Elite Localism and Inequality: Understanding affluent community opposition to rail network expansion within the political economy of Sydney.

Sydney is a global city experiencing a surge in the expansion of public transport infrastructure. It is an unequal city, with a greater ratio of inequality between suburbs than any other major city in Australia. This state of inequality has a long history. From its historic origins to the present day, the presence and absence of public transport has served to entrench inequality in the city. Those areas with greater access to employment and education tend to be wealthier than those without, and public transportation is a key provider of accessibility and mobility in the city Residents of some of Sydney’s most affluent areas, have fiercely resisted government attempts to extend rail links into these suburbs. These successful actions have led to serious consequences extending beyond the affluent suburbs in question to the city as a whole. This thesis will seek to investigate, identify and understand the phenomena of affluent local opposition to the expansion of rail networks

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead