Reimagining design education: Renewal and transformation

We live in a time when change is happening globally to an unprecedented extent. The awareness of the phenomena underpins the current discourse and research activities in design and design education. Many design educators understand the demand for change and are looking for new strategies to respond to it. The challenge is how to transform and renew design disciplines and its learning processes so that the next generation of designers can actively and responsibly promote change. Some educators are already focusing on the dimensions of change, namely, contemporary issues such as climate change and sustainable goals. Others are reflecting on how to deal with a world which is becoming more complex and uncertain and considering alternative ways of identifying and developing more sustainable solutions to cope with pressing complex issues. Others yet, are investigating the role of evolving technologies in design education and curricula development. Some are exploring the designers' role and their impact on the changing society. Faced with the complexities that define our present and future lives, design practices can intervene in different ways. In our view, design education must have the capacity to create connections and forms of collaborations amongst creative, human, and science research areas to address the complexities of our times and generate new knowledges, new experiences of experimentation, and new forms of collaboration. With such approach, design educators can support design students in becoming agents of change

Reimagining design education: Renewal and transformation

We live in a time when change is happening globally to an unprecedented extent. The awareness of the phenomena underpins the current discourse and research activities in design and design education. Many design educators understand the demand for change and are looking for new strategies to respond to it. The challenge is how to transform and renew design disciplines and its learning processes so that the next generation of designers can actively and responsibly promote change. Some educators are already focusing on the dimensions of change, namely, contemporary issues such as climate change and sustainable goals. Others are reflecting on how to deal with a world which is becoming more complex and uncertain and considering alternative ways of identifying and developing more sustainable solutions to cope with pressing complex issues. Others yet, are investigating the role of evolving technologies in design education and curricula development. Some are exploring the designers' role and their impact on the changing society. Faced with the complexities that define our present and future lives, design practices can intervene in different ways. In our view, design education must have the capacity to create connections and forms of collaborations amongst creative, human, and science research areas to address the complexities of our times and generate new knowledges, new experiences of experimentation, and new forms of collaboration. With such approach, design educators can support design students in becoming agents of change

HAND2 is a novel obesity-linked adipogenic transcription factor regulated by glucocorticoid signalling

Aims/hypothesis Adipocytes are critical cornerstones of energy metabolism. While obesity-induced adipocyte dysfunction is associated with insulin resistance and systemic metabolic disturbances, adipogenesis, the formation of new adipocytes and healthy adipose tissue expansion are associated with metabolic benefits. Understanding the molecular mechanisms governing adipogenesis is of great clinical potential to efficiently restore metabolic health in obesity. Here we investigate the role of heart and neural crest derivatives-expressed 2 (HAND2) in adipogenesis.MethodsHuman white adipose tissue (WAT) was collected from two cross-sectional studies of 318 and 96 individuals. In vitro, for mechanistic experiments we used primary adipocytes from humans and mice as well as human multipotent adipose-derived stem (hMADS) cells. Gene silencing was performed using siRNA or genetic inactivation in primary adipocytes from loxP and or tamoxifen-inducible Cre-ERT2 mouse models with Cre-encoding mRNA or tamoxifen, respectively. Adipogenesis and adipocyte metabolism were measured by Oil Red O staining, quantitative PCR (qPCR), microarray, glucose uptake assay, western blot and lipolysis assay. A combinatorial RNA sequencing (RNAseq) and ChIP qPCR approach was used to identify target genes regulated by HAND2. In vivo, we created a conditional adipocyte Hand2 deletion mouse model using Cre under control of the Adipoq promoter (Hand2AdipoqCre) and performed a large panel of metabolic tests.Results We found that HAND2 is an obesity-linked white adipocyte transcription factor regulated by glucocorticoids that was necessary but insufficient for adipocyte differentiation in vitro. In a large cohort of humans, WAT HAND2 expression was correlated to BMI. The HAND2 gene was enriched in white adipocytes compared with brown, induced early in differentiation and responded to dexamethasone (DEX), a typical glucocorticoid receptor (GR, encoded by NR3C1) agonist. Silencing of NR3C1 in hMADS cells or deletion of GR in a transgenic conditional mouse model results in diminished HAND2 expression, establishing that adipocyte HAND2 is regulated by glucocorticoids via GR in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, we identified gene clusters indirectly regulated by the GR-HAND2 pathway. Interestingly, silencing of HAND2 impaired adipocyte differentiation in hMADS and primary mouse adipocytes. However, a conditional adipocyte Hand2 deletion mouse model using Cre under control of the Adipoq promoter did not mirror these effects on adipose tissue differentiation, indicating that HAND2 was required at stages prior to Adipoq expression.Conclusions/interpretation In summary, our study identifies HAND2 as a novel obesity-linked adipocyte transcription factor, highlighting new mechanisms of GR-dependent adipogenesis in humans and mice.Data availability Array data have been submitted to the GEO database at NCBI (GSE148699).</p

