look at what he brought to Africa, or brought back from Africa, but to see how his back-and-forth movement contributed to the formation of new ideas and institutions globally. The article looks at Junod’s contribution in three domains in particular, namely anthropology, human rights worldwide, and African studies in Switzerland.

A Dynamic Factor Approach to Mortality Modelling

Longevity risk has become one of the major risks facing the insurance and pensions markets globally. The trade in longevity risk is underpinned by accurate forecasting of mortality rates. Using techniques from macroeconomic forecasting, we propose a dynamic factor model of mortality that fits and forecasts mortality rates parsimoniously.We compare the forecasting quality of this model and of existing models and find that the dynamic factor model generally provides superior forecasts when applied to international mortality data. We also show that existing multifactorial models have superior fit but their forecasting performance worsens as more factors are added. The dynamic factor approach used here can potentially be further improved upon by applying an appropriate stopping rule for the number of static and dynamic factors. 

Accountability for Responsibility: An assessment of the Transnational Capitalist Class' role in driving a Global CSR Agenda

Globalisation has led to the establishment of a new hierarchy of leadership. At the helm is the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) , which oversees the direction of Multi National Corporations (MNCs) at a global level. Can the TCC, as leaders in the governance agenda, drive a global CSR agenda, or, perhaps, the question should be: do they want to drive a CSR agenda?
The hypothesis of this article is that, as the structure of global leadership and governance has changed, so too has the potential for aligning national CSR agendas to a globally accepted standard. This is unlikely due to systematic limitations inherent in a transitional structural realignment of global leadership. Whereas the design of global leadership has changed due to processes of globalization, the bodies that can regulate this leadership have not developed at the same pace. Regulation on issues such as CSR remains at national, federal and supra-­-national levels suggesting that TCCs have a free reign in dictating agenda. This new class (TCC) may bear a responsibility for CSR but there is a lack of accountability if it is not fulfilled.