History of Inuit Community Exposure to Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury in Sewage Lake Sediments

Exposure to lead, cadmium, and mercury is known to be high in many arctic Inuit communities. These metals are emitted from industrial and urban sources, are distributed by long-range atmospheric transport to remote regions, and are found in Inuit country foods. Current community exposure to these metals can be measured in food, but feces and urine are also excellent indicators of total exposure from ingestion and inhalation because a high percentage of each metal is excreted. Bulk domestic sewage or its residue in a waste treatment system is a good substitute measure. Domestic waste treatment systems that accumulate metals in sediment provide an accurate historical record of changes in ingestion or inhalation. We collected sediment cores from an arctic lake used for facultative domestic sewage treatment to identify the history of community exposure to Pb, Cd, and Hg. Cores were dated and fluxes were measured for each metal. A nearby lake was sampled to measure combined background and atmospheric inputs, which were subtracted from sewage lake data. Pb, Cd, and Hg inputs from sewage grew rapidly after the onset of waste disposal in the late 1960s and exceeded the rate of population growth in the contributing community from 1970 to 1990. The daily per-person Pb input in 1990 (720,000 ng/person per day) exceeded the tolerable daily intake level. The Cd input (48,000 ng/person per day) and Hg input (19,000 ng/person per day) were below the respective TDI levels at the time

Lithuanian higher education: between path dependence and change

Over the past century, Lithuanian higher education has experienced a steady horizontal differentiation. It started with a moderate differentiation in the Soviet times and intensified after 1990 when two regional universities and new specialized universities were created, many universities opened new programmes, and Vytautas Magnus University was re-established. Horizontal differentiation was especially fostered by the Law on Higher Education and Science in 2000, as it created a binary higher education system and allowed the establishment of private universities and institutions of a non-university type. This development opened the door to a number of small private and public colleges which strongly focused on management, business and law - the subjects which were in high demand at that time. These subjects were also taught at different universities, with new management and social sciences programmes being introduced at all universities, even though they could be, for instance, specialized in sports or agriculture. This blossoming of programmes and rapid system expansion catered for the ever increasing number of students, when up to 70% of high school graduate cohorts were going to obtain higher education. Issues of quality as well as funding through tuition fees were often the topic of policy debates. The state used quality assurance instruments of programme accreditation as well as institutional evaluations to "tame" the expansion of programmes and to ensure minimum quality. As the demographic reality started to change and student numbers started to drop (with the prognosis of 40% drop until 2020) the vertical differentiation started to increase even further. Some institutions in Lithuania have changed their names quite a few times, sometimes to ensure that the same rector will be in office for a longer period of time than usual (e.g. Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences, Mykolas Romeris University). At the same time, renaming institutions has served the symbolic purpose of "relabelling" into a new profile, which may reflect institutions’ intentions to "abandon" earlier legacies and specializations (in the case of Mykolas Romeris - former police school, and then law and social sciences orientation) and to signal that the profile of the institution has become broader. The Lithuanian higher education system was vertically differentiated from the outset - with one main classical comprehensive university catering for the needs of the nation. This trend has been maintained after 1990. However, the stratification of the institutions has increased due to the creation of the binary system, as well as the appearance of private higher education institutions. The prestige of public traditional universities and technological universities has remained the same, with Vilnius University still being the top university in terms of research output and student numbers. The specialized public institutions are stratified into two main categories. The well-established and prestigious specialized Arts and Music Academies and the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences recruit students on a national basis and have good reputation both nationally and internationally. At the same time, regional universities as well as some private higher education institutions and public colleges serve regional needs. They enjoy moderate prestige and have certain research strengths, but their main focus is on teaching and contribution to regional economy and knowledge transfer. Recent national rankings, a variety of international rankings of study programmes and the attempt of the Ministry of Education and Science to evaluate research quality at Lithuanian universities in 2014-2015 show that the government is keen to identify "winners and losers" in the system. Further, the Centre for Quality Assessment in Higher Education with its programme and institutional accreditations has indirectly sustained the system’s vertical differentiation. However, it is not that easy to establish a thoroughly stratified system in Lithuania as there are many lobby forces and a strong tradition of higher education funding on historical basis, which is not easy to uproot. The main developments towards performance-based funding and especially the availability of science funding via Lithuanian Research Council for basic research using EU Structural Funds seem to be one of the main instruments to boost the prestige of researchers and research groups from Lithuanian universities. Teaching and research at universities have been "reconnected" in stronger ways due to external research funding. In this respect, the role of the Lithuanian Research Council as well as EU funding in the stratification of the system should not be neglected. [...