The Nontradable Share Reform in the Chinese Stock Market

Nontradable shares (NTS) are an unparalleled feature of the ownership structure of Chinese listed companies and represented a major hurdle to domestic financial market development. After some failed attempts, in 2005 the Chinese authorities have launched a structural reform program aiming at eliminating NTS. In this paper, we evaluate the stock price effects of the actual implementation of this reform in 368 firms. The NTS reform generated a statistically significant 8 percent positive abnormal return over the event window, adjusting prices for the compensation requested by tradable shareholders. Results are consistent with the expectation of improved economic fundamentals such as better corporate governance and enhanced liquidity

Technology Transfers and the Clean Development Mechanism in a North-South General Equilibrium Model

This paper analyzes the potential welfare gains of introducing a technology transfer from Annex I to non-Annex I in order to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Our analysis is based on a numerical general equilibrium model for a world economy comprising two regions, North (Annex I) and South (non-Annex I). As our model allows for labor mobility between the formal and informal sectors in the South, we are also able to capture additional aspects of how the transfer influences the Southern economy. In a cooperative equilibrium, a technology transfer from the North to the South is clearly desirable from the perspective of a global social planner, since the welfare gain for the South outweighs the welfare loss for the North. However, if the regions do not cooperate, then the incentives to introduce the technology transfer appear to be relatively weak from the perspective of the North; at least if we allow for Southern abatement in the pre-transfer Nash equilibrium. Finally, by adding the emission reductions associated with the Kyoto agreement to an otherwise uncontrolled market economy, the technology transfer leads to higher welfare in both regions

Marginal Cost versus Average Cost Pricing with Climatic Shocks in Senegal: A Dynamic Computable General Equilibrium Model Applied to Water

The model simulates on a 20-year horizon, a first phase of increase in the water resource availability taking into account the supply policies by the Senegalese government and a second phase with hydrologic deficits due to demand evolution (demographic growth). The results show that marginal cost water pricing (with a subsidy ensuring the survival of the water production sector) makes it possible in the long term to absorb the shock of the resource shortage, GDP, investment and welfare increase. Unemployment drops and the sectors of rain rice, market gardening and drinking water distribution grow. In contrast, the current policy of average cost pricing of water leads the long-term economy in a recession with an agricultural production decrease, a strong degradation of welfare and a rise of unemployment. This result questions the basic tariff (average cost) on which block water pricing is based in Senegal

Cost Effectiveness in River Management: Evaluation of Integrated River Policy System in Tidal Ouse

The River Ouse forms a significant part of Humber river system, which drains about one fifth the land area of England and provides the largest fresh water source to the North Sea from UK. The river quality in the tidal river suffered from sag of dissolved oxygen (DO) during last few decades, deteriorated by the effluent discharges. The Environment Agency (EA) proposed to increase the water quality of Ouse by implementing more potent environmental policies. This paper explores the cost effectiveness of water management in the Tidal Ouse through various options by taking into account the variation of assimilative capacity of river water, both in static and dynamic scope of time. Reduction in both effluent discharges and water abstraction were considered along side with choice of effluent discharge location. Different instruments of environmental policy, the emission tax-subsidy (ETS) scheme and tradable pollution permits (TPP) systems were compared with the direct quantitative control approach. This paper at the last illustrated an empirical example to reach a particular water quality target in the tidal Ouse at the least cost, through a solution of constrained optimisation problem. The results suggested significant improvement in the water quality with less cost than current that will fail the target in low flow year

The Role of Risk Aversion and Lay Risk in the Probabilistic Externality Assessment for Oil Tanker Routes to Europe

Oil spills are a major cause of environmental concern, in particular for Europe. However, the traditional approach to the evaluation of the expected external costs of these accidents fails to take into full account the implications of their probabilistic nature. By adapting a methodology originally developed for nuclear accidents to the case of oil spills, we extend the traditional approach to the assessment of the welfare losses borne by potentially affected individuals for being exposed to the risk of an oil spill. The proposed methodology differs from the traditional approach in three respects: it allows for risk aversion; it adopts an ex-ante rather than an ex-post perspective; it allows for subjective oil spill probabilities (held by the lay public) higher than those assessed by the experts in the field. In order to illustrate quantitatively this methodology, we apply it to the hypothetical (yet realistic) case of an oil spill in the Aegean Sea. We assess the risk premiums that potentially affected individuals would be willing to pay in order to avoid losses to economic activities such as tourism and fisheries, and non-use damages resulting from environmental impacts on the Aegean coasts. In the scenarios analysed, the risk premiums on expected losses for tourism and fisheries turn out to be substantial when measured as a percentage of expected losses; by contrast, they are quite small for the case of damages to the natural environment

Recent updates on the Maser Monitoring Organisation

The Maser Monitoring Organisation (M2O) is a research community of telescope operators, astronomy researchers and maser theoreticians pursuing a joint goal of reaching a deeper understanding of maser emission and exploring its variety of uses as tracers of astrophysical events. These proceedings detail the origin, motivations and current status of the M2O, as was introduced at the 2021 EVN symposium