Community knowledge networks: an action-orientated approach to energy research

The Climate Change Act 2008 commits the UK to reducing carbon emissions by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. With household emissions constituting more than a quarter of current total energy use in the UK, energy practices in the home have taken on increased policy attention. In this paper, we argue that the UK government's approach is founded upon a variant of methodological individualism that assumes that providing greater energy information to individuals will effect behaviour change in relation to energy use. Such an approach is potentially limited in its effectiveness and does not afford appropriate recognition to all those affected by energy policy. In contrast to this approach, we set out an alternative perspective, a community knowledge networks approach to energy and justice which recognises the contexts and relationships in which people live and use energy. Such an approach emphasises situated knowledge and practices in order to gain a greater understanding of how individuals and communities use energy, but, importantly, offers a means for affording greater recognitional justice to different social groups.     

Big society,little justice? Community renewable energy and the politics of localism

This paper challenges “Big Society (BS) Localism”, seeing it as an example of impoverished localist thinking which neglects social justice considerations. We do this through a critical examination of recent turns in the localist discourse in the UK which emphasise self-reliant communities and envisage a diminished role for the state. We establish a heuristic distinction between positive and negative approaches to localism. We argue that the Coalition Government's BS programme fits with a negative localist frame as it starts from an ideological assumption that the state acts as a barrier to community-level associational activity and that it should play a minimal role. “BS localism” (as we call it) has been influential over the making of social policy, but it also has implications for the achievement of environmental goals. We argue that this latest incarnation of localism is largely ineffective in solving problems requiring collective action because it neglects the important role that inequalities play in inhibiting the development of associational society. Drawing upon preliminary research being undertaken at the community scale, we argue that staking environmental policy success on the ability of local civil society to fill the gap left after state retrenchment runs the risk of no activity at all.     

Natural resource industry involvement in collaboration for water governance: influence on processes and outcomes in Canada

Natural resource industries are increasingly significant actors in environmental decision-making. Possessing vast institutional and technical capacity, firms have an important role to play in ‘new’ governance strategies such as collaboration. These strategies are often based upon assumptions of equitable influence. This paper investigates the nature of resource industry participation in collaborative water governance in Canada, and the potential consequences of that participation as investigated using power theory. The study used comparative cases to reveal that resource industries are able to shape collaboration, and the issues collaborated upon, at multiple analytical levels both internal and external to the collaborative process in ways not available to other actors. Analysis also revealed that resource industry participation in collaboration did not reflect a commitment to engage in shared learning and the reexamination of values and interests as presupposed by collaborative theory. Collaboration is thus challenged in producing equitable, representative outcomes when resource industries participate.     

Use of a Hydrogen Peroxide Nebulizer for Viral Disinfection of Emergency Ambulance and Hospital Waiting Room

Food and Environmental Virology - Disinfection of hospital facilities and ambulances is an important issue for breaking the chain of transmission of viral pathogens. Hydrogen peroxide has provided...     

How does cell-based non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) perform against chorionic villus sampling and cell-free NIPT in detecting trisomies and copy number variations? A clinical study from Denmark

Objectives

We aimed to compare cell-based NIPT (cbNIPT) to chorionic villus sampling (CVS) and to examine the test characteristics of cbNIPT in the first clinical validation study of cbNIPT compared to cell-free NIPT (cfNIPT).

Material and Methods

Study 1: Women (N = 92) who accepted CVS were recruited for cbNIPT (53 normal and 39 abnormal). Samples were analyzed with chromosomal microarray (CMA). Study 2: Women (N = 282) who accepted cfNIPT were recruited for cbNIPT. cfNIPT was analyzed using sequencing and cbNIPT by CMA.

Results

Study 1: cbNIPT detected all aberrations (32/32) found in CVS: trisomies 13, 18 and 21 (23/23), pathogenic copy number variations (CNVs) (6/6) and sex chromosome aberrations (3/3). cbNIPT detected 3/8 cases of mosaicism in the placenta. Study 2: cbNIPT detected all trisomies found with cfNIPT (6/6) and had no false positive (0/246). One of the three CNVs called by cbNIPT was confirmed by CVS but was undetected by cfNIPT, two were false positives. cbNIPT detected mosaicism in five samples, of which two were not detected by cfNIPT. cbNIPT failed in 7.8% compared to 2.8% in cfNIPT.

Conclusion

Circulating trophoblasts in the maternal circulation provide the potential of screening for aneuploidies and pathogenic CNVs covering the entire fetal genome.