Commodifying Danish housing commons

Housing was a backbone of the Danish welfare state, but this has been profoundly challenged by the past decades of neoliberal housing politics. In this article we outline the rise of the Danish model of association-based housing on the edge of the market economy (and the state). From this, we demonstrate how homes in private cooperatives through political interventions in the context of a booming real estate market have plunged into the market economy and been transformed into private commodities in all but name, and we investigate how non-profit housing associations frontally and stealthily are attacked through neoliberal reforms. This carries the seeds for socio-spatial polarization and may eventually open the gate for commodification – and thus the dismantling of the little that is left of a socially just housing sector. Yet, while the association-based model was an accessary to the commodification of cooperative housing, it can possibly be an accomplice in sustaining non-profit housing as a housing commons

Bacterial whole genome-based phylogeny: construction of a new benchmarking dataset and assessment of some existing methods

BackgroundWhole genome sequencing (WGS) is increasingly used in diagnostics and surveillance of infectious diseases. A major application for WGS is to use the data for identifying outbreak clusters, and there is therefore a need for methods that can accurately and efficiently infer phylogenies from sequencing reads. In the present study we describe a new dataset that we have created for the purpose of benchmarking such WGS-based methods for epidemiological data, and also present an analysis where we use the data to compare the performance of some current methods.ResultsOur aim was to create a benchmark data set that mimics sequencing data of the sort that might be collected during an outbreak of an infectious disease. This was achieved by letting an E. coli hypermutator strain grow in the lab for 8 consecutive days, each day splitting the culture in two while also collecting samples for sequencing. The result is a data set consisting of 101 whole genome sequences with known phylogenetic relationship. Among the sequenced samples 51 correspond to internal nodes in the phylogeny because they are ancestral, while the remaining 50 correspond to leaves.We also used the newly created data set to compare three different online available methods that infer phylogenies from whole-genome sequencing reads: NDtree, CSI Phylogeny and REALPHY. One complication when comparing the output of these methods with the known phylogeny is that phylogenetic methods typically build trees where all observed sequences are placed as leafs, even though some of them are in fact ancestral. We therefore devised a method for post processing the inferred trees by collapsing short branches (thus relocating some leafs to internal nodes), and also present two new measures of tree similarity that takes into account the identity of both internal and leaf nodes.ConclusionsBased on this analysis we find that, among the investigated methods, CSI Phylogeny had the best performance, correctly identifying 73% of all branches in the tree and 71% of all clades.We have made all data from this experiment (raw sequencing reads, consensus whole-genome sequences, as well as descriptions of the known phylogeny in a variety of formats) publicly available, with the hope that other groups may find this data useful for benchmarking and exploring the performance of epidemiological methods. All data is freely available at: https://cge.cbs.dtu.dk/services/evolution_data.php

Small-scale combined heat and power as a balancing reserve for wind – The case of participation in the German secondary control reserve

Increasing amounts of intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) are being integrated into energy systems worldwide. Due to the nature of these sources, they are found to increase the importance of mechanisms for balancing the electricity system. Small-scale combined heat and power (CHP) plants based on gas have proven their ability to participate in the electricity system balancing, and can hence be used to facilitate an integration of intermittent RES into electricity systems. Within the EU electricity system, balancing reserves have to be procured on a market basis. This paper investigates the ability and challenges of a small-scale CHP plant based on natural gas to participate in the German balancing reserve for secondary control. It is found that CHP plants have to account for more potential losses than traditional power plants. However, it is also found that the effect of these losses can be reduced by increasing the flexibility of the CHP unit

The impact of socioeconomic status and multimorbidity on mortality: a population-based cohort study

Objective: Multimorbidity (MM) is more prevalent among people of lower socioeconomic status (SES), and both MM and SES are associated with higher mortality rates. However, little is known about the relationship between SES, MM, and mortality. This study investigates the association between educational level and mortality, and to what extent MM modifies this association. Methods: We followed 239,547 individuals invited to participate in the Danish National Health Survey 2010 (mean follow-up time: 3.8 years). MM was assessed by using information on drug prescriptions and diagnoses for 39 long-term conditions. Data on educational level were provided by Statistics Denmark. Date of death was obtained from the Civil Registration System. Information on lifestyle factors and quality of life was collected from the survey. The main outcomes were overall and premature mortality (death before the age of 75). Results: Of a total of 12,480 deaths, 6,607 (9.5%) were of people with low educational level (LEL) and 1,272 (2.3%) were of people with high educational level (HEL). The mortality rate was higher among people with LEL compared with HEL in groups of people with 0–1 disease (hazard ratio: 2.26, 95% confidence interval: 2.00–2.55) and ≥4 diseases (hazard ratio: 1.14, 95% confidence interval: 1.04–1.24), respectively (adjusted model). The absolute number of deaths was six times higher among people with LEL than those with HEL in those with ≥4 diseases. The 1-year cumulative mortality proportions for overall death in those with ≥4 diseases was 5.59% for people with HEL versus 7.27% for people with LEL, and 1-year cumulative mortality proportions for premature death was 2.93% for people with HEL versus 4.04% for people with LEL. Adjusting for potential mediating factors such as lifestyle and quality of life eliminated the statistical association between educational level and mortality in people with MM. Conclusion: Our study suggests that LEL is associated with higher overall and premature mortality and that the association is affected by MM, lifestyle factors, and quality of